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The angel is the most important part of the Christmas tree. That’s what Abuelita said. Without it, Christmas couldn’t start.
And six-year-old Rafael can see why. The angel he pulls out of the box of decorations has pink lips and dark hair. Its eyes look to be faded, but he chips at the paint and pulls off a sliver of blue. The white dress is shimmery, and there’s a softer gray layer over the sides. He likes the way it turns in the light; he rotates it to watch the silver flicker and splash in front of him.
“Do you like it?” Abuelita asks, smiling warmly at him. Rafael nods and toys with the hem of the dress. The wings are tender, reminding him of puffy pillows “It’s very important that you save the angel for last, pepito . It’s bad luck if you don’t.”
“When is she going up?” He asks.
“In a few minutes, Rafi,” his mom assures him softly. “How about you grab a few snow globes for me?” She’s been decorating every surface of their room with whatever his father has handed over from the box at his feet. For once, they were able to settle with the venom between them and decorate for the holidays.
“Here, Rafael,” his father says, and he scoots over so Rafael can peer into the box. “You can choose which ones get to go above the fireplace.”
Rafael reaches in the box and pulls out a snow globe with a palm tree and tall buildings. “I like this one,” he declares. His father smiles and puts it on the table so Rafael can dig further. His eyes shine when he finds a snow globe with a white building, ornate with a pointy roof and long columns in the front. “What’s this?”
“It’s a courthouse,” his mother explains. “Abuelita likes to collect things with special landmarks.”
Rafael places the snow globe on the table beside the other one and tilts his head. “What’s a landmark?”
Abuelita scoops him into her arms. “It’s a special building that helps people recognize a place. Like when people see Lady Liberty, they know they’re referring to La América .”
“Or Las Torres Gemelas ,” his mother adds. “There are a lot of landmarks in New York City.”
Rafael delivers the snow globes to his mother so that she can place them on the mantel. He spins a few ornaments on his finger before his mother hangs them on one of the tree branches. When he squints his eyes at the tree, the lights blur and jut out. He spots the angel moving to the top of the tree, a rush of silver and white, and he reaches out to take it. Abuelita laughs and picks him up.
“Can I put it on the tree?” He asks in a small voice.
“ Por supuesto! ” She says, and his mother hands him the angel with a grin.
“Make sure it’s on the very top,” his father advises softly. “We don’t want it to fall off.”
Rafael squeezes the angel’s sides and reaches up as his grandmother raises him just enough to put the angel on the very top of the tree. He’s very high in the air, hovering over the fairy lights and, and he feels like he’s flying. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine it, for just a fleeting second—
His family cheers around him. Rafael finds himself grounded and lost and wishing for more.
“You gotta start fighting back, Rafael,” his father sighs when he returns home with a black eye and a busted lip. Almost ten years old and he’s already getting into fights. If it weren’t for his friend Eddie, Rafael is sure he would have much worse. “If you let these bullies hurt you, they’re never going to leave you alone.”
“What did they say this time?” His mother asks. She was the one who had received the call and had to leave work early to pick him up from the nurse’s office. His father hadn’t been working steadily in a month, making it more difficult to get him out of the house.
Rafael kicks his feet on the cabinets below the counter and frowns past the ice pack he holds to his cheek. “Benny Suarez called me a maricón because I said I liked his shirt, so I called him a cabròn because he thought his mom was Gloria Estefan.”
His father chokes on a sip of Dr. Pepper; his mother whips toward him with wide eyes. “Rafi! Where did you learn that?!”
“When you and Papi argue, you call him uno cabròn for hanging out at the café. And one time I kissed Marisol and said it tasted like pez viejo and now everyone at school calls me a maricón .”
“Are you?” His father asks. His mother slaps his arm with a deep growl that sounds like “don’t you dare.”
“Rafi, you can’t call people names,” she advises when she faces him again, “no matter how upset they may make you.”
“Lucia,” his father scoffs, “he should learn how to fight.”
“Abuelita said I should only use my words to fight,” Rafael points out. Ever since he was a child, she had condoned physical fighting in lieu of using his words to battle for him.
His mother lets out a long sigh and hides her face in her hands with an exasperated groan. When his father turns away from him and whispers to her, Rafael takes it as a sign to leave. He hops off the kitchen counter and heads out. He gives his parents’ marriage three more months before his mother leaves his father and takes Rafael with her. He always had his mother’s last name for a reason anyway. His relationship with his father was formal, nothing like the ones he saw at school. He used to wish his father would smile more, but he learned quickly that smiles weren’t permanent and always went away.
