My brother told me that he had been hearing the bells, too. He said they sounded like sleigh bells, jingling up and down the stairs at night.

“I was awake for hours,” he said. “Anytime I’d close my eyes, they’d start again.”

“No footsteps though. Right?” I asked. “Just bells?”

“Just bells.”

This was right around his birthday, near the end of November. I hadn’t seen him for Thanksgiving that year. We were both musicians, both percussionists, like our dad. But we didn’t work in the same town. I was in New York, and he was in Philly. And we didn’t talk much. Not because it was too tragic or emotional or anything. Our parents had been gone for a while now. It was just too much work to keep it together. And between the train, the bus, the cabs, and the days out of town losing money when we could be taking gigs, it was expensive, too. Neither of us wanted to muster up the investment, financial or otherwise.

But by the time Thanksgiving was over and December had rolled around, we were hearing the bells every night. A few days before Christmas, I heard them thrashing outside my bedroom, as if someone was trying to break my door down with the wooden handle of a sleigh bell. When I got to the door, steak knife in hand, nobody was there. Just dangling string lights.

“I’m wearing these big construction earmuffs over my earplugs,” my brother told me on the phone that night. “Nothing works. I can’t sleep. I need to sleep.”

“What if I came over?”

“Aren’t you playing that Christmas show this weekend?”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to sub for one of dad’s old friends,” I said. “But I can see if he can get someone else to do it.”

 

***

 

I made it to Jersey in less time than I’d expected. The bus was crowded, but I was able to listen to most of the songs for my next show and mark up the sheet music, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Plus, the music helped distract me from reeling over the changes they’d made to our hometown—the fitness center that had replaced our old bowling alley, the pharmacies where our baseball field used to be, the urgent care that had once been our favorite video rental shop, WOW! Movies.

I never understood why my brother, emotional as he was, chose to stay in Pine Grove. Sure, he was in his own apartment, far enough away from the old house that he didn’t have to see it all the time. But as our familiar spots disappeared, it began to feel like our childhood had never actually happened, like it was all out of some imagined episode of The Wonder Years. Then again, I hadn’t lived here for years now. My brother had never really left.

I walked in the cold from the bus station to my brother’s apartment by the Delaware River. I was surprised that you couldn’t see the Philly skyline from his window.

“The city’s actually on the other side,” he said, pointing across the apartment towards his bedroom. “That’s just the harbor. But sometimes we get fireworks from the ball games, at least.”

“We?”

“Uh…” he hesitated, smiling. “We as in, like, the royal we.”

And then we were laughing, eyes locked.

My brother squatted onto the couch and woke up the TV. It was on an old movie channel, playing It’s a Wonderful Life in black and white. The two beers he’d set up on the coffee table were sitting there in lukewarm pools. He clipped both of them open with his keychain, then collapsed into the cushion.

We were both sitting there, totally wordless, but there was something happening between us. In our own language, I could tell. I had never visited him before. He’d lived at this place for at least a few years, but I’d never come to stay. I could have used this moment to hash it out, deflate the tension. But it would take too long to figure out where to start, to peel back the timeline of miscommunications and passive gestures, the pathetic little affronts, all the ways we’d punished each other for losing touch.

“This is pretty scary, actually,” he said, unlatching his lips from a green bottle of beer with a loud POP. “So he kind of dies and goes to hell?”

“No, he doesn’t die!” I laughed. “Come on. You don’t remember It’s a Wonderful Life? We used to watch it every year when Mom was putting up the tree!”

I downed the rest of my beer and flung it by the neck into the kitchen, nailing the recycling bin without nicking the lid. The glass didn’t even break.

“Score!” he cheered.

“I still got it, baby.”

He split open a pistachio and flicked the shells onto the coffee table.

“I guess I only remember all the funny quotes you guys used to say,” he trailed off, his eyelids starting to weigh. “I wish I had a million dollars…Hot dog!” He squeaked in his best Jimmy Stewart voice. “Freaks me out. The nightmare version of Bedford Falls.”

