Christmas this year dawns cold and clear, a sharpness infused into the whole world. I go for a run in the morning, all the Christmas lights in the neighborhood dulled and faded in the bright sunlight, and when I get back my mom is in full holiday prep mode.

At heart, I am a child about Christmas. I believe it will fix everything. The act of it, the coming together and the goodwill—I always expect big things from it. And it always manages to flatten all the problems lurking around it, too; if we can shelve whatever’s wrong for the day, then nothing can be quite as bad as it seems.

Tall order, this year. Four days ago, my parents sold my dad’s car, which they tried to spin to me as no big deal, which didn’t work because I’d been hearing them argue about it the past two weeks. When my mom came home from work she was tight-lipped and quiet, aiming most of her conversation toward me in a way that felt pointed, and my dad retreated into himself, eating dinner in silence and then doing the dishes without saying a word. Two days ago they got into a fight over my dad buying two bottles of name-brand mouthwash.

I’ve been trying to escape into drawing the way I always used to. I wanted something new to submit to the 30 Under 30 show and I also wanted to forget about it altogether, but the deadline was coming up and I couldn’t tamp down that force of how badly I wanted it and so I gave up a few days ago and sent in the pieces from my portfolio I thought had the best shot. And I’ve been trying to come up with something Regina can use in her tribute in our March issue, too, but every time I find a starting point, try to trace that line of her cheekbones or the dark curves of her eyebrows, a sick feeling comes pouring into the room the way heat comes through the vents, that same feeling I get when I think about being at school the day of the anniversary, and I have to put my pencil down.

So the mood at home had been dark overall, I guess, with all three of us. But now: Christmas.

My mom always makes sea bass and duck for Christmas and starts planning in the summer, deciding what herbs and vegetables she’ll plant to serve with dinner. This year she found whole chickens on sale a few weeks ago and now four of them are defrosting in pans on the counters, lined up like a small chicken army, and she’s out rooting around in her garden. She’s been worried about the weather all week, worried it’ll be too dry or too cold, always checking the temperature online and going outside to finger the plants to see if there’s been any damage.

We don’t have any family in the area—or really anywhere, I guess, since both my parents are only children whose parents are gone—and we’ve always done holidays with their friends. They mean a lot to my parents, my mom especially. She was lonely here for a while when we first moved, always asking me about my classmates’ parents. I remember when she found out Uncle Benson and Auntie Mabel listed us as emergency contacts for Harold and Anson’s school, it meant so much to her she cried. I always think how she probably would’ve loved to have a big family. I wonder why they never tried for any more after me.

By four, an hour before everyone’s supposed to arrive, my mom’s flying around the house getting stuff ready, dusting and straightening and pulling the plastic covers off all the furniture. Also, she’s turned the heater on for once. It’s legitimately balmy in here.

“Finish wrapping the presents for the kids,” she says over her shoulder on her way to Windex the bathroom mirrors. My dad’s been tasked with sweeping and vacuuming. I wrap the toys she got for everyone and doodle drawings on the wrapping paper with Sharpie. Sometimes when the kids were younger and we’d go out to dinner—always Chinese places with the giant lazy Susans and paper place mats on the table—I’d entertain the kids by drawing on the place mats. One time Harold Chiu carefully tore off and saved a drawing I made him of a robot.

But even trying to draw random crap on present wrapping that’ll get crumpled up and thrown away—I’ve got nothing. I resort to drawing a bunch of cartoony dogs that look like Sushi, the Lims’ collie, which will make the kids happy, at least.

“Do you think there will be enough food?” my mom says when I come back into the kitchen to get more tape. “I’m worried there isn’t enough.”

“What are you talking about? There’s always way too much food.”

“I should have gotten fish, too. Maybe I can send Baba to—”

“There’s plenty, Ma. I’m sure everyone else will bring stuff, too.”

“No, I told them not to bring anything.”

It makes me laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I told them I would cook everything.”

“Okay, cool, I’m sure they totally listened and will all definitely show up empty-handed.”

