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Noelle's mom has something under her arm when she comes home from work. She's smiling a little as the kids run to greet her, and she gives them both a quick pat on the shoulder. "December," she says, "you've been interested in learning music recently, so your father and I thought we could get that started." She hands Dess the bulky case, and Noelle's sister opens it with shining eyes. Inside is a soft red acoustic guitar. Dess gasps. "Thank you!" she squeals, pulling the instrument from the case and admiring the shiny finish. Her mother looks at her softly.
Dad comes over from the kitchen. "You are home!" he says, and pulls Mom in for a quick kiss, the way they usually do when she gets back from work. "I thought I heard your voice." Dad looks over at Noelle and Dess, and his grin grows. "It arrived!" He claps Dess on the shoulder. "Gonna be a guitar superstar, huh?" She grins back at him. "Sure, Dad."
Dess spends the rest of the evening trying to play the guitar. Noelle doesn't think she's particularly good at it, but she figures that learning an instrument takes time. Kris wasn't very good at piano when they started learning, after all. Dess will get better after a while. Right now, though, she's talking a mile a minute at Mom and Dad about the different things she could get for the guitar. Dad's mostly laughing along at her more ridiculous suggestions ('no, Dess, we're not getting you a converter, does that even work with acoustic guitars?") but Mom is nodding along and taking down notes for the more reasonable ones, like replacement parts and picks. "That can be arranged," she says, when Dess mentions wanting a strap for the guitar. Dess brightens at that, and starts talking even faster.
Noelle's just happy to listen. It's nice, when things are like this.
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Dess is in trouble again. Mom is marching through her messy room, carrying a plastic trash bag with her, and grabbing everything that's out of place to dispose of. Dess is trailing along, trying to clean up what she can, as Mom shouts something about responsibility and laziness.
Noelle stands in the hallway, twisting her hands around her wrists. She's caught in indecision- if she joins this she has to get closer to her angry mother and, potentially, risk that wrath being turned on her. On the other hand, she hates seeing Dess upset like this, and if she joins the cleaning maybe she can save more of Dess's stuff. And if she's honest, Noelle probably couldn't live with herself if she hid.
So, there's really only one option. Noelle steels herself and walks towards them. She tries her best to not listen to her mother, but Carol's presence is commanding even when she's not yelling at them, so she hears it anyways.
Noelle makes it into Dess's room and crouches down next to her sister. "Where do these go?" she says quietly, gesturing towards the stationery scattered over the floor in front of them. Dess sniffs. "My desk," she says morosely. Her cheeks are red.
Carol is still grabbing items for the trash. She lifts a hairbrush from under the bed. "Where does this go?" she says, almost mockingly. "Not under here!" She tosses it into the bag and moves on. Noelle doesn't say it, but she thinks to herself, well, I take out the trash anyways. The thought gives her some courage. After all, it's not like Carol supervises her during chores. If Dess really wants something back, Noelle can dig it out for her in secret. It feels like her own, private rebellion, which is a novel sensation. She has power, now. She can do something about how sad Dess is.
She lets the feeling of strength bolster her, and starts moving the pens and pencils to her sister's desk.
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It's late in the morning on a weekend, and the Holiday family is gathered around the coffee table in the living room. Carol pulled out one of their old puzzles to put together, and everyone else had drifted over in their own time to join her. It was Noelle first, sitting down on the rug and silently joining in. Rudy had seen them working together, and watched them with a smile until Carol had told him to just come over already. Dess had come last, making her way down from her bedroom and sliding onto the couch to help with the puzzle.
Rudy leans towards Noelle. "Hey, Elly, I think I have something for you." He gestures to a set of four pieces he's put together. "They look like they match with your section." Noelle's working on a section with a bunch of mushrooms in it, and the pieces do indeed match a couple she's managed to put together. Sure enough, they click together perfectly to make up one of the mushroom caps. Her dad grins.
It doesn't take long to finish the puzzle with all four of them working on it together. Carol's incredible at puzzles, Rudy's told them. Whenever she needs a task done, she focuses on it like nothing else, with laser-precision until everything is done. Her dad says that doing puzzles is how Carol keeps herself calm. Everything comes together nicely and makes one pretty image at the end.
Carol's good at games, too. Once the puzzle is completed, the Holidays move into playing card games. The vaulted ceilings of the house make their laughter echo long after they all part ways.
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"Look!" her mother yells, gesturing wildly at the coffee table. "I'll just throw everything around, too!" She tears pieces of the puzzle away. They scatter along the floor like so much broken glass. Noelle's trying to stop crying, but her vision is blurring hard. "You need to learn that I'm not your servant," Carol continues. "You're old enough now that you can pick up after yourselves, so do it!"
She pauses for a heartbeat, and then, "Clean it up."
Carol marches off. Noelle doesn't move for a moment, but eventually she spurs herself into action, picking up pieces of the puzzle that Carol scattered over the floor. Dess is doing the same, and once the puzzle is dealt with they move on to tidying the things they left around the house.
It's these moments Noelle hates, because she always gets this horrible feeling of guilt and anger and fear at the same time mixed up into one horrible bad emotion, and what's more she can't stop crying.
Carol comes back into the living room.
And it's strange to look back on, but when Noelle turns her head to look at her mother she just feels so angry. She's ashamed of it later, but in that moment, Noelle thinks she hates her mother.
