Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb Read Free Book Online Page A

and grand ideas and I am trying to make sense and be encouraging. He is inventing something—something that glues sheets of paper together and he’s going to get a patent and make a million dollars. Last time it was a machine that stamped numbers on pages. Last time it was five million dollars.
    We are eleven and nine now and beginning to know. We know that other kids don’t spend their Christmas this way—smuggled across borders, hurtling through night on the highway gripping cups of milk between their thighs. The man we call Daddy who takes us away and we feel awe and love and terror: to do or say the wrong thing would take away the sense of security we are inventing here out of necessity.
    —
    Willy and I sleep on a mattress on the grey carpeted floor of a house big and empty and smelling like drywall and new plastic. The woollen blanket is itchy and I hear the sound of snoring from the next room. Sometimes I hear weeping. This sparse house is one of several identical ones on an unfinished housing estate. Yet here we are in one of them, apparently living. There are only the two mattresses and a lamp on the floor. What’s missing though, it seems, is not the furniture, but the feel of Christmas. I had not realized that Christmas has to be created, it doesn’t just exist. I had never realized that somebody has to take care of the details and that by default it must have always been Mum, because Christmas wasn’t here and neither was she.
    Dad buys a tree. He buries its base in a mountain of nuts—brazil nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds, and calls it Christmas on a desert island. He thinks it’s very clever but I just feel terribly terribly sad and I am trying my hardest not to cry. There are so many nuts and we won’t eat them all so it seems like a waste and they don’t even look pretty there, all different colours of brown on the grey carpet.
    Nothing feels right and I am walking through this empty house trying not to cry, watching my feet, trying to walk straight lines across the carpet but the lines become blurry with my tears welling up. Willy is crying because he wants to go home and Dad seems to be crying for the same reason. He is sitting on a cardboard box with his forehead cupped in his hand, staring at the ice cubes in the bottom of his glass, tears flooding down his cheeks, saying he misses my mother. We all want to go home.
    On Christmas day he gives us each a canvas bag with I ♥ NY written on it. I have to ask what NY means and I am mortified by the big red heart because I know it means love. Inside is all this stuff, all this debris from my father’s nomadic life. Paper and pens from trade shows and diminutive packages with tiny soaps and shampoos and toothbrushes from hotels and little plastic magic tricks wrapped in shrink wrap and short pieces of metal bound together in clever ways – brain teasers to be untangled. All this is thrown together and swimming in the bottom of bags with embarrassing red hearts.
    We give Dad the cards we made at school, which I had tried to make envelopes for and Mum had folded into frayed blue towels. We call Mum at lunch time and I am trying hard to be brave, telling her “Yeah, we are having a good time. We went to a beach where there were crabs and Willy found a little seahorse.” We had traipsed the north shore of Long Island that morning looking for treasures in the sand. We wore windbreakers and there were no people but we found surprises in the sand and wrapped them in sheets of toilet paper, which Dad carried in the pocket of his blue parka.
    Later we ate turkey with salty bluish gravy and mashed potatoes in a truck stop full of old people hacking through the mucus in their thick lungs. Dad called me a hoyden and I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. Then he asked Willy, “What are you planning on doing with your life?” Willy said maybe he’d learn how to ride a skateboard, but Dad got angry and said, “But how do