“Should I send Baba—”

“No.”

“Maybe I should get—”

But I’m already out in the living room with my tape. “Not listening!” I call back. They’re all Chinese; obviously they’re all going to bring something. “Can’t hear you!”

At five-forty (which is basically five, Asian time) the doorbell rings. “Aiya, Daniel, the door,” my mom cries from the kitchen, rushing to the hall mirror with her lipstick. The Lims and the Chius come pouring in, their arms weighted down with the pink bakery boxes and oranges and Saran-Wrapped platters of spareribs and noodles and braised abalone my mom insisted they wouldn’t bring, and everyone’s greeting each other in the hallways when the Pons come, too (also, for the record, bearing food), and with them that flood of goodwill that makes me feel a little safer in the world.

My parents’ friends’ kids are all younger. I’m four years older than Harold, who’s the next oldest. The Huang kids brought iPads and plop down in the living room, and Chelsey Lim and Anson Chiu crowd around to see what they’re doing. I sprawl out on the floor and talk with Harold, who’s in seventh grade now, about whether his school’s robots club is a sham (spoiler: it is; the advisor keeps trying to tell him drones aren’t robots and as far as Harold’s concerned, all credibility has been lost). Harold’s this nerdy kid with giant glasses that keep slipping down his nose and a total lack of social awareness, and he’s a genius. He takes practice SATs for fun. I get a kick out of him. Sometimes when I think about the kind of kid my parents would’ve chosen, if it worked like that, I think Harold is who my dad would’ve picked, and I wonder if my sister would’ve turned out that way.

My mom comes to recruit me to help her in the kitchen, the counters overflowing with steaming plates and bowls, and in between her hurried orders—get a cup for Mabel a yi, put Lin a yi’s cake in the refrigerator—the aunties descend on me, chattering about how big and handsome I’ve gotten (sure, I’ll take it) and asking a million questions about RISD. They pinch and pat me and plot out a future in which I’m famous and rich and successful until my mom pulls me aside, her smile gone.

“Go find Baba,” she whispers, which is when it occurs to me that ever since the doorbell rang he’s been in the back of the house. “Tell him to come back out here.”

I assumed he would be doing—what, exactly? Getting ready or something, but when I find him he’s lying on his bed watching TV. My hope flattens a little, loses dimension. I say, “Uh, Ma wants you to come out there.”

He kind of grunts and pretends to be watching really intently. It’s a commercial. “Are you coming?” I say. “What are you doing in here?”

He waves his hand. “I’ll come out.”

“She said—”

“It’s okay. I’ll come right out.”

I close the door behind me. When my mom sees me come back without him, something in her expression collapses. An image of the two of them next year, the space without me here echoing between them, floods me with sadness. I wrestle the sticky rice into a serving dish and joke around with Uncle Benson and Uncle Fred. Convincingly, I think, even though in truth I have a sick feeling that maybe I should’ve tried to talk to my dad, or tried to alert my mom.

It’s ten or so minutes before my dad comes back out. I see him coming down the hallway before he sees me, his face drawn, and just before he comes into the living room he plasters on a smile, folds himself into the back-clapping and loud exclamations of his friends. He relaxes, I think, a little bit. Christmas is back on track.

And it stays that way until my dad’s pouring drinks and Uncle Benson asks, “So how is the lab? When will you move up to professor?”

Auntie Mabel makes a jerking motion with her head at him. My dad starts to answer and then stops, and then waits a beat too long, and then the silence stretches out until you feel it around you like a cloak. My mom’s smile slips away. Auntie Mabel and Auntie Lin exchange a look. I realize, when they do, what happened—my mom already told the aunties what happened, but the uncles don’t know yet.

“Why isn’t he answering your question?” Calvin asks. He’s five. Auntie Mabel motions at him to be quiet. Calvin frowns. “But—”

“Calvin.”

“But you said—”

Auntie Mabel smiles apologetically around the kitchen. That could’ve been my dad’s out; he could’ve made some joke about kids, or something. But he fumbles, isn’t sure what to say, and then that awkward silence rears up again.

