My Husband Missed Our Dying Son’s Final Christmas

The hospital room smelled like antiseptic and pine. I had taped a strip of cheap tinsel around the IV pole that morning, and it caught the fluorescent light in little green flickers. It was the only Christmas I could give him inside these walls.

Brayden was propped against two pillows, a size too big for his four-year-old body. His skin looked thin, like paper held up to a lamp. The bear in his lap was missing an eye. He had refused to let the nurses wash it.

"Mommy." His voice was soft. It always was now. "Can I tell you my Christmas wish?"

I leaned closer. My hand found his under the blanket. His fingers were cold. "Anything, baby."

He looked up at me. His eyes were huge in his small face, dark and serious, the way they got when he was working up to something important. "I want Daddy to come home. And put the star on top of the tree. Just one time. Like on TV."

I kept my face still. I had gotten good at that. I nodded, slow and sure, like this was the easiest thing in the world. "Okay. Okay, sweetheart. That's what we'll do."

He smiled. It was a small thing, barely there, but it lit up the whole ugly room.

I kissed his forehead and stepped into the corridor. I closed the door softly. Then I walked to the end of the hall, where the vending machine hummed, and I pulled out my phone.

Nikolai's name sat at the top of my recent calls. I hadn't spoken to him in six days.

It rang once. Twice. Three times. Four.

On the fifth ring he picked up. Somewhere behind him a woman laughed—bright, easy, the kind of laugh people have when nothing in their life is bleeding. I heard a girl's voice too, high and giggling. Indie. Then a spoon against a bowl.

"Erin." He sounded winded, as if I'd interrupted him mid-sentence. "What is it."

I pressed my forehead against the cold wall. "Brayden told me his Christmas wish today."

Silence. A pause where a father should have leaned in.

"He wants you to come home Christmas Eve. He wants you to put the star on the top of the tree. That's it. That's the whole wish."

I heard him exhale. It was the sigh of a man being asked to lift something too heavy for a Tuesday. "Erin. I've got a lot going on."

"He's four, Nikolai."

"I know how old he is."

Lilith laughed again in the background. Something clinked. A glass, maybe. A wine glass on a Wednesday afternoon.

"I'll try to swing by," he said. "Christmas Eve. I'll try."

"Try." I repeated the word so I could hear how it sounded out loud. It sounded like nothing.

"I have to go. Tell him I said hi." And the call ended. Just like that. No goodbye. Not even his son's name.

I stood there with the phone still against my ear, listening to the dial tone.

When I came back into the room, Brayden was watching the door. "Was that Daddy?"

"It was." I made my mouth curve. "He said he'll be there."

"On Christmas Eve?"

"On Christmas Eve."

He nodded, satisfied, and closed his eyes.

---

We went home two days later. The doctor let him out because there was nothing more they could do that we couldn't do in a living room. He didn't say it like that. He said it kinder. But I heard it.

The tree was small. Four feet, maybe. I had picked it up from a lot on Ninth Street where a man with red hands sold them for twenty dollars each. I set it by the window so Brayden could see it from the couch.

He wanted to help decorate. His arms shook after the third ornament. I pretended not to notice and slowed down to match his pace. We hung a glass snowman. A red bulb. A little wooden reindeer with a chipped nose that used to be his father's, from when Nikolai was a boy. I hesitated with that one. Then I hung it anyway, low, where Brayden could touch it.

He looked at the box on the mantle. The gold star. It was cardboard-boxed and dusty on the corners.

"We're not putting it up?" he asked.

"No, baby. That's Daddy's job. Remember?"

His face got quiet in that way I had started to hate. Like he was thinking harder than a four-year-old should think. Then he nodded. "Okay. We'll wait."

I set the box carefully in the center of the mantle. Like an offering. Like a summons.

---

Christmas Eve morning, he was already up when I came downstairs. He'd pulled on his red reindeer sweater by himself, backwards at first, and then I heard him in the bathroom fixing it. He'd dragged the ottoman to the front window and climbed up. His stuffed bear was tucked under one arm.

"Hi, Mommy." He didn't turn around. His eyes were on the driveway.

"Hi, my love." I brought him his pills in a tiny paper cup, and a mug of hot chocolate with three marshmallows because he liked odd numbers. I sat down on the ottoman next to him. My knee touched his.

"When do you think he'll come?" he asked.

"I don't know, baby. Sometime today."

"Morning or night?"

"I don't know."

He nodded. He took a careful sip of the hot chocolate. He kept his eyes on the driveway.

An hour passed. Then two. The sun climbed and then began to sag. A neighbor's car pulled in across the street and Brayden sat up straighter, then settled again when he saw it wasn't ours. He didn't say anything. He didn't complain. He just watched.

I watched him watch. And I felt something in my chest go very, very quiet. The kind of quiet that comes right before a house catches fire.