I Want to Live in a House Made of Candy
It was Heather’s junior year, which meant her mother was always sneaking up, squawking about good grades and good effort and college, college, college. Nauseating. Heather had developed a new habit of slamming the door in her mother’s face. Because it was hypocrisy! Heather’s mom had attended three whole months of paralegal school before dropping out and marrying Heather’s father, who had (just five years after that) dropped out of his own family when he revealed he was fathering a child with his front office gal, and proceeded to move with his bulbous new bride to her recently-inherited family property in Hawaii! To the ex he sent child support. Sometimes Heather got a puka shell bracelet in the mail. It has a slider knot because I don’t know how big your wrist has gotten.

Heather thought puka shell bracelets looked stupid in New Hampshire. She had not spoken more than ten words to her dad in a year. But who cared. Adulthood was practically around the corner.

Heather’s mom’s coworker Jan Vandenberg owned a Christmas tree farm. He (Yes he. Jan. Yan.) had been asking about teenagers looking to help out on weekends leading up to the holiday, so Heather told her mom to put her name in, and Heather got the job.

Day one, early a.m, they pulled up to a half-dozen local teens stomping their boots in the parking lot. Their breaths were ephemeral puffs. The winter sun was white. Heather assumed her mother would not have the opportunity to do anything to embarrass her. She slammed the car door. She gave a chin-nod goodbye. But then Heather’s mom made a big show of blowing her goodbye kisses through the windshield before shifting the Jeep into reverse and driving away.

Then Jan appeared, turning up the collar on his red and black outdoorsman’s jacket, walked the new hires around and showed them everything.

The farm was located by Interstate 93, which made it easy for tourists to hop north, spend an afternoon in the White Mountains, fell their tree, then rush back home to suburban gridlock. Some customers at the Vandenberg U-Cut Christmas Tree Farm liked to cut their Christmas tree themselves. However, Jan said, when the big moment came, as it turned out, many folks did not. They’d thought they’d want to cut their own tree, they liked the idea of cutting their own tree, but when it came time, they didn’t want to. Jan didn’t say why. He was a fast walker and the kids heel-and-toed it behind, trying to keep up.

Heather pictured the tourists in their quilted parkas, their worsted wool wraps, trudging through muddy snow, wimping out about dragging metal teeth across wet wood. They annoyed her already. Everyone ought to be able to cut down a small tree. It ought to be a graduation requirement. Heather was sure she could do it. She had been something of a tomboy, back in the day, before her style became ripped jeans and oversized army-navy store coats and concert T’s.

“That is where you come in,” Jan said. Born in the Netherlands, Jan had lived for years in the U.S., but still said words in the wrong part of his mouth. Jan’s own coat was splatter-stained with oil and flecked with sawdust around the widest part of his waist. He was swinging a bow saw. He grabbed the trunk of a six-foot Doug fir and shook the snow out of it. “Be strong,” he said. Then he got down on his stomach, and worked the saw blade until the tree sank diagonal.

The job did not take long to learn. When Heather wasn’t wandering the farm with a family, she hung out in what Jan referred to as the baling shed. Most of the time she was in the baling shed. It didn’t look much different than the old hand built woodshed in her backyard, that lone testament (other than Heather herself) to her father’s efforts. Their own shed was spidery, and like Hawaii, on Heather’s list of Never-Go’s. The Vandenberg shed, on the other hand, was cute. It featured a cast-iron wood stove, which Jan’s wife Madchen kept kiln-hot with a full year’s supply of trimmed branches. The piney aroma was quite nice. Some effort had been made to decorate the place, with garlands looping the rafters, Christmas carols on a boom box, and a string of twinkly white lights outside.

At the center of the shed was a table with a pump pot filled with hot cocoa. Next to it, a big red bowl brimming with the little candy canes that always break at the bend. Neither Jan nor Madchen had expressly said that employees could help themselves, but neither had they said they couldn’t. Therefore, Heather sucked down prodigious cups of cocoa and snatched great handfuls of candy canes at a time, stuffing them into the deep pockets of her army-navy coat. (She grabbed a lot each time so as to appear to be taking less.) On the chance that the sweet stuff was forbidden, Heather did so only when Jan/Madchen were not looking. Sometimes the other employees saw, but they did it too, so who cared.

