Christmas was swiftly approaching. The weather outside was unseasonably cold, resulting in a drop in business for Arcana – it seemed that not many people wanted to venture forth from their homes. Not that I could blame them – if Gen and I didn’t rely on our wages from work to pay the rent and utilities, and to buy food every week, we probably would have stayed at home in our apartment.

Two weeks before Christmas Day, however, my mother gave Gen and I an early Christmas present.

“The two of you have been absolutely wonderful over the past month or so,” Ma said during our lunch break. “I can’t recall the last time Arcana took in more than a thousand dollars’ takings. And it’s all thanks to you.” And Taylor, I added mentally. “So, as a reward, I am giving the two of you the rest of the year off, along with the first week of January. I’m sure that Kate and Lia won’t mind doubling their shifts. That should give you both a little bit of time to do your Christmas shopping.” She paused, to allow this to register. “And before you ask – yes, you will be paid. Let’s say…double-time-and-a-half?”

I could hardly believe my ears. My mother, who was a real hard-ass when it came to the day-to-day running of the café, was not only giving Gen and I a four-week vacation from work, but she was paying us two-and-a-half times what we were normally paid each week. I half-expected a flock of winged pigs to come soaring past the windows of the café. “Can we even afford that?” I asked.

“We’ll manage,” Ma replied. “Not to mention that the two of you deserve it.”

Gen and I looked at each other. Four weeks off of work, with full pay…there was only one thing to be done.

“Road trip!” we chorused.

Ma turned us loose a couple of hours later, and as soon as the two of us got home we retrieved our laptops from our rooms. The door to the former study – now Taylor’s room, seeing as he was now staying with us on a permanent basis – was tightly closed as usual, which meant that either Taylor was out again, or he was taking a nap. I figured that the former was much more likely.

“So where do you want to go?” I asked as I fired up my laptop and signed onto my desktop. “I mean, you can’t be wanting to hang around here for the next four weeks.”

“I promised Jess and Avery that I’d go and visit them soon,” Gen replied as she started tapping away. “So unless you and Taylor have any objections to that…”

“No, that’s fine by me. I’d like to meet your sisters, anyway.” I cocked an eyebrow at her. “And what’s this about Taylor coming along?”

“Did you really think we’d leave him here? I think he’d want to see them as much as I want to. He hasn’t seen them in years, I know that for a fact.”

“Would he even be able to come with us? I mean, he said something to me about being stuck here.”

“I guess we’ll find that out when we leave.” She paused in her tapping away. “Oh, good Lord…”

“What?”

“I can’t believe we’re planning to drive to Florida. It’s going to take us nearly nineteen hours to get there.” She let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “I suppose we could stay overnight along the way, but still…”

“Why don’t we fly there?”

Gen fixed me with a hard look. “And where, may I ask, is my brother going to sit? He’s not sitting on my lap.”

I shrugged. “Fine, we’ll drive. But we’re taking your car.”

“Suits me. Your car’s too small anyway. I mean, there’s the three of us, along with three suitcases, Christmas presents for my sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces, and anything else we decide we’re going to need. There’s no way we could fit all of that in your Excel.”

“Precisely.” I pulled up Microsoft Word and began typing out what we were going to have to do before leaving. “Just one other thing – how the hell are we going to pass Taylor off? I mean, there’s a good chance that your sisters will be able to see him.”

“We’ll just say that he’s your cousin or nephew. I’m pretty sure that my sisters know that you don’t have any brothers, but they don’t know any of your other relatives.”

“Saying that he’s one of my cousins might be a little more realistic.”

Gen resumed her tapping away, letting out a groan after a few more minutes. “If we make an overnight stop in Atlanta, it’s going to take us just over nineteen hours to get to Jacksonville. That is insane…”

“You said it.”

The door to the apartment closed and opened, and I looked behind me. Taylor had returned, and he had a black messenger bag looped around his neck, the shoulder strap resting on his left shoulder. “What’re you guys doing?” he asked as he dropped the bag on the floor.

“Planning a road trip,” Gen replied. “We’re going to visit Jess and Avery for Christmas. Want to come?”

He frowned. “Are you sure you want to put up with me for however long it’d take us to get there?”

“Nineteen hours, ten minutes,” Gen replied. “And yes, we’re sure.” She fixed a pained look on her face. “Don’t tell me that you’d rather spend Christmas alone…”

“That’s not what I meant.” He shrugged. “I’ve been seventeen years old for the past twenty-five years – I just thought that you might not want to have a teenage guy tagging along with you.”

