Will they return to Santa?

On the 23rd, my final day at work, I receive the email from my mother:

Well, Dans kids were exposed to covid...Jodie tested positive...I'm not sure how you feel about this...We could do Christmas with you Christmas eve, or Christmas afternoon..or you are welcome to come Christmas day...it's all up to you...again remember Bryan has to go to work at 2:30.but the big yummy food will be here Xmas afternoon...you were here with sick Bryan last year

(I did not spend Christmas Day with my family last year, though I did see Bryan on Christmas Eve. I cannot recall how sick he was or with what, but he does work in the healthcare field.)

I had built up in my mind that this would be my last Christmas with my niblings. Did I acknowledge that this possibility, kept from them by COVID? Yes, but I hoped it was a small one. Dan does not take COVID seriously and has inoculated none of his children. This was a potential outcome.

Though I have the next ten days to recover and three shots in me that should make me resistant, Amber only has the latter. She is honor-bound to tell her work if she has had contact with anyone diagnosed with COVID. Her animal hospital is already down too many workers and could not afford to lose her.

Dan, I am sure, would think my concern was nonsense. If I trust the vaccine and my mask, shouldn't I be okay attending Christmas morning with people who were exposed?

"Exposed" is not the same as "infected." I work in a facility where three of the units were quarantined before I left, one of which I had been on half an hour before it was shut down; I am exposed to COVID too often and am okay, even though the facility won't give me a test when I ask, which would prevent transmission if I did get infected. (I tried to find my own test, but America is experiencing a significant shortage.)

Amber and I decide that, since I am regularly exposed to potential COVID, it is likely okay to attempt going to Christmas as long as none of the children are symptomatic.

I inform my mother that Christmas is saved.

She replies:

I don't think so...we just went to get the kids and 3 out of 4 are sick..so we left them.not saved.

There is no way, no doubt, that I can justify going there for Christmas in Dan and his kids are present. I would rather that my mother and father not be exposed to them, but I cannot make that decision for them. I do not want Dan's parting gift to my parents to be an active case of coronavirus. I do not want my niblings sick, but I have no say in that now. The die has been cast.

It could have been prevented. There is no way around that.

My mother comes up with a timeshare solution for Christmas morning: the healthy from late morning to early afternoon and the Plague Rats after that. Nothing else would be possible. I am grateful even for this. Even then, I can only hope precautions keep my parents from infection. My mother might otherwise have squeezed her departing grandchildren until the impression she made on them became physical. I won't be there when the kids are, a grace period of at least half an hour between my departure and Dan's arrival. If she somehow resists the impulse that might show itself infectious, what my mother does is out of my hands.

On Christmas Eve, Amber and I arrive about to drop off presents, eat some pizza, and see a few firetrucks drive by with Santa and Frosty atop. Amber made explicit that she could not be near the Infected. My mother assures us that Dan's brood would not come into the house. Indeed, this is the case. At first, it seems that they might not even leave their van, but they do in time to see Santa arrive. Addie runs toward Amber -- one of her favorite people in the world -- and we halt her ten feet away from where Amber and I have separated ourselves.

"I love you, Plague Rat," I fondly caution her, "but stay away." For the most part, Addie understands this prohibition, but she does not like it. She wants to pounce on Amber. I want to watch her do this, but it cannot be.

I see Dan's family only twenty feet away, dark but for the flashing red lights from the firetrucks. I know as it is happening that this meeting at a distance will be the last time for a while that I will see his family if I can be said to have seen any of them but Addie -- and her only in Christmas-lit silhouette.

When Amber and I arrive, my brother Bryan, my 21-year-old niece Ayannah, and her long-term boyfriend Gabe are already there. My mother directs me onto a sofa away from the "anti-vaxxers." I look askance at Ayannah and Gabe, but my mother -- twice vaxxed -- might mean herself. After the complication of this Christmas and Dan's whole family falling victim to COVID yet again -- his natural immunity seems to lag behind my vaccinated one -- I would hope my family would have lost some of their skepticism, but perhaps not.

My second eldest niece, Alieyah, intended to return home from her college in Boston for Christmas and a more proper send-off for her family. Upon hearing that they were infected, she changed her plans. There are few if any gifts worth being the Typhoid Mary who felled her college's theater program. I suspect that she is not too sorry to skip Christmas. Though I cannot point to evidence that makes me think so, I sense that she resents her family moving to Texas and will do all she can to avoid the Lone Star State.

Per gifts, I am surprised by little. (Gabe is charmingly astounded by many of my parents' presents to him -- to be fair, some of them are big-ticket electronics such as a PlayStation 5 and a Windows tablet.) What startles me is the mention that Yan and Gabe would be moving to Texas. My brother did not give clear information to my parents -- perhaps on purpose -- but he thought that his house in Longview had fallen through. Yan would have had to live in her car when she arrived, an excellent reason not to go in the first place. The house squared away, this would be the final day that Yan would be a resident of New York.

When Ayannah and Gabe leave hours later, it is with hugging from all. I've never felt occasion to embrace Gabe, but what better time to change that than when I do not expect to encounter him for a year?

When the door closes behind them, I rush to hug my mother, having heard from across the living room the tiny cracks in her composure that the first of her grandkids has said their goodbye today.

She weeps a moment, saying that she now has only two sons. In a lighter mood, my father says that I am now the number one son.

"Wow," I tell Bryan, "they didn't even waste a second picking me. That must hurt."

My father clarifies that he meant that I would be the oldest.

My mother cries twice more, mourning the loss of the children she will see in an hour, calling her eldest son all but a traitor to his birth family.

I ask Amber on the drive home how much my mother will break down today, though we agree she won't give Dan the satisfaction or excuse of doing it in his presence.

Does it need saying that I would have orchestrated a better parting from my brother and his family, full of back-thumping hugs and wise words to the kids? Instead, I only hear some child -- I'm not sure which -- in the background when I speak to my mother about returning a nonfunctioning electronic. I am denied my theatrical, sniffly send-off because they are more than sniffling from something worse than melancholy.

I don't know what the next Christmas will be like or how we will react to it. Dan's family may come back at some point, as he initially suggested. I cannot give that outcome my complete faith.

last watched: Birds of Prey (2002)
reading: Danse Macabre - Stephen King