Heather’s life was one of quiet desperation. It had been for many years, and continued to be. The thrill of even this small deception therefore caused her to lose her sense of moderation. And every weekend Heather worked at Vandenberg U-Cut Christmas Tree Farm she gorged on the sweet stuff. She became woozy with it. It got to the point that just a whiff of peppermint was enough to make her almost retch.

Mostly, Heather sat on a bright red bench along the baling shed wall staring at the floorboards between her feet. When it was her turn for a customer, she would drag her eyes up to the doorway where they stood, waiting to be helped. She would sigh regretfully, compose her face to hide her scowl, select her preferred saw from the rack by the door, draw a weak breath, offer a weaker smile, and finally throw herself out into the cold.
*
This was the Heather that Darien laid eyes on when he opened the door of the baling shed. She was sitting on the bench, appearing sad (he thought) not ill. She had the wide feet and downcast eyes of an NBA player on the bench as his team loses the game. That’s how Darien thought she looked. She had a scowl. Nevertheless, she looked beautiful. Darien thought she did. He had the privilege of gazing at Heather for a long moment before she looked up. She was…transcendent. Angelic. Into his mind budded all sort of thrilling erotic possibilities, both realistic and stunningly fantastic. He was awash in fantasy. He wanted her.

Darien’s parents had been bickering all morning at home. They started as soon as Darien woke up, went all through breakfast and getting ready to go, all the way out of the city, only stopping when his mom fell asleep in the car. As soon as she did, his dad turned the radio to a.m. and listened to the DJs crack jokes, occasionally stabbing the air with his own awful laugh. Darien himself had nodded off for a bit, at some point in between Boringston and Nowheresville. But then, when his dad finally turned off the highway onto the frozen roads and his mom woke up, she’d been all lovey and kind-faced, as if a simple snooze erased years of a shitty situation.

They started up again, as Darien had known they would, as soon as his Dad pulled into the Christmas tree farm. They’d bickered about bottoming out on the potholes in the farm’s dirt lot. This was the place his mom’s boss Margie had said made a perfect day trip.

But then, in the warm shed, he was captivated by this girl. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Maybe Darien was still waking up. Maybe that was part of what made her appear so ethereal. He had been asleep just minutes ago. Darien had never been one to nap. He disliked the grogginess afterward. Now, he blinked in his sudden reality. He was standing in the doorway of a dinky little Christmas-themed woodshed, his parents filling in on either side of him. Waiting to be helped. Darien hated that phrase. But who cared. He had tunnel vision for this girl.

Then a miracle happened. She looked up. Took in the three of them at the doorway. And stood.
*
There ought to be a name for it, this phenomenon of Heather’s. Whenever she was feeling her worst, whenever circumstances caused her to feel sick to her stomach, or angry, sad, afraid, or anything in the unpleasant category, a boy would appear. Shit you not. A cute boy, usually a stranger, would somehow, in some way, show up in her life. Boom. Puff-of-smoke. Kismet.

(This did not mean Heather had lots of boyfriends. She saw the boys. She did not date them.)

Heather had found that the Magic Boys’ level of attractiveness was roughly commensurate with the severity of feelings she was, at the time, feeling. Case in point: At Vanderberg baling shed Heather felt very, very sick. The boy in the doorway was devastatingly cute. Smoky brown eyes. Square, fuzz-covered chin. Clothed head-to-toe in black. He stood with the weary slump of a long adolescence under problematic parents. She wanted him.

Heather got a bow saw. She spoke the prescribed Vandenberg greeting. Silently, habitually, she cursed herself for succumbing to all those dozens of candy canes. Then she took a final breath of warm air, bowed her head, and followed the family and this magical studmuffin out to the trees.
*
It was embarrassing, all the fighting. And because he was there with them, Darien felt implicated. They’d started up as soon as they left the shed, following the girl. His dad had looked toward the parking lot as if to check for damage from afar after bottoming out in the parking lot, as if he hadn’t already checked for damage the moment he shut off the engine. His mom had watched him bend over to look, and groaned histrionically as he did.

Sometimes, his mom had said last week, I think your dad loves his Volvo more than he loves me.

Yeah, Darien had said, chuckling a bit, because they had been alone, and it had surprised him to hear his mom say something like that. She might bicker endlessly with his father, but she did not badmouth him. Never, never. Not when he wasn’t there to hear it. She defended him.

