The photograph was of Claire at six years old, standing on a dock at a lake in Vermont, holding up a fish that was mostly fin. Behind her, laughing so hard her eyes had closed, was her grandmother.
Ruth Hollis was her father's mother. She lived four hours north in a white farmhouse outside of Montpelier, where she had taught high school English for thirty-one years and buried a husband and raised, by all accounts, one son who had turned out mostly fine. She came down every Christmas. She had come down every Christmas for as long as Claire had been alive, except for the last two, because of her hip and then because of the surgery on her hip, and Claire had felt each missing Christmas like a step missing from a staircase in the dark.
This year she was coming. She had called the week before to say so.
"I've got a new hip and a new attitude," Grandma Ruth had said over the phone, her voice crackling with the old farmhouse line. "I'll be there Christmas Eve, and I'm staying through New Year's whether your mother likes it or not."
"She'll like it," Claire had said, which was a lie, and they both knew it, and Grandma Ruth had laughed.
"Did you get my package?"
"What package?"
There had been a short pause. "I mailed a box to the house the first week of December. Two boxes, actually. One for you and one for your sister. They should have come by now."
"I haven't seen anything. Maybe Mom put them under the tree."
"Maybe she did." Another pause, a little longer. "Claire, honey. Yours has a green ribbon. You'll know it."
Claire had thought about the green ribbon every day since. She had looked under the tree, carefully, when no one was around. There were a great many presents under the tree, wrapped in her mother's coordinated paper of silver and white, and most of them said Madison in her mother's looping handwriting. A few said Greg. A few said Diane. Claire had found two with her own name on them, flat and rectangular, and had felt the small, shameful relief of being remembered at all.
She had not found a green ribbon.
She sat on her bed now and looked at the photograph of the dock and the fish and her grandmother's closed, laughing eyes, and she told herself the box had gotten lost in the mail. Things got lost in the mail at Christmas. It happened all the time.
Downstairs, Madison shrieked with laughter, and the music got louder.
Grandma Ruth arrived at three o'clock on Christmas Eve in a rented car that she had driven herself, against the explicit advice of her surgeon, her son, and her daughter-in-law.