“Well, that’s all right,” Uncle Benson says loudly, realizing, I think, why his wife was trying to motion to him to shut up. “Always next time, right?”

“Right.” My dad clears his throat, and stretches his lips over his teeth. “Yes. Next time.”

Everyone leaves early. I can feel my mom frantic to keep them there, frantic for everyone to be having a great time, but as soon as presents are opened and red envelopes handed out the parents all quickly gather their kids, making excuses about getting everyone home to bed. When they’re gone I find my mom sitting in the kitchen, staring blankly at the mound of dishes and the chicken carcasses strewn all over the counters.

“I’ll do these,” I say, trying to paint brightness into my voice, trying to ignore the pit in my stomach. “You should go rest.”

My dad comes in. “Such a mess,” he says, surveying the kitchen. My mom swivels her head toward the wall, fast, but not fast enough to hide the way tears well up in her eyes. Something in my dad’s expression retreats. He holds up the half-empty wine bottle from dinner and says, roughly, “Should I dump this?”

My mom blinks at the wall and then wipes her eyes. “Okay,” she says, fighting to keep her voice steady.

“Or should I refrigerate it?”

I glare at him. He doesn’t look at me, though, and lifts the bottle a little. “You want me to just throw this away?”

“I don’t care what you do with it, Joseph, I had no money for the fish and the duck, and we had to serve our friends chicken on Christmas, and—”

There’s a cold feeling that starts in my stomach, spreading out to my extremities. “The chicken was great,” I say quickly. “Auntie Lin kept saying how good it was.”

They both ignore me. My dad starts to say something, then gives up—he dumps the wine into the sink, and it glugs loudly through the bottle’s neck like it can’t escape fast enough.

“It was fun to see everyone,” I say. I can hear the desperation in my voice. What I want to say, of course, is, Tell me it’s going to be fine with you two, with all of us. “The kids are so big. It was great to see them, right?”

There’s a looseness in my mom’s expression, like she might come apart and never find her way back together again. My palms are sweating. She starts to say something, then stops. Then she puts her hand on my shoulder a moment. “Merry Christmas,” she says, and that’s all, and I hear her footsteps falling all the way down the hallway.

When I get up late the next morning, nearly afternoon, the laptop’s missing from my desk—one of them must have come in when I was still sleeping—and when I find it on the kitchen table and look through their search histories there’s a whole trail there of one of them looking up divorce.

The world bottoms out around me a second or two, wavers around the edges before it slowly balloons into place again. Which of them looked it up? Was it that one of them wanted or was even thinking about a divorce, or was afraid the other did?

I try to calm my breathing, then call Harry. “What are you doing? You want to hang out?”

“Right now? I was going to wait in line at Din Tai Fung with my parents. You want to come?”

I’m careful to mask my disappointment. “That’s all right. I don’t want to crash your family thing.”

“It’s not a big deal. Actually—you want to come over? I’ll just stay home. I’m not in the mood to sit around waiting in the mall for two hours. It’ll be packed today anyway.”

“No, you should go to lunch with them.”

“Nah, they’ll be glad to get rid of me. Just give me a couple minutes. I have to shower.”

He’s still toweling off his hair when my dad drops me off—Harry takes the longest showers—and a few beads of water cling to his calves. Not everyone gets this: someone who’ll drop everything for you, no questions asked. I know how lucky I am.

I will not think about my parents. I will not think about my parents.

And, mostly, I don’t. We eat leftover prime rib from the Wongs’ Christmas dinner and then play Skyrim while the food coma has its way with us, and then Harry wants to go outside and play basketball. They have a half-court out back next to the tennis court. We play one-on-one. I get my ass kicked.

“It’s only because you never do anything you don’t already know you’re good at,” I say over his gloating as we head back inside. “That’s why you always want to play basketball.”

“Damn right that’s why.”

“Uh, that was not a compliment.”

“Anything is a compliment if you take it as one.”