But now his mom repeated her accusation. “Sometimes I think you love that car more than you love me.” She said it loudly. Loud enough so that even the girl – who had walked now a good six or seven paces ahead, and was taking wide strides, the kind of steps that showed she traipsed through muddy snow all the time – even the girl could hear. She said it so that she could hear.

That was how Darien’s mom was, always showing off her problems. Darien had had it with her. He’d heard her with her friends. She was all one-up anecdotes about how bad she had it, how much she had to suffer. Darien was sick of it. He was sick of his dad too, with the anger he just stuffed up and sat upon. Ineffectual asshat. Darien hated both his parents. It was his greatest wish that they would hurry up and divorce each other so he could get on with the peaceful part of life.

Darien was newly sixteen. Exactly thirty months, three days away from graduating from high school and being free. Recently, he had begun to harbor a secret fear that his mom and dad were actually waiting for him to leave before going their separate ways. The theory was out there. Staying together was “best for the children”. Or, in his case, the child. Darien was a one-and-only. IVF miracle! Top-shelf caviar! But that was bullshit. Did they think he was still five? Did they think their divorce would scar him? Darien’s friend LJ’s parents had divorced. Now his dad took him to the bar on the weekend, let him eat peanuts and shoot pool.

Perhaps – and this was a dark thought Darien had come to earlier in December, during the long nights – perhaps the root cause, the origin point of all his parents arguing had to do with regretting his own conception? Those dollars spent stuffing eggs with sperm, the uncertainties associated with coaxing a zygote into becoming an embryo, the endless monitoring, monitoring…Perhaps all of that, followed by his acne-covered, baseball-punting, horn-squeaking self. It all added up to disappointment? That was surely it. His parents regretted him. They should have gotten a puppy. They would have been fine with a puppy. They would have had fun with it. But now they were stuck. And the root of it all was too terrible to say.

Darien had found it wasn’t so hard to understand adults the closer he got to being one.

This was the tuneless, never-spoken, made-up-on-the-spot melody Darien was imagine-humming as he schlepped across the field of snow, last in line behind the girl, his mom, and his dad:

High time! To get out!
High time! To get out!

Once the words slipped into the rhythm of his crunching footsteps it was hard to make them stop.

But that girl. He watched the way she swung the saw as she walked. He loved it. The best kind of girlfriend to have, Darien had always told LJ, was a girlfriend at another school. Preferably another school district. Someone you could talk about, but no one knew. If no one knew her, no one could make fun of her. Darien and LJ were friends with each other, and only each other.

In a perfect world, Darien would charm the tree farm girl with a simple nod of his chin. She would be drawn to his arm and cling there. A regular good-guy Disney cartoon beau, that was Darien in his imagination. But he couldn’t, because his parents were really going at it now. His dad had brought up the credit card which (according to their marriage counselor, Terry) was off-limits when either of them was feeling heated. Darien hated that he knew what his parents’ counselor said. He hated that his mom was still talking loudly enough for the girl to hear. He wondered if she was walking faster to get away from them. Probably she was.

“Do you know what the balance is up to now? Are you even checking? You said you’d keep an eye on it, Donna. You claimed, in front of Terry and myself, that you were going to keep an eye on the balance, but I am willing to bet that if I was to ask you here and now to state the balance, I bet you couldn’t do it. Not even close. Whatever you think it is, it’s more. I bet you think–”

And on and on like that, as if they had a biological need. Food. Water. Shelter. Argument.

High time! Darien’s left foot announced.
To get out! added his right.

Darien didn’t stop to think about it. The problem with stopping to think about things is sometimes you change your mind. Darien broke into a half jog. It was not easy going in the compacted snow. He passed his dad first, then his mom. Then he caught up to the girl.
*
“Hi,” the boy said, settling into pace beside her.

“Oh,” Heather said, startled. “Hi.” It was the most awkward moment in any conversation, right after hello. That’s when topics are selected. The conversation could go anywhere. There were many things that could not be said: The boy’s stunning looks, the obvious cold, his parents’ incessant arguing. What did that leave to talk about? Heather didn’t know.

“You been working here a while?”

The parents, clearly surprised by their son’s sudden bravery, observed a momentary ceasefire.

“A little while.” Heather thought. She’d worked at the farm for three weekends. It was Sunday. Including today, she had worked a total of six days. It was as long as she’d worked anywhere.

“Probably sucks,” the boy said. “Freezing your ass off all day.”