“We’re not leaving you here,” I said. “That’d be cruel of us. The first real, tangible human contact that you’ve had in a quarter of a century, and we go off and leave you alone at Christmas – it’s just wrong. Besides, we don’t mind having you around. Do we, Gen?” I asked, elbowing Gen for good measure.

“No, of course not,” Gen said hurriedly, shooting daggers at me. She pushed her laptop to one side and went into the kitchen, returning with the cordless phone. Settling herself back down on the floor, she proceeded to dial what I guessed was one of her sisters’ phone numbers. “Hey Matthew, it’s Auntie Zoë, is your mom there?...thanks kiddo.” She swapped the handset to her other ear and tapped her fingers on the floor. “Hey Jess, how’s things?...yeah, I’m good. Listen, you remember how you wanted me to come visit you? Well, I was thinking of coming over for Christmas, and Ria’s thinking of tagging along…no, Ria’s mom gave us a four-week vacation from work, and we don’t want to hang around here…you sure you don’t mind? What about Chris?...oh, did he?...I see. Would it be okay for us to come a couple of days before Christmas, or is that a bit too late?...okay, great. Also, Ria has to bring her cousin with her, would that be all right with you guys?...yeah? Awesome. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks. See you soon.” She hung up and tossed the cordless over her shoulder; it landed on the couch. “Well, that’s it – Jess and Chris are totally cool with us coming for Christmas, and they don’t mind Taylor coming with us.”

“What if they can’t see him?” I asked.

“Then we’ll say that I couldn’t come after all,” Taylor said. “And I wish you wouldn’t talk about me as if I’m not here.”

“Who is Chris, anyway?” I asked.

“Jess’s husband. You know the band Fantasia?” I nodded. “Jess married their guitarist about 15 years ago.” Gen chuckled. “It’s ironic, isn’t it – both my sisters married musicians, when they themselves have two brothers who are musicians.”

“It is a bit,” I agreed. I closed my laptop and set it aside. “Let’s get going – we’re going to need to get Christmas presents, we need to figure out what we’re taking with us, and we need to get my mom to deposit our pay into our bank accounts rather than sending it to us via the post, seeing as she can’t give it to us face to face.” I looked up at Taylor. “Want to come with us?”

“Do I have to?” he asked, affecting a childish whine. “I just came back from the store…”

“Well, now that you mention it…” I gave Gen a quick nod, and she shot to her feet, latching onto Taylor’s right shoulder. “Yep. You do.”

“Grab my phone and my wallet, would you?” Gen yelled over her shoulder as she steered Taylor toward the front door, ignoring his rather vocal protestations as she shoved him through into the corridor.

I couldn’t help myself. Instead of getting to my feet and trailing after Gen, I just sat there on my living room floor, threw back my head and laughed. The sight of Gen treating her much older brother like a petulant child was just too much. One thing was for sure – this was going to be one hell of a road trip, and a rather interesting Christmas.

---

We left Tulsa at eight-thirty in the morning of December twenty-second, heading east. Gen had burned an MP3 CD the night before that contained her favourite driving songs – partially in deference to her own musical tastes, and partially to keep Taylor from bitching too much, the CD contained mostly music from the 1990s and the early 2000s. Taylor had told us a few weeks earlier that he greatly disliked most of the music that was released nowadays; so that he didn’t have to listen to the radio so much, he had raided mine and Gen’s CD collections so that he had something to listen to. Gen had loaned him her old Discman to use whenever he left the house and wanted to be able to listen to music – to make this a little easier on him, so that he didn’t need to carry a bunch of CDs wherever he went, Gen and I had bought him an iPod as a Christmas gift; we both knew full well that it would be the first Christmas present he would have received for twenty-six years, so we had wanted it to be something special.

“You do know what time we’ll be getting to Atlanta, don’t you?” I asked Gen as The Anthem, Gen’s favourite Good Charlotte song, melted into Phantom Planet’s California.

“Yeah, of course I do,” Gen replied. She adjusted the position of her hands on the steering wheel and glanced at the rear view mirror. “It’s going to be about twenty to midnight by the time we get there, I know. Why do you think I made reservations before we left?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

I looked back over my shoulder at Taylor, who was sitting in the back seat behind Gen; he was completely absorbed in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone. “Hey,” I said, flicking the magazine so that he looked up. “You’ve been quiet.”