“That’s definitely not how compliments work.”

He laughs. Then he holds the smile, trains it at me until I feel something at the core of me start to liquefy. I can feel my heartbeat in my ears. Maybe it’s from the exercise. I take the water he’s holding out for me and drain it quickly, averting my eyes.

When we’re back in his room he sprawls out on the floor and then says, “Oh, hey.” He sits back up. “Regina got into Northwestern.”

“She did? She found out?”

“Yeah, she heard the day before Christmas Eve.”

“She didn’t tell me.” I would’ve expected her to. Knowing she didn’t—what am I supposed to make of that? The distance unfurls like a carpet, rolls itself longer and longer, and a weight sinks against my chest. It’s exactly what you’re afraid of, Mr. X hisses to me. She sees you. Sees right through you like a window. “Was she stoked?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it that. That program is damn hard to get into, too. It was kind of weird. I thought she’d be happier.”

“Maybe she’s just worried her parents won’t let her go.” They’ve always said she has to go to whatever is the best-ranked school she gets into, and I doubt Northwestern will end up being it. Even if it is, they’ve always said they’ll never let her major in journalism. I hope she does it anyway.

“Maybe, yeah.”

“Regina’s parents are garbage.” I always think of how he told me that after Sandra died Regina’s parents made her take down all her pictures of the two of them and get rid of anything of Sandra’s she still had in her room. I think it just freaked them out, Harry said. They’re scared. They’re scared she’ll—you know—which was, I always thought, overly generous of him. So what if they’re scared? Some things don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

“They’re definitely—complex.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I take out my phone to text her congrats. “What are you going to do, then?” I say, not looking up from the keypad. “If she goes, you’ll be really far away from her.” And: me. The thought of having whole states between us next year feels like someone took a hole punch to my heart. “You think you guys will stay together in college?”

“Maybe.” He kind of laughs. “Or maybe she’ll want an upgrade when she gets there. Who knows. We’ve never really talked about it. She might not want to do long-distance.”

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I wonder whether she and Harry are sleeping together. Harry never says anything about it, which could mean they aren’t or could just mean talking about it isn’t his style. It feels like another lifetime that she told me how she was going to break up with him. I’ve never asked her about it since. For a while I kept waiting for it to happen, but it seems clear now it isn’t going to, and I should probably be glad. It would be a stain on anyone’s character to wish more loss on someone like Regina. The easiest thing to imagine is that after Sandra died she just couldn’t do it—she needed him too much, and she couldn’t endure another loss on top of everything else.

He reaches for a basketball shrouded by the edge of his blanket. “I’m scared I’m not going to get in anywhere.”

“That’s definitely not going to happen. But what about like University of Chicago or something?” I say. “I bet you’d like it there.”

“Yeah, maybe…” He’s too polite to say he would view that as complete and abject failure, but he would, obviously. It isn’t that I want him in Chicago, either, I just wish he didn’t see it as Princeton or bust. I guess what I wanted to say was You could do a lot worse than Brown.

“When you turned in your portfolio,” he says, “did it feel like, I don’t know, like you were ripping off your clothes so they could judge you naked? I don’t know what I’ll even do if I don’t get in anywhere good.”

“You’ll probably get in everywhere you applied.”

He hooks his leg over mine and then, without warning, rolls over so he’s pinning me against the ground. I can feel his heart beating against mine, which means, probably, that he felt it when mine picked up. He grins in my face.

“Get off me,” I say. My voice comes out kind of squeaky. I move feebly underneath him, not enough to actually shake him off.

“I’m trying to open up here and share my genuine fears and you’re just brushing me off. You’re probably going to get to RISD and find a new best friend, huh? Just replace me?”

I am hyperaware of every centimeter of him against me. And at the same time my mind is a raging mess of color and chaotic form, a Jackson Pollock painting splashed across the whole thing. I manage, “No.” Then he rolls off me.

I’m out of breath. What am I supposed to make of that?

He looks unruffled. Why did it feel like a lightning bolt to me, then? My whole body is still tingling.