“It’s not that bad.” Heather did not have the words to explain how her insides felt. The sugar slurry in her stomach had begun swirling. Just being that close to an attractive boy did things to her. She felt half cold, half warm in her black knit cap, Sorel boots, and fuzzy scarf. The sharp, cold air against her cheeks was a welcome diversion from the yuck she felt inside.

“Well,” the boy’s tone dropped, and he jagged a thumb behind. “I wish I could skip off to some part-time job and get away from these clowns for a while.”

“Yeah,” Heather said again. She said it with a little laugh in her voice. She was not accustomed to making fun of customers with other customers. But as soon as she laughed, the boy laughed. That made her like him even more. He was cute, funny, and nice. Trifecta.

“My name’s Darien,” the boy said.

“Heather,” Heather said.
*
Darien’s parents were back at it (back to bickering about the credit card) as Heather led the group toward a sign reading Fraser Firs. He and Heather walked quickly. Long strides. Fast feet. There was a bit of grade to the land, a slight upward slope, and Darien huffed and took deep breaths, trying to mask his exertion. This girl was clearly fitter than him. But anybody would be. Anyone who didn’t have a habit of playing video games every night. In his imagination, Darien was back in his attic bedroom, deep into Mortal Kombat. Heather appeared in his doorway, all gauzy and middle-eastern looking, like Genie in I Dream of Genie. She had Pepsi and a plate of Totino’s Pizza Rolls in her hands, steaming hot.

Darien felt embarrassed. His cheeks flushed. Why Pizza Rolls? Why I Dream of Genie? If Heather could see what he had been thinking, he’d been too mortified to ever open his mouth again. As it was, he was doing a piss-poor job of holding up the conversation. He would have to stop thinking about such stupid things if he had any hope of not coming off like an idiot. “Your school get out for break yet?”

“Nope. We got one more week.”

“Cool. Sucks. Same.”
*
At the Fraser Firs, Darien’s dad took off the kid gloves about the credit card, and said the reason she has to go back to the salon, at least two days a week but preferably full-time, is to repay the debts racked up in the last year, most of which were not strictly necessary.

At the Balsam Firs, Darien’s mom countered that she is still receiving physical therapy relating to her car accident and can’t, physically can not, be at the salon more than two days a week. Doctor’s orders. That’s assuming that Margie even has two days a week to give her, which more than likely she does not, given business lately. And yes, she could look for a new salon, but that means interviewing, schlepping her stuff around, getting used to a new boss, new rules, new coworkers, new customers. Who has time for that?

At the Doug Firs, they volleyed back and forth at each other, red-hot and absolutely inane.

“I wish I’d never met them,” Darien said.

Heather shoved her chin into her scarf and snickered.

“Do you know any pawn shops that take used parents?”

Heather laughed again.
*
Heather was not religious, but this cute-boy-appears-when-spirits-are-low phenomenon felt like something biblical. She had an urge to get down on her knees in the snow, offer thanks. But to whom? She wondered what religious people do when an angel appears to them. Just be cool with it? That didn’t seem right. Obviously, this ‘Darien’ had been sent to her for a reason. Obviously, it was up to her to make sense of it, to utilize this gift. Darien was everything she’d ever wanted. So thank you very much, God. And maybe you do exist. But now what? The stakes felt high.

“The Doug Firs are pretty, but their needles fall out.” Heather did not have a lot of knowledge about Christmas trees, but she was able to parrot things she’d heard Jan say.

“Don’t all trees’ needles fall out?”

“Yeah, eventually.” Heather sniffed. She plucked a pine needle and squeezed it, hoping for a splotch of green juice. “These just…I don’t know. They fall out faster.”

Darien’s parents had come together on one side of a Doug Fir. Darien’s dad was looking at the tree while Darien’s mom’s chattered. It was a perfectly conical tree. Maybe the most perfect tree in the entire Vandenberg farm. Heather could see Darien’s dad looking at the tree, and she knew without doubt that was what he was thinking. It was the perfect tree.

“We’ll take this one,” he said just then.

Heather offered Darien’s dad the bow saw.

“No, no, no.” He waved a flurry of horizontal movements. “That would be a job for my son.”

“Really, Dad?” Darien was plucking pine needles. “I thought you were talking about getting back to the gym.”

“Talking about it,” he grinned.

Heather looked at Darien’s mom but her eyes were up and away, as if the secret to happiness was in the wispy cirrus clouds.