He drained his beer, then chucked it into the kitchen like I had. It missed the recycling bin by a foot and smashed onto the floor.

“Dummy,” I said.

“It’s midnight,” he muttered. “Merry Christmas, buddy.”

“And Merry Christmas to you,” I quoted back in the voice of the villain, Mr. Gower, from the movie. “In jail!”

 

***

 

The bed was smaller than he’d said. Just a full, not even a queen. We’d shared a bed for years when we were little, too many times squeezing into the top bunk when our Grandma came to stay, but we were big boys now. It wasn’t so easy anymore. I could feel the hair from his leg on my bare shin and pulled further away from him.

“The house lady called again,” he said, noticing that I was awake. “They don’t think it’s going to sell.”

“That’s what they said last time,” I said. “We paid for all that work. They cleared out the mold. The floors are in better shape now. What’s the problem?”

He paused. Took a deep breath. I could hear the speedline pass by outside, chugging over the bridge towards Philly.

“The work…nobody’s been in there to do the work yet.”

“What? What’ve you been doing with all that money I sent you?”

The speedline howled until it dopplered out of earshot.

“I’m not gigging as much as I was before,” he said in a voice that was almost inaudible. “It’s not as easy down here to pick up work. It’s not like New York.”

“So the house has just been sitting there?”

“I told myself I’m gonna pay it all back once I get another show, something consistent.”

I laid back down and sighed, “We’re never going to get rid of that fucking house.”

He took another pause. It was as if he was taking long drags from a cigarette between each of his thoughts, sucking them up and letting them sit inside his chest before blowing them out.

“I’m sick of dealing with it,” he said. “I don’t have any money and it’s too much work to keep up with all the phone calls and shit and I don’t know why we’re even bothering to try to sell. We’re not going to make any money off it. Just let the bank take it. It’s been like five years.”

“Ten years,” I corrected.

“It’s been ten years?”

“Dad’s funeral was ten years ago in July. Mom was a year and a half before that.”

He collapsed off his elbow, his head hitting the pillow with a thud. He inhaled to say something, then stopped.

The blackness through the window cleared its voice with a gust of wind. Somewhere out on the street, a trash can—or something metal—rolled around on the pavement, making a sound almost like a snare drum. Sccrr-up-pup-pup-pup. Scrrr-up-pup-pup-pup.

 

***

 

“Wake up,” He said. “It’s here.”

Two a.m.. From across the slats in the door you could hear the unmistakable sounds of jingle bells coming up from the belly of the apartment. They were just single quarter notes. Not rolls or shimmers, not very fast or rhythmically complicated—but also not at all disorganized. Just simple, perfectly-timed quavers. Jing. Jing. Jing. Jing. Jing. Jing. Jing.

My brother got out of bed and said, “Fuck this.”

He grabbed a vibraphone mallet from the chest by the door and walked out. I sat there listening to the bells, trying to come up with some sort of logical explanation. Maybe it’s ringing in our ears. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe since we’re both sons of a percussionist, we’re having the same sort of hereditary psychosis.

“SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!” I heard him yell. There was a slam and then a crunching noise, the distinct clinking of broken glass.

I sprang up and bolted down the stairs.

“What happened? Did you get hurt?”

“I can’t do this anymore! I can’t do this anymore…” He was crying, sprawled out against the fridge, his foot bleeding, green splinters of glass splayed out around him.

“Shh—your neighbors.”

“How are you so cool about all of this?” he shrieked. “You hear them every night too, don’t you? Why aren’t you losing it? How are you just standing there?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Why wasn’t I crying? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried.

“It’s torture, you know,” he said. “Sleep deprivation is a form of torture! If there’s some sort of fucking spirit in here, speak now! Show yourself—”

I muzzled him, guarding his mouth from whatever was there with us, beyond the kitchen.

“Don’t say that shit! You’re going to invoke dark spirits!”

“Invoke?” He laughed, wild-eyed. “Where have you been?”

“Why don’t we get out of here?”