As he’s heading to his room, Rafael spots the abandoned box of decorations next to the Christmas tree, fully decorated and shining. The angel, their Christmas topper, sits on the coffee table, nothing surrounded it. If Rafael took a guess, he would say his father had been close to putting it up. Rafael fights a smirk—only because it hurts too much on that side of his face—and takes the angel. He puts it on top of the tree with a few hops in place, and he smiles when it lands and stays, pain in his face be damned.
His parents always argue in the kitchen.
They try not to get loud, but they never win. When his parents divorced, his father moved out but stayed close by. Since they were only a few blocks away, it was easy to meet up and arrange visitation hours. His father was a physical man, never taking his anger out on them, but sending it on other things: a door, his toys when he was younger, a wall. Rafael is thankful to be turning eighteen in the new year. After that, he can decide who he wants to be around. He won’t have to be haunted by wars over child support checks or the nightmares of yells that still chase after him when he’s too stressed to go to sleep past 1 AM.
Rafael turns up the volume of the radio; Abuelita will be proud when she hears what he’s done. She and his father never got along, and Rafael’s admiration for her always bugged him. At least his parents get the arguments out in the open before the 25th.
His parents always argue in the kitchen. So he stays in the living room to decorate the tree, he wraps the tinsel around the green pine needles, and he stands on the tips of his toes to place the angel on top as the very last step.
“Ah, it’s el juez ! His first week at his dream job and he’s come to el barrio .”
Rafael smiles when he enters Abuelita’s apartment and is greeted with her warm smile and even warmer hands. She caresses his cheeks and coos at him, pokes his sides and chastises him for not eating enough, and he answers her questions with laughs and soft eyerolls that he knows he inherited from her. Lucia worked too much; his father hardly worked in Manhattan; his best chance of normal holiday traditions was with Abuelita. She had always been there.
“I’m not a judge, Abuelita, you know that,” Rafael chides her jokingly.
“Tsk, tsk, Rafi. Don’t you know I can see into the future?” She winks at him and leads him inside the apartment he’s known for so long. All the years she could have gotten a better place and she stayed in the same home. She always was a person of habit.
They share warm drinks and catch up. He helps her make dinner, and she sings along to the Cuban records worn from their use. When they eat, Abuelita shows off her collection of reports in the newspaper about his cases. Each segment using his name is circled, and the ones with his picture are separated to keep them clear and free of crinkles. Rafael can’t help but smile fondly at it. Abuelita always had a soft spot for him.
“You know,” she says after they clean up dinner, “I kept the angel for you.”
Rafael furrows his brows. “The angel?” The second it leaves his lips, his expression relaxes and he bursts into soft laughter. “The angel. Abuelita, you shouldn’t have. I hope you finished decorating.”
She grins and nods to the tree in her living room. It’s nothing extravagant, a thin and rather squat thing in comparison to the past trees she’s used, but Abuelita always loved sentimental reasons. Sure enough, there’s an angel figurine sitting underneath the tree. He can’t see from here, but he knows it’s not the one from his childhood. It’s much too fragile like it could break if he so much as breathed on it. But it’s always been the gesture, never the angel itself, that meant so much.
The next song begins as Rafael places the angel on the tree. It’s an easy stretch to plop it on, emphasizing the ornaments and branches below with grace and finesse. Abuelita grins and sings along with him, swaying beside the fairy lights.
When the Christmas tree appears in the squad room of Manhattan’s Special Victims Unit, it’s during three open cases that are nothing but complicated: one with a brain-dead victim, one with three women with foggy memories via drugged drinks, and one with a criminal who has threatened witnesses and pays a lawyer stupid amounts of money to get it taken care of. He’s had a migraine going on four days and absolutely no end in sight for the cases this squad has delivered to him.
“Happy holidays,” he says to the trio awaiting him in Cragen’s office, nothing more than teasing. Judging by the glowers sent his way, it’s successful. “Tell me something good and make this trip worth more than breaking in new shoes.”
“Unfortunately, we can’t do that,” Benson frowns. Rafael is rolling his eyes before she even finishes. “Two more girls came forward this morning against Dillard, but they already have hate mail.”
“And it’s a perfect match for the other three,” Amaro adds. “Same signature on the front, same font in the letter, same threats.”