Harry palms the basketball and tries to lift it. “I’m starving. You want to stay for dinner? My mom said the cook got crab.”

I do want to stay for dinner; I’d want to if the cook had gotten cardboard. I wait until I’m sure I won’t sound out of breath. “I’ll ask my parents.”

He lies down on his back, tries to twirl the basketball around on his finger without it falling and clocking him in the face. He keeps having these near misses, swerving his head out of the way. “You’re an idiot,” I say. Today the emptiness of life without him feels more real to me in ways it didn’t when I got the RISD acceptance. When my mom picks up, I say, “Hi, Ma, Harry asked if I could stay for dinner.”

“For dinner? No, Daniel, come back home. We have to eat all the leftovers.”

“I can have those tomorrow inst—”

“Don’t stay for dinner. They’ll think you don’t get to eat enough at home.”

“They won’t—”

“Baba is home. I’ll send him to get you.” She hangs up.

“No go?” Harry says.

“Nah, another time. Thanks, though.”

The ball thumps millimeters from his face again. He sits up, grinning, his arms stretched wide.

“What are you doing?” I say, my heartbeat not yet back to normal still. “Why do you look so smug? You’re terrible at that. You have nothing to be smug about.”

“It never got me, though, did it? I always got away.”

At home: tense silence, a cold—the heater’s turned off again—that slithers up against my nose and neck, my mom ensconced in her garden, tools arranged around her like armor. She’s out there another hour at least (an hour that, for the record, I could’ve stayed at Harry’s) and she comes back in wearing her sun visor and with her arms laden with some carrots and a bunch of greens. She fills the sink with water and plunges the vegetables under. The water swirls with dirt.

They’ve had all day to work things out together. I hope they did exactly that.

“Go get your father,” she says without looking up. “Tell him it’s time for dinner.”

He slides into his chair without looking at anyone, and his unhappiness spreads through the room like a fog. My mom shakes out her napkin and smooths it over her lap. For dinner she spooned mushrooms and pickled vegetables over rice, and the chicken from dinner last night is waiting on the middle of the table on a plate. There’s a tightness in my stomach.

“Lin still hasn’t called me back,” my mom says. Something about her tone, like using just the tip of your finger to touch a pan to see if it’s hot—it makes me think they haven’t spoken to each other much all day. My hope that they’ve reconciled fritters into nothing. “Anson left his jacket here last night.”

“Did you leave a message?” my dad says.

“No.”

“So maybe she doesn’t know why you’re calling.”

“That’s what I mean. She doesn’t know why I’m calling, so she isn’t calling me back. That’s not like her. That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Well, how long ago did you call?”

“This afternoon.”

My dad raises his eyebrows at his plate. “Maybe they’re not home.”

My mom tightens her lips. She reaches for a piece of leftover chicken. “I called her cell phone.”

“Maybe her phone is turned off. Maybe they went to see a movie.”

My mom takes a very deliberate bite of chicken, then another one. I say, “Good chicken, Ma.”

She ignores me. To my dad, she says, “Anson might need the jacket.”

“He’s fine.”

“He might not have—”

“He’s fine,” my dad says sharply. “Don’t waste time worrying about it. It’s not consequential.”

The look she gives him feels like a knife. I remember that jolt I felt looking at the search history this morning.

Our chopsticks clink against our dishes. I chase grains of rice around my bowl. Brown rice, which none of us particularly likes, but my mom made the switch a few years ago after reading some article about diabetes.

She wants to say something else, I can tell. What I can’t tell is whether my dad is oblivious to that, or is acting oblivious because he knows better. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s making everything so much worse.

“Regina got into Northwestern,” I say.

My mom turns to my dad in a way that makes it abundantly clear they both plan to ignore me. “It’s going to freeze tonight. That’s what the forecast says. It will drop below freezing.”

He sets his cup down harder than necessary and grunts.

“In the hills it may even get down to—”

“It’s not going to freeze.”