“Just leave? You want me to leave my own apartment? Move out?”

“No, I mean, let’s go. Why bother trying to sleep? It’s Christmas Eve. Clean up your foot. Let’s go to the diner, get something to eat.”

He blew out a trail of sniffles, then said, “Christmas Eve was yesterday. I told you already. It’s Christmas now.”

 

***

 

It was just the two of us there in the diner, except for the manager with the curly back hair bulging out from his shirt collar who was nodding off by the cash register, a cigarette oozing a line of smoke from the corner of his lips.

“Should we get the duck?” he said, deadpan. “Or what is it supposed to be, goose?”

“I don’t think they serve goose or duck here.” I laughed, sipping my coffee.

“Oh my god…” He leaned in. “There she is!”

Floating in was this impossibly frail, skeletal woman, removing her raincoat to reveal a long-sleeved ivory evening dress. Black galoshes. Her hair, a blinding shock of white, stood perfectly still as she winked at the old Greek man by the door.

“Lady Death,” my brother whispered over the jukebox.

“I can’t believe she’s still alive,” I said. “Looks like Nosferatu.”

I peered back at the ancient woman, who somehow looked exactly the way she had back when we were in high school. She had black doll eyes, lips that seemed stuck in a permanent grimace. She waddled toward her bar stool gingerly, as if one wrong motion might send her flying to the floor. I imagined her poofing onto the tile like a dust bunny, being swept under one of the booths, never to be seen again.

A leathery waitress came by with a pot of coffee to take our food orders.

“I’ll have the short stack,” I said. “And actually…you have alcohol here, right? How about a whiskey on the side. Um, whatever you have. Neat.”

I’d never ordered booze at the diner before. It felt like I was a teenager again, closing night of the high school musical, sitting with the other pit musicians, wishing we had fake IDs.

“Make that two whiskeys,” my brother peeped with this freaky smile, some punch-drunk expression of sleep-deprived giddiness and hopeless surrender.

When she left our table, a silence hung down between us again. My eyelids felt thick and itchy and swollen. With the cozy booth cushion beneath my thighs, the children’s choir recording of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” playing on the jukebox, and the hypnotic clinking of dishpans and silverware from the kitchen, I felt like I was breathing pure Ambien.

“I don’t think I’m going to keep playing much longer,” my brother said flatly.

The words should’ve hit me hard, but I was too sleepy to muster anything more than a vacant “Yeah.”

“All of this has made me realize how much I hate it. Gigging. Practicing. Nights, weekends when everyone else is around, I’m playing shows.” He let out an evil shadow of a yawn. “And then when I get home, I don’t come home to anyone. Just those fucking bells.”

My vision began to narrow, my field of view shrinking. My brother started speaking again, but he seemed far off now, somewhere behind a door that was sealed shut, just muffled Charlie Brown noises. Muh muh muh muh muh.

And then, “YO.”

My eyes rolled back into place.

“You know, for somebody who always avoids talking about shit, you really suck at hiding it.”

“What—what were you saying?”

“I’m telling you I’m going to stop playing. I’m trying to have an actual conversation with you.”

“No, I heard you. Keep going.”

“I don’t want to do this shit anymore.”

It wasn’t my intention—at least consciously—to fight back. But the only response that came to mind was, “What else can you even do, though?”

His cheeks flushed red, signaling that I’d picked the complete opposite of the right thing to say, maybe the worst possible response to him opening up and confiding in me.

“I’d work at Walmart at this point if it meant I never had to tune a fucking snare drum again,” he said with this big, gruff tone.

“Are you still… practicing?” I said carefully, trying to pronounce the words in the least condescending tone possible.

“You don’t think I love it the way you do,” he said back, hiding a pouting expression that was forming around the edges of his lower lip. “You never did.”

“That’s not what I mean. But maybe–”

“I wasn’t a little prodigy like you.” He scowled. “I was good. I was really good when I was a kid. But then you came along. Once you started playing, almost right away you were just so amazing. I think I could have done something, could have made it up there in the city like you. But you didn’t believe in me. You or dad, or mom.”

