A Sense of Symmetry Pt. 08

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KarennaC
KarennaC
613 Followers

"But won't it look good for us that we didn't put up a fight about letting him go?" Jason asked.

"Sure. In a case like this, every bit helps. Well, if you'll excuse me, my wife's waiting Christmas dinner for me. I'll see you Tuesday at my office. Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," Jason and Dani replied.

Sean and Anna were in the living room; Sean was telling Dani's parents all about his night with his mother. Dani's parents had agreed to wait until Sean had arrived to open the presents, so there was a huge pile of packages under the tree. "Grammy Lynn, this is mine, right?" Anna asked, pointing to the largest package.

"I talking!" Sean said, angry at being interrupted.

"Just a minute, Sean," Lynn said. "Anna, you can read your name. Does that present have your name on it?"

"I mad!" Sean announced. He stalked over to a corner and sat down to sulk.

Anna studied the tag on the large present. "Not mine," she said, disappointed. "I think it's Melanie's."

"That's right," Lynn said, surprised. "How did you know that?"

"'Cause it got a M on it."

"I mad," Sean said again, more calmly.

"I'm sorry you're mad, Sean," Lynn said. "I just needed to answer Anna's question. Now I'd love to hear the rest of your story."

"Well, everyone's here now," said Dani's father. "Let's get this over with." He was mostly joking.

"Anna, Sean, you're the elves," Dani said.

"How?" Sean asked.

"I'll take a present out from under the tree and tell you whose it is," Dani explained. "Then you give it to that person."

"I go first!" Anna said.

"No! Me!" Sean argued.

Dani looked at her mother, who was laughing, and shrugged. Her attempt to avoid an argument between the two children had caused one. "You'll do it together," she said, after some thought. She pulled two presents from under the tree and handed one to each child. "Sean, please give yours to Bubba," she said. "Anna, can you tell who yours goes to?"

Anna looked at the tag. "It got a D on it," she said. "Daddy?"

Dani checked. "Actually, it's mine," she said. "Remember, my name, Dani, starts with D. If it was Daddy's, it would have a J, for Jason."

"Oh, yeah," said Anna.

Opening the presents took quite a while, since Dani's parents had gone a little overboard buying for the kids. Anna and Sean had another argument, this time over who should open Melanie's presents, since Melanie couldn't do it herself. Lynn solved the problem by holding Melanie on her lap, and helping the baby grab the paper and tear it.

By the time they were ready to eat dinner, Melanie was asleep. Sean was yawning, and Anna was whimpering like a puppy, which was her signal that she was tired. "I think some kids were up too late watching for Santa," Dani's father said.

"Anna was up late having nightmares," Jason said.

"I haved nightmares, Bubba," Anna informed her grandfather.

"I watch for Santa," Sean said. "Mommy taked me out and say, look way up. And I seed Santa!"

"Nuh-uh!" Anna said.

"Uh-huh!"

"Stop it, both of you!" Dani ordered. The kids fell silent. "You two have been fighting since Sean got here," Dani said. "We're going to sit down and have dinner now, and I want the fighting to stop while we're eating. The first one of you to start an argument will go in Melanie's playpen to take a nap!"

"What about the second one?" Anna asked innocently.

"The second one will be hung upside-down from the Christmas tree," Dani said, over the laughter of Jason and her parents.

* * *

They went home when it started getting dark. It took five trips outside to get all the presents loaded into the van. "Your folks overdid it again," Jason told Dani when they got home.

"Our kids are their only grandchildren," Dani pointed out. "They like to buy things for them."

"I their grandchildren?" Sean piped up.

"Yes, you're their grandchild," Dani replied.

"I Meme and Pepe's grandchildren?"

"Yes, and Grammy Phyllis's, and Gramma Susan and Grampy Carl's."

"Mommy say just Meme and Pepe and Grammy," Sean said.

Dani was furious that Julie had said this, but glad that the woman had at least included Phyllis. "Well, you weren't born in our family," she explained to Sean. "So Grammy and Bubba, and Gramma and Grampy, haven't always been your grandparents. But they are now, because now you are part of our family."

"Did you like visiting your other Mommy?" Jason asked, hoping to change the subject.

"She not mean now," Sean said. "She want me live there."

"No!" Anna shouted. "You have to live with us, forever and ever!"

"I will," Sean said. "But maybe sometimes I live with Mommy."