“I can do it,” Heather did not wait for approval. She simply dropped to her knees, then to her belly. She wiggled under the perfect tree. She dug the saw’s teeth in, blade to bark. She sawed.

Heather loved cutting the Christmas trees, but she hated it too. She loved showing off her strength, she was still a tomboy in that way, but she hated the idea of seeing herself from others’ perspective. She knew that her rear end and legs, (her jean pockets lumpy with cellophane wrappers) were sticking out from under the tree. She knew the effort of her arms was visible. There were cheap jokes to make about jacking off a Christmas tree. Other customers (in whispers) had made them. Heather did not like being unable to see people when she was doing this part of the job. She could only listen, and try not to wonder if they were staring at her rear.

Heather did not hear arguing, so they were almost certainly looking at her rear. There was a brief conversation, and then the sound of someone walking away.

When Heather stood up again, brushing snow off her pant legs, Darien’s mom was walking toward the parking lot. Darien was still shredding pine needles. His dad was watching her go.

“She doesn’t have a car key,” Darien said. “She’s going to freeze just waiting there.”

Darien’s dad sniffed, pinched his nose, and sniffed again. “Terry said she needs to decompress.”

“Okay, so give her a minute. Then go.” Darien wagged a hand toward the parking lot.

Darien’s dad frowned. “I guess you’re right.” He reached inside his coat, grabbed his wallet, peeled off a couple twenties, and held them out to his son.

“I got this,” Darien said, taking the money.

“Thank you.” Darien’s dad began picking his way through the snow toward the parking lot.

Heather leaned down, looped the saw blade through the bottom branch of the tree and heaved it up again, ready to go.
*
As soon as it was just the two of them, alone, everything felt different. Better. They could have been a young couple themselves, attending to their own holiday tradition. They could be all grown up and making merry. Darien’s parents, in that very moment, might as well not exist.

Darien wanted to tell Heather how beautiful he thought she was. He wanted to say I love you. He felt he did. He felt love for her, even though that was crazy. Darien felt crazy. It seemed his whole life had been leading up to this moment, this chance encounter. And everything later would be because of it. It was like that weird poem his English teacher had read, about how so much depends on a red wheelbarrow. So much depended on what happened next. What he did.

Darien heaved a sigh. “Every time I come up here, I wish I could stay forever.” It was a weird thing to say, but it was what came out. He hoped Heather wouldn’t ask him about it. He would have no details to add. He’d only been north of Concord once before that he knew of, and that was with his grandparents on a camping trip over a decade ago. He remembered nothing.

“Yeah. The traffic down south sucks.”

“Tell me about it.” Traffic is not what he had been referring to. Darien never even thought about traffic. It was just an undercurrent. Something to endure. “I mean, it’s beautiful here.” He waved a stiff arm toward the dark line of forest. A grand gesture, done rather lamely. “Very peaceful.”

“People think so, but what they don’t know is that peaceful rots to become boring.”

“I like boring.” The words were just coming to Darien now. No stopping to think about them.

Heather shrugged. Darien shrugged. It was remarkable how much they had in common. It hinted at something greater, this commonality. Darien sensed it. He felt that Heather sensed it too. If only they had more time. It was impossible to make a connection in the few minutes they had left. Darien felt like a salmon swimming upstream. He felt like he had to.

“I’d like to stay here forever.” It was the second time he’d said it. He didn’t realize until too late.
*
“We could disappear into the woods never to be seen again.” Sometimes words came out of Heather, bypassing her brain. She was as surprised as anyone, hearing the words that came out.

Darien looked at the horizon. The woods were a narrow space between the sky and snow. “We could live in a house made of candy. We could grow old and wicked there.”

Heather pulled her single remaining candy cane out of her pocket, and dangled it in front of him like a seed. She grinned. “We could invite lost children in, fatten them up, and then eat them!”

“We’d feast on overweight children! We’d fry them and dip them in ketchup!”

“And for dessert we’d nibble our house!”

“And anything we ate would grow back overnight!”

Darien looked ebullient. “Our parents would never stop searching for us.”

“But they’d never find us! That forest–” Heather wagged a hand, “goes all the way to Canada.”

Darien’s voice was now a tad softer. “The world would miss us terribly.”

Heather’s voice matched Darien’s. “But we’d be just fine without the world.”

They nodded. They smiled at each other. Then they disappeared into the woods, where they lived happily, where they are still living happily, even now, today.