“The forecast says it’s going to—”

“Don’t worry so much about your garden,” he erupts, his face going red, with a suddenness that I think even surprises him. “Of everything else—it’s not important. You shouldn’t be so attached. It’s only plants.”

This time they don’t save the fighting for when I’m out of the house. When I get out of the shower I can hear them in their bedroom, their voices carrying down the empty hallway like a freezing wind.

“It’s because you made last night so uncomfortable for everyone. You were hiding in the bedroom, and then you—”

“No one was uncomfortable, they—”

“Yes, they were uncomfortable, Joseph, because you hid in the bedroom and then you didn’t speak to or look at anyone and then you pretended everything was fine at work, when they already knew you were fired.”

“I was only being polite. I didn’t want to ruin your dinner.”

“No one likes to see other people’s private business. And if they worry we’re struggling maybe they would feel obligated to try to help. How can I see them now? I can’t talk to them because they’ll think they have to help.”

A pause, which gives me brief hope it’s over. Then my mom says, “Our savings is already—”

“You’re overreacting. You—”

“I knew this would happen!” She’s the first one to yell, and her voice is shaking, I think with tears. “I knew. I told you it was dangerous. I told you it was going to ruin us. You wouldn’t listen.”

So she knows, then, what it was that he did. But that was the thing I haven’t heard her say yet, the thing she keeps biting back. She hasn’t outright blamed him. I stand in the foggy room, hugging myself in my towel. Outside the door there’s another silence, one I feel inside my eardrums, my rib cage. When my dad speaks again he sounds drained.

“That’s not what ruined us,” he says. “You know that.”

“We’ve been so careful all this time. How could you just—”

“It doesn’t matter, Anna. You know it doesn’t matter. We always knew it couldn’t last forever.”

I fall asleep with their words ringing in my ears—that’s not what ruined us, you know that—and I don’t know what time it is when my dad wakes me up. I garble something unintelligible, still half-trapped in sleep, and my dad whispers, “Wake up.” He shakes me gently. “Wake up.”

It’s freezing. If my eyes weren’t so bleary, I bet I could see his breath in the dark.

“What’s wrong?” I say. And then my heart slams against my chest, because it’s the middle of the night and he’s wearing a jacket: he’s leaving. This is him saying goodbye.

“Here.” He holds out my ski jacket. “Get up.”

“What is this for? Ba, I’m not—I can’t—” I’m not going with him. If he’s asking me to take a side, expecting me to choose him, I can’t do that. I’m not leaving this house.

“Put it on and come with me.”

“But—”

“Just come with me.”

I get up. I’ll go with him to the door, at least, try to talk him out of it. My knees are weak. I scramble for the right thing to say.

We pad down the hallway. He opens the door to the hallway closet and gathers an armful of towels and sheets, then slides the sliding door open onto the backyard. That part confuses me—maybe I’m reading the situation wrong.

The cold hits hard. My mom is outside, kneeling in the moonlight. She looks up, surprised to see us. “What are you doing?”

He goes and kneels next to her and puts his mound of towels on the ground, then plucks one from the pile and drapes it carefully over a row of her cai tai plants. It’s one of the things she loves best in her garden—you can’t find it in grocery stores here and it took her years to grow any that she thought were as good as what you could find in Wuhan. My dad tucks the ends of the towel carefully over the stalks. It looks like a ghost in the shadows.

I feel stuck in place, bronzed in my relief. “What is this?”

“The freeze will damage the plants,” my mom says, holding out a sheet toward me. “The sheets will keep moisture from the ground. Maybe it will save some of them.” The anger from earlier has slid away from her voice.

“Come help,” my dad says quietly. He meets my gaze, and when he does I understand that he knows I overheard them earlier.

We work side by side in the freezing cold until I can’t feel my fingers anymore and my eardrums ache. We swaddle her whole garden as the moon sinks toward dawn, and afterward I’m so cold I can hardly feel my hands. I bury myself under my covers and wait for the warmth to spread, for sleep to come. In the morning, all her plants made it through.