"No! Just us!"

"Anna, please take this inside," Dani said, handing the girl a bag with some of her presents inside. "Take it right to your room."

"Okay," Anna said, sulking.

Once Anna was inside, Dani turned to Sean. "Sean, do you want to live with your mommy?" she asked.

Jason started to say something, but Dani gave him a "shut-up" look. "I like Mommy now," Sean said. "But I like you and my Jason better. Maybe sometime I go Mommy's house again."

"That's right, sweetheart," Dani said. "You can go to your Mommy's house whenever you want."

"I your little boy?" Sean asked, worried.

"Of course you are," Jason said.

"Okay," Sean said, relieved.

"Now that we have that settled," Jason said, "why don't you and Mommy Dani help me get this stuff into the house."

"I can't," Sean said.

"Why not?" Dani asked.

"I too little."

Dani laughed, and Jason handed the boy a small bag. "I think that's little enough for you," he said. "Now go ahead in."

After they got everything inside, Jason and Dani began the longer-than-usual process of getting the kids to bed. Dani started an assembly line of baths, while Jason took charge of pajamas and teeth (or gums, in Melanie's case). Anna wanted to sleep in Sean's room; Jason bribed her to stay in her own room by letting her take one of her new dolls to bed. Sean refused to sleep with any of the toys he had gotten from the Sheridans or Phillipses; he insisted instead on a teddy bear that Julie had given him. Dani was a little hurt by this choice, but she hid it well enough, she thought.

Finally, the three children were in bed, and at least pretending to be asleep. Dani and Jason went downstairs. "I guess everything went pretty well," Jason said.

"Do you mean in general, or with Sean and Julie?"

"You sound angry," Jason observed. "Honey, just because Sean enjoyed being with his mother doesn't mean he doesn't want to be with us. I don't really like the situation either, but the fact that Sean had a good time at least shows that Julie's treating him all right."

"I know," Dani said. "And I guess it's good that he likes spending time with her, in case she does manage to get custody. I just feel like she's trying to turn him against us somehow."

"Maybe she is trying to turn him against us. I'm not impressed with her telling him that he isn't really part of our family. But our actions speak louder than her words, I think. He knows that we love him."

"Ten more days," Dani said, referring to the time left before the hearing.

"I know. But we agreed not to worry about it till Christmas is over, and right now, it's still December twenty-fifth. And I have another present for you."

Dani tried to smile at his tone, but failed. "I wonder what it could be," she said.

"Come up to bed, and I'll help you open it," Jason said.

Later, after Jason had fallen asleep, Dani came back down to the couch. She sat looking out the window at the neighborhood lights. Her intention had been to pray, but she fell asleep instead.

"I hate Christmas," Ben said. "My father's always drunk, and Phyllis always cries. And I'm stuck with it, because Christmas is a 'family day.'"

"You aren't stuck anymore," Dani said. "You're an adult now."

"Time is relative. Didn't you listen in science class?" He turned into a little boy, then grew into a man in the space of a few seconds. "A short time to you is a long time to a child. Sometimes so long that they forget."

Suddenly, they were back at the scene of the accident. The accident replayed itself in reverse, the wagon uncrumpling from the tree and being unpushed by the car with the grinning skeleton inside. "Time is relative," Ben said again. "It only moves forward because that's what we expect."

"You're getting more obtuse every time I have one of these dreams," Dani told him.

"I can't help you anymore, Dani. You've done everything you can. It isn't up to you anymore. Not to me, either. Time moves along, and whatever happens will pass."

"Is this real?"

"Reality is in the mind of the beholder," Ben replied, as he had done before. "And memory has a way of becoming fantasy. Merry Christmas."

Dani woke up, her neck aching from the position in which she had been sleeping. She rubbed it, thinking about the dream. Although it had been harder to understand than the previous one, Dani was pretty sure she knew what it meant. And it was a possibility she didn't even want to think about.

KarennaC
KarennaC
613 Followers
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BigFtHunterBigFtHunterabout 16 years ago
It just a little mixed up.

I liked it a lot better the first chapters. I dont like Dani and her lying ways. I dont like the weird perceptions on dreams and reality. I feel sorry for the husband and Julie for what Ben and Dani put them through. Maybe just maybe Julie is the way she is because it was so obvious Dani and Ben had something going on. They lied time and time again to their spouse's now Dani is going crazy trying to justify her sins.

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