He didn’t say anything for a little while. “This is the first time I’ve left Tulsa since…it happened,” he said finally. “I didn’t think I’d even be able to.”

As California faded away, and the familiar opening notes of the Stone Temple Pilots’ Interstate Love Song tumbled from the speakers, I reached forward to the car stereo and cranked up the volume. All three of us loved this song, and it wasn’t hard to see why. It was the perfect driving song – it had a good rhythm, the lyrics were easy to sing along with, and the overall feel of it just lent to driving down the highway, with the windows rolled down and the wind rippling through our hair.

“Waiting on a Sunday afternoon…for what I read between the lines…your lies…feelin’ like a hand in rusted shame…so do you laugh or does it cry…reply…

“Leavin’ on a southern train…only yesterday you lied…promises of what I seemed to be…only watched the time go by…all of these things you said to me…

“Breathing is the hardest thing to do…with all I’ve said and all that’s dead for you…you lied…goodbye…

“Leavin’ on a southern train…only yesterday you lied…promises of what I seemed to be…only watched the time go by…all of these things I said to you…”

I turned the volume down again as the song faded out, and looked out of the window at the passing scenery. Pretty soon, the only sounds in the car were the music that played over the stereo speakers, the hum of the tyres on the highway, and the engine, as each of us became lost in our own thoughts.

---

Four o’clock the next afternoon saw us arriving at Gen’s older sister’s place on the outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida. I had never been to Florida – heck, I’d never been further east than Missouri – so this was entirely new to me. Not so to Gen and Taylor, who were chatting away about their favourite parts of the state.

“Zoë!” a tall, blonde woman said as she opened the door. “It’s great to see you, sis.”

“It’s good to see you too, Jess,” Gen said as the two of them embraced. They broke apart, and Gen introduced us. “Jess, this is my friend Rosaria Hill; Ria, I’d like you to meet my sister Jessica.”

“Hi Jessica,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“And you, Rosaria.” Jessica then raised an eyebrow. “And who is that gorgeous young man standing by your car, Zoë?”

Oh shit. Jessica could see Taylor. She could see her brother.

“He’s my cousin,” I replied. I turned around and waved at him. “Get over here, Jesse!” I called, using the name that we’d chosen as Taylor’s alias. Gen ‘introduced’ the two of them, Taylor remaining uncharacteristically quiet throughout. And Gen and I knew exactly the reason for it – he was seeing his sister for the first time in over two decades.

“So is Ave coming over?” Gen asked as the four of us walked inside Jessica’s house.

“Yeah, in an hour or so. Chris and I invited her and Phil over for dinner, so you’ll get to see her then. In the meantime, why don’t you show Rosaria and Jesse where they’ll be staying?”

Gen nodded and led Taylor and I upstairs to a pair of guest bedrooms. Instead of leading me into one and directing Taylor into another, she pulled both of us into the room nearest the stairs.

“Well this is just wonderful,” Gen said as the door closed behind us. She threw herself onto one of the two beds and let out a loud sigh. “She can see him.”

“Well, at least she doesn’t recognise him,” I said. “That at least has to count for something.”

“She’s going to recognise him sooner or later,” Gen said. “Out of the three of us girls, she remembers him the best.” She shook her head. “Those two, from what I remember, were like two peas in a pod. Losing him absolutely devastated her – it took her years to recover. Even now, she’ll come across something that reminds her of him and that’ll be it – downward spiral that she won’t come out of for weeks.”

“I wish you two wouldn’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Taylor said. “It’s annoying.”

“Well, if you’d breathe or something, maybe we’d notice,” Gen muttered.

“I can’t, Zoë. I haven’t been able to since everything went to hell.” He got to his feet and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Gen let out another sigh, this one quieter than the last, and covered her face with her hands. “I’m always fucking up,” she whispered. “Always.”

I went to try and comfort her, but she shied away. “Don’t, Ria,” she said. “Just…don’t. Go and talk to Taylor or something, but just keep the hell away from me.”

Taylor was sitting halfway down the main staircase, staring downstairs with his chin propped in his hands. “I think you might have hurt her feelings or something,” I said offhandedly as I sat down beside him. He didn’t say a word, merely kept staring into space. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” he said flatly.

“Liar,” I disagreed. “You’re not. You’re miserable, and that’s putting it lightly.”

“Well, how would you feel if you were fighting with your little sister?”

“I don’t think you’re fighting, per se. You’re just…you’re both stressed out. That’s all. And I don’t really blame you – this kind of thing would stress anyone out if they were in your…shall we say, unique position.”