“Well,” Rafael sighs, “the more we complain, the less we get done.” He takes a glance at the tree outside of the office and points at it over his shoulder. “Did you put the star up before you finished decorating? It’s bad luck to top a tree if you have more to decorate.”
“It came pre-finished,” Cragen says, already shooting him a glare before he finishes talking.
Rafael shrugs and walks out again. “Well, there’s your problem. Call me when you have something good. My migraine needs a break.”
Rafael slaps the new detective’s hand—what’s his name, Carees?—before he tops the Christmas tree. “Are you done?”
The newbie blinks down at him. The lucky bastard can reach the tree without breaking a sweat. “What?”
“I said, are you done?” Rafael taps the tip of the tree topper. “It’s bad luck to top a tree without finishing the rest of your decorating.”
“Don’t ask questions, Carisi,” Rollins calls out to him from the other room, barely looking up from the report she’s typing up. “Barba can’t handle not being the center of attention for more than a minute and wants to top the tree himself.”
“Funny,” Rafael smirks at her, and she looks at him over her laptop, “I used to hear the same thing from my third-grade teacher. I’ll let her know I didn’t change.”
Carisi, a pout forming on his lips, returns the star to his desk. “The desk sergeant said the tree hadn’t been topped for a few days. I was trying to help, not step on your toes.”
Rafael hums and looks him up and down. The man hasn’t done anything wrong, but Rafael likes messing with him just a little. He knows Carisi can match him if he just got a better hold of his tongue and wrangled something together. “I’ll let it slide. If you promise not to put it up while I’m here, and only after everything else is completed.”
This time, the irritation is clear on Carisi’s face. He crosses his arms and juts a hip out, brows furrowed and lips forming around a scoff. “How the hell am I supposed to know that?”
Rafael smirks. “Wait a week.”
“So,” Sonny sighs, causing Rafael to jump and spin around to face him, “is there any reason why you’re in the closet?”
“I miss the glory days,” Rafael retorts. He hands over the Christmas topper they had bought a few years ago—an angel, nothing special, just a white dress and feathery wings—and gets on his knees to dig past the bags and boxes on the ground to look into the back of the hall closet in their apartment. “I can’t reach the top of the Christmas tree. I swear, that thing has gotten taller.”
“Or you’re getting shorter.” Rafael pinches his ankle. “That’s what happens when you get older!”
“Says the man with, hm, how many gray hairs did we count last time? Or were there too many to keep track of?”
Sonny chuckles and joins him on the ground. “Don’t act like you don’t love my grays. We both know the truth.” He pauses, standing up when the step ladder is nowhere to be seen, and sighs. “Well. There’s always plan b.” When Rafael looks up at him, Sonny waves him to stand and join him. “C’mon. Plan b.”
Rafael, confused, lets his boyfriend lead him into the living room where the tree is. They had spent all weekend decorating it and picking out the best ones for their fifth Christmas as a couple. And so far, it looked amazing: their combined ornaments and tastes were getting better. He kept the snow globe with the courthouse in memory of Abuelita on the dining room table, right next to the advent wreath Sonny’s nonna had kept. It looks like home, like warmth, like holiday joy that he is more than happy to relish in.
Before Rafael can say anything, he finds his feet leaving the ground. He lets out a surprised yell and grabs Sonny by the shoulder. Sonny winks at him, shifting him in his arms and walking slowly over to their Christmas tree. “What the hell are you trying to do, kill me?!”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sonny grunts. He hands over the angel and keeps his arms wrapped tight around Rafael’s thighs. “Let’s go put the angel up. I’m right here with you.”
Rafael’s heart cannot beat fast enough to map out the love he holds for Sonny. In both of their faults, they’ve stood by each other. For their oddities and insecurities, they barely bat an eye and provide nothing but unconditional support. Rafael smiles at him, caressing the side of Sonny’s face where the silver in his hair is bright and shining, admiring the blue of his eyes that spark with the lights of the tree. He is suddenly six again, wishing to fly, squinting at the tree and putting the angel on the tree.
The angel doesn’t sit on top of the tree—the tree topper does, at least, but the real angel is with him. The same man who can pair his sharp words with his own, the same man who knows the shape of his body as well as his own and can fuck him senseless as easily as he can hold him tight. There are not enough words to describe the feelings he has for Sonny Carisi. And that’s okay. For once, he can let his words fail.
Rafael and Sonny place the angel on top of the tree. As Sonny drags him to the couch to kiss him senseless, Rafael wonders how he could have gotten so lucky.