She's crying loud, and of course her mother notices. "Stop that," she says sharply. Noelle tries, she swears she tries, but she just can't stop. "Stop!" her mother says, even more sharply this time, but she can't! Her mother's lips purse in a frown. "Fine, then," she says, and marches upstairs and into Noelle's room.
She comes out holding a book. Noelle recognizes it; it's part of a series about flying humans she's been reading. Her heart rate kicks up when she realizes what her mother is doing. She doesn't even really hear what Carol says; when she tries to recall it later, the only thing she can remember is the torn pages of the book fluttering to the ground as Carol rips it apart.
She remembers picking up the remains of the book and putting them in the trash.
There's more to be done, though, so she and Dess keep going as Carol is storming down the hallway carrying the laundry that just finished running.
It's on one of her trips past them that Noelle gets a stupid idea in her head.
Here's the thing: Noelle is scared, and her mother is angry. And Noelle remembers, from school, the lessons they were taught about conflict resolution and making up. She knows that her mother is mad at them for doing something wrong.
What she will never figure out later, though, is why she decided to hug her mother.
She remembers the feeling of wrapping her arms around Carol, the warmth of the laundry against her skin.
She also remembers the ice in Carol's voice when she told Noelle, "Don't suck up to me."
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It's a quiet winter morning. When Noelle makes it downstairs for breakfast, it's only Rudy in the kitchen. He smiles when she comes in. "Morning, Elly!" He pulls her into a side hug. "Help me with breakfast?"
She sets the table and starts cutting up fruit. Dess comes down next, rubbing sleep from her eyes and yawning.
When Mom gets downstairs, she looks exhausted. Noelle figures she must have stayed up late to work, again. Rudy hugs her, and hands her the mug of tea he got ready. She smiles back at him, strained but real.
Breakfast is a quiet affair.
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Noelle walks out to breakfast with her heart in her throat. She knows she messed up, cutting her own hair, and all she can do now is hope Carol doesn't notice.
She doesn't even know why she did it! Something about the sensation of scissors through hair, or just the freedom to cut as she desires, or just getting that pesky lock of hair out of the way, meant she actually did it. It's not that noticeable, really, or at least she thinks. It doesn't take Carol too long to realize, and the relaxed atmosphere in the kitchen freezes into horrible anticipation.
"Noelle," her mother says, flatly, "what did you do with your hair?"
She panics, throat closing up. "I- um." Carol walks in front of her. "Noelle. What. Did you do." Her voice is starting to get angry, now. Somehow the panic gets worse. "I'm-" she can't force out anything. Carol whacks the edge of the metal serving spoon into the table in front of Noelle's plate one, two, three times, and then she's yelling again. "NOELLE! Why. Would. You. Do. This?" By now Noelle's crying hard enough that her mother's face is blurry. She knows what expression Mom has on, anyways. "We just got your hair cut!" Carol slides back into her seat with a huff. "Seriously, Noelle, I thought you would have grown out of this. This is the kind of thing a kindergartener does, not someone your age!" Carol sighs. "Well, you better not come crying to me when someone at school notices what your hair looks like."
Noelle swallows hard. On the wood table in front of her there are one, two, three, new divots.
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Noelle's seen her mother in a lot of different situations. She's heard her mother's stories from city council, she's seen her mother battling attempted thieves, she's seen her staying up all night to finish work. Along with that, of course, is knowing how her mother wears her emotions. Noelle's familiar with a lot of them: anger, contempt, stress, happiness, frustration, and so on, but whatever her mother has been wearing recently is new.
No one has seen Dess for two days.
Noelle is scared. Hometown is such a peaceful place. Something like this is unheard of. And, to make it worse, the police can't find anything. Carol's been running herself ragged trying to hunt down any leads, but so far she's got nothing at all.
Something Noelle's noticed is that from the outside, if you don't know her Carol almost always looks perfectly calm. She's perfected that act of icy cool that she puts on when she's out of the house, but Noelle knows her tells by now. Something is wrong. Her breathing is too fast, her eyes are too wild, and her movements are the kind of sharp Noelle usually associates with anger.
It's only when she's a bit older that Noelle realizes what happened. That week was the first and only time she ever saw what Carol looked like terrified.
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The door to the Holiday mansion slams shut after Susie. Noelle leans against the wooden door, fighting to keep the grin off her face before her mother comes into the kitchen. She's missed having this. Having someone who didn't care about Carol's authority and gave as good as she got.
These days, she doesn't really see her mother too often. Sure, she's home from work as much as she always was, but whenever Noelle talks to her, she gets Work Carol.
Rudy doesn't like talking about it. Whenever she mentions how Carol's been different, he insists that she'll come back soon enough, she's just got a lot on her plate right now. Or she must just be tired today. Or that she'll liven up when he gets back.
Noelle doesn't think Carol's visited him once.
Before, when her mom got home from work, she would drop her mask of professionalism. She would laugh sometimes at Rudy's corny jokes, and Noelle would catch her soft smiles sometimes when she was watching them. Of course, she had her outbursts sometimes. But she was herself around them. Now, Noelle's held at the same careful distance as a colleague would be. She's sick of it. Honestly, she kind of hopes Susie's brash attitude was enough to crack Carol's icy shell, even if it's just out of anger.
The door creaks behind her and her mom steps through. The look in her eyes is unreadable. She takes a breath in as if to say something, before slowly exhaling instead. "Clean up the living room, please, Noelle. Your study materials are still out there." She walks back out, and Noelle can hear her walking up the stairs. A few moments later, a door shuts.
Noelle doesn't have to check to know it's locked.