A truck barreled by outside, quaking the pine tree in the diner’s parking lot, its lights jittering, colors mixing together. Lady Death hacked a nasty cough. The waitress refilled her coffee.

“Nobody ever thought I could make it. ” he said. “So fuck it. I never had a chance anyway.”

 

***

 

He drove us the back way through town, avoiding major streets like we always did, even though it was half past three a.m. on Christmas morning and there was nobody on the road. We’d eaten in silence, now we were driving in silence.

As we got closer to Bluebell Street, a looming pressure—or at least feeling of inevitability—filled the car, gushing from the air vents that were spewing recycled CO2.

The house. It was like we were being pulled toward the house on a track, and no matter which direction my brother pointed the wheel, we’d somehow end up on the curb of 343 Bluebell Street whether we wanted to be there or not.

We took a right and the house revealed itself to us, its unseen forces drawing us back into the driveway. We crested perfectly into the treads in the gravel where our family car had once sat. I knew those treads, those lumps and hips and ridges. I’d sledded on these slopes, made holes in the grass on the sidewalk with my pogo stick, had my first kiss under the big fern tree that covered the entire front lawn.

The key came out of the ignition and our doors unlatched. We shuffled our feet across the icy driveway and then we were at the bowels of the stairwell, 343 Bluebell widening its maw and inhaling. The screen door swung shut behind our backs, my brother and I standing there in the drafty foyer, the frozen air turning our breath into smoke.

The carpet was gone. The floorboards were run with mold. I wondered if the weight of our feet would send the whole house crashing down around us, the three bedrooms upstairs, the slipper-shaped bathtub, all the festering, exposed insulation in the attic piling on top of us like soil.

The attic. We were climbing the stairwell, each step causing the wood beneath the mildewy rug to emit a different sound or squeak, a language that only old houses speak.

We creaked open the door to my brother’s old room. You could get to the attic in there, through a door in the corner. There was the empty desk, the wobbly bed frame, the painting of Buddy Rich. A melted Halloween mask, a Burger King crown.

My brother thrust open the attic door, and then we were climbing stairs again, these ones creaked louder than the others, groaning under our weight. Crouching with one hand above my head, I saw the nails that had been used to plug the shingles into the roof, pointing down at us from above like some medieval torture device. Neither of us said a word. We acted in tandem, doing exactly as the house said.

I clipped open the trunk full of ornaments and string lights. My brother dug the prickly faux Christmas tree out of its cardboard box.

In the living room, moonlight filtered in through the shutters while we set up the tree. I finished wrapping the string lights around the fake needles and they lit up, glowing unnaturally before I even reached for the outlet. They were the old kind of Christmas tree lights. The big fat ones, the kind that buzzed, that would get hot to the touch if you left them on too long. These hadn’t been plugged in for decades. But they were warm now. There was still life in them.

My brother finished hanging all the ornaments—the reflective one that looked like a scroll, the Minnie Mouse on a sled, the Grinch, the little drummer boys, the bronze trumpets, the soft plastic apples, the tiny tambourine. He placed the angel at the very top, with her ivory wings and emerald gown full of tiny little bells.

The room fluttered its eyes and seemed to take its first breath in a decade, all the Christmas music boxes and electric candles and poinsettia bouquets and sparkling rolls of tinsel that had once wrapped around antique conga drums and bookcases and shelves conjuring back into place.

An old Bing Crosby cassette groaned from the office—the stereo system that Dad had tried so desperately to get working through the entire house. Bing was faint and scratchy, his dewy baritone sounding mushy through the waterlogged wooden floor speakers. But the carol was unmistakable:

 

Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays

‘Cause no matter how far away you roam

When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze

For the holidays, you can’t beat home sweet home

 

***

 

When we woke in the morning, we were laying with our heads on each other’s shoulders under the tree. The room was bare, ice on the floorboards.

 

After that night, neither of us ever heard the bells again.