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“What other traditions do you have?” Bjorn asks. I’m actually touched that he’s asking me questions.
“For Christmas, well, let’s see,” I muse, taking a baking sheet and ripping it off before putting it on the table. “Cookies, of course.” I place the bowl of dough in front of him. “Now, if you promise not to eat it—that goes for you too, Tor—then you can help make the cookies. Just take a little bit like this and roll it in your hands and press it into the sheet like so.” I demonstrate while I tell him, “Actually, my grandmother and I started this tradition the year after…”
I trail off, not sure how much of my past to tell the kids. But even Sigrid is looking over her shoulder for me to continue, and I remind myself that sometimes kids can handle death more maturely than adults do.
“When I was eight, my parents died,” I say.
Bjorn’s eyes go round. “How did they die?”
“They went to a party in another town, and I had stayed with my grandmother. On the way back a landslide came down the mountain and buried them.”
Tor and Sigrid are listening intently now too.
“That’s awful,” Sigrid says.
“It was,” I say. I don’t talk about it often, and even though it was so long ago, it doesn’t stop me from getting a lump in my throat. “The first Christmas after they died, it was so hard. It felt wrong to celebrate it without them. So my grandmother said we should go and buy them gifts anyway. We went to Trondheim together to the department store. I picked out a mug I thought my mother would like, and a tie for my father, and we had them wrapped up. We put them under the tree.”
“Did you open them?” Bjorn asks.
I nod. “We opened them for our parents, just as we opened the other gifts we got from each other and friends. Then we put them in a box in a room downstairs. It’s filled with presents.”
“That is just lovely,” Sigrid says with a sniff.
When I look over at her, her back is to me, and she’s trying to hide her tears in the turnips.
“Are you getting them presents this year?” Bjorn asks as he mashes the dough onto the baking sheet.
I nod. “They’re in my room. I already picked them out. I got my mother a candle and my father some pipe tobacco. I got him a pipe last year, so…”
“They must have been nice people,” Bjorn says thoughtfully.
I give him a quick smile. “They had many friends,” I say. That’s the most I can say. They were nice to everyone, and that included me, but that’s pretty much where it stopped. They tolerated me, were polite to me, but in general didn’t want to have much to do with me. Which makes their death all the more complicated.
“It’s a hard time of year,” Sigrid says, “for so many people.”
“Oooh, what are you making?” Lady Jane says as she steps into the kitchen. “Cookies!”
Even though I shouldn’t be crying, even though it’s been so long, Sigrid is right in that it’s a hard time of year. I feel like if I don’t get out of the kitchen, I’m going to burst into tears.
I get up and muster a smile for Lady Jane. “I have to use the toilet,” I tell her. “Do you mind watching them?”
“Of course.”
I hurry past her and into the hall, the tears now starting to fall, and I’m almost to my bedroom just as James is coming out of his room.
He smiles at me, but it quickly turns to a frown as I try to hide my face and disappear into my room. “Laila?” he calls out.
I shake my head and try to close the door on him, but he pushes into my room and grabs hold of my shoulders.
“What happened? Is it your grandmother?”
I try to pull back. “No. Yes. I don’t know, I just…”
“Hey,” he says softly. “It’s okay.”
He shuts the door gently behind him, and I put my back to him, burying my face in my hands. I never let myself cry, and I can’t tell if I’m crying more because I’m hit with this unexpected wave of grief, or because I’m getting angry and frustrated for crying at all, and especially in front of James.
I try to get myself together, take a deep breath, and straighten my spine.