“Unique.” Taylor let out a sharp bark of laughter. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“Well, it is in a way.” He looked at me and raised one slender blonde eyebrow. “Taylor, for all intents and purposes, you’re a ghost. There are only three people in the world that we know of who are physically able to see you – me, and two of your sisters. And in most people’s experiences, ghosts do not go on road trips, and they usually don’t celebrate Christmas. You’re rather unique in that aspect. Trust me when I say that it’s a good thing.”

Another laugh. “Right.”

“I’m serious.” I clapped him on the shoulder and made to stand up. “Now, c’mon back upstairs, and apologise to that sister of yours.”

“Excuse me?”

I looked downstairs to see another blonde woman who looked like an eerie combination of Jessica and Taylor, standing there with her hands on her hips. “Did I hear the word ‘sister’ in there somewhere?”

“Ave, leave them be,” we heard Jessica call.

“No Jess, I will not ‘leave them be’,” ‘Ave’ shot back. “I heard something about a sister.”

“Yeah, me,” I heard Gen say from behind me. “Hey Avery.”

“Hello there stranger,” Avery said, the hostility completely stripped from her voice. “How has Tulsa been treating you?”

“Not bad. Work’s been good – I bet you never thought you’d hear anyone say that!”

“Well, nobody except…you know,” Avery said. She looked at Taylor and I, fixing the two of us with a searching gaze. “Jess, want any help with dinner?”

“If you don’t mind.” Jessica and Avery walked off, leaving Gen, Taylor and I alone again.

“Great,” Gen said. “She knows something.” She sat down on Taylor’s other side. “So what now?”

“We tell them the truth.”

Two pairs of blue eyes stared at me in something akin to horror. “What, now?” Gen asked.

“No, after dinner. Then there’s less of a risk that we’ll be wearing our meal rather than eating it.”

“I don’t like the sound of this…” Taylor and Gen said in unison. There was a short silence as they looked at one another, and they dissolved into laughter.

Dinner was tense that evening. We had eaten out on the back patio, being that Jessica and Chris’ dining room just wasn’t large enough to accommodate the two of them, their three children, Avery and her husband along with their children, not to mention Gen, Taylor and I.

“You’re quiet, Jesse,” Avery’s husband Phil noted as the dinner plates were cleared away. That was something else we had noticed – it wasn’t just immediate family, as in just his sisters, who could see Taylor. Phil and Chris, along with Gen’s nieces and nephews, could also see him. The interesting thing was that other people couldn’t see him, which made things harder for us when it came to going out in public.

Taylor shrugged and toyed with the edge of the tablecloth. “I…don’t often get to eat dinner with others,” he said, choosing his words carefully by the sound of it. “My parents work a lot, and I’m an only child,” he added, lying through his teeth. “Which is part of the reason I’m staying with Rosaria for Christmas – so that I’m not by myself.”

“How old are you?” Avery asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Seventeen.”

“Thought so,” she said thoughtfully.

After dessert – fresh fruit salad and vanilla yogurt – Gen made her request. “Jess, Ave…can we talk to you?” she asked. “Alone?”

“Of course,” Jessica agreed, sounding a little confused. She looked at her husband; Phil had already gone inside.

“Come on kids, inside,” Chris said, picking up on the hint. He herded the kids inside, leaving Avery, Jessica, Gen, Taylor and I outside.

“We sort of have a confession to make,” Gen said. Jessica raised an eyebrow. “Jesse isn’t Rosaria’s cousin. Hell, his name isn’t even Jesse.” Gen sighed and tugged at her hair. “You…you remember Taylor, don’t you?” she asked.

After a few moments of quiet, Jessica and Avery both nodded. “Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Jessica said.

“Because this is Taylor, Jess,” Gen said calmly.

“Zoë…” Avery sighed and rubbed her temples. “Zoë, it can’t be him. Taylor died twenty-five years ago. You just want it to be that way.”

“Don’t fucking patronise me, Avery. I know my own brother when I see him.” She nodded to me. “Rosaria reunited us. He’s been hanging around Tulsa for a whole quarter of a century since…it happened. And it’s been an interesting two months, let me tell you.”

Jessica suddenly stood up, tipping her chair over backwards, and walked into the house, slamming the back door closed behind her.

Gen let out a soft groan, breaking the silence that had settled over us. “Why do I always have to open my big mouth?” she asked.