The Age of Miracles

16

By early December, three weeks before Christmas, the days had swelled to forty-two hours. Changes had been detected in the currents of the oceans. Glaciers were melting even faster than before. Certain long-dormant volcanoes had begun to bubble and steam. There were reports that migratory whales were failing to migrate, remaining instead in chilly northern waters. A few fringe experts gave us only a few months to live, but they were roundly dismissed as extremists—as if nothing so extreme could possibly be true.

Meanwhile, colored Christmas lights blinked as usual from the rooflines in our neighborhood, and Mr. Valencia installed on his front lawn the same life-size animatronic manger scene he set up every year. Forests of Christmas trees bloomed at the fairgrounds and in the grocery store parking lots. All the usual carols wafted through the aisles of the drugstores and the malls amid concerns about the health of the holiday shopping season.

My mother and I spent one whole afternoon baking sugar cookies in Christmas shapes.

“It feels good to do something normal,” she said as she flattened the dough with a thick rolling pin. A strand of dark hair kept swimming out from behind her ear. I was glad that her hair was its usual shade again. She’d finally dyed away all the gray.

The Christmas season had turned my mother cheerful. But I felt there was something excessive about her interest that year in the choosing of the ideal noble fir, in the draping of tinsel and the wrapping of presents, the daily marking of the advent calendar. There hummed beneath her good cheer an undercurrent of dread, as if we were conducting each of our annual rituals for the very last time. I sensed it in her constant smoothing of the dining table’s holiday runner, in her glue-gun repair job of a porcelain Santa Claus cookie jar that had lain broken in the closet for years. It was in the way she crouched low on the FoodPlus linoleum as she searched a bottom shelf for the silver sprinkles we used every year but which FoodPlus no longer carried.

“Things change,” she said. “But not everything has to.”

When the last batch of cookies came out of the oven, we filled one whole tin for my grandfather and then divided up the rest for teachers and friends.

“Let’s bring some to Sylvia, too,” I said, leaning on the counter while a buttery scrap of dough dissolved in my mouth. The last batch of stars lay cooling on a rack.

“I don’t think so,” said my mother. She was wrapping each bundle of cookies in green and red cellophane, her fingers working gingerly to preserve the frosting.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s not a good idea.”

Both cats appeared at the kitchen door and began to scratch furiously on the glass. They had a taste for sweet things, so they were not allowed inside until the mixing bowls had been washed, the cookie cutters cleaned, the pastry bag emptied and put away.

“But why?” I asked again.

“We didn’t make enough cookies to give them out to everyone we’ve ever met.”

My mother had never forbidden me to talk to Sylvia or the other real-timers. It was never explicitly said. But it didn’t need to be said. I understood well that I was supposed to keep my distance from them, from Sylvia especially. And mostly, that’s exactly what I did.

But I felt sorry for Sylvia, so later that day, when the oven was off and the kitchen cleaned and my mother asleep on the couch, I collected a handful of cookies from our pantry, tied them with red ribbon, and left the house.

I waited a long time on Sylvia’s doorstep before the knob turned and the door swung open, revealing a sleepy Sylvia in a purple silk robe, looking ballerina-thin as she leaned against the doorframe, her hair pulled back in a loose red bun. It was nearly my dinnertime, but the sun was high in the sky—late morning in the natural day.

“Merry Christmas,” I said, and handed her the cookies.

“That’s very kind, Julia,” she said in a voice I wasn’t used to, a heavy, low-pitched scratch. “Excuse me,” she said, and then she spent a long time clearing her throat. “Sorry. I haven’t talked to anyone yet today.”

To me, this was more proof of how alone she was, as if, when too long isolated from other human beings, a person risked losing not only the need to speak but also the ability.

It seemed to me that even her movements, like her days, had turned slow, the unhurried raising of a wrist to brush away a wisp of hair, or the measured turn of her head when she nodded. I realized I was living almost two days for every one of hers. Eventually, if she went on like this, Sylvia would fall months behind us, then years.

I glanced over Sylvia’s shoulder and into her house. “Don’t you have a Christmas tree?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t feel like dealing with all that this year.”

Her wind chimes, made of seashells, rattled softly above my head.

“Thanks again,” she said, closing the door. “Take care, Julia.”

A few days later, a delivery truck pulled up to Sylvia’s house. Two young men in thick green gloves threw open the back door to reveal a Christmas tree, which they gingerly rolled down the ramp. It was the living kind. It came in a terra-cotta pot and was meant to be planted in the yard after Christmas. Sylvia lugged the tree into her house by herself. She set it up in her living room window and left it there, unlit and undecorated. But it seemed better than nothing. Her house looked a little less sad.

That same day Tom and Carlotta returned home, released on bail. They were awaiting trial.

“How long do you think they’ll be in jail?” I asked my parents that night. My grandfather had come over for dinner.

“It depends,” said my mother. “Probably a long time.”

“What did they do?” asked my grandfather. He took a shaky sip of milk.

“They should have left those poor people alone,” said my father. It was his day off from work, but he was dressed nicely: clean-shaven, with a collared shirt.

“I still don’t know what they did,” said my grandfather, talking louder than before. He took a big bite of salmon and looked at me for an answer as he chewed. “Julia, do you know?”

“Drugs, Gene,” said my mother. “They were growing drugs.”

My grandfather coughed and spit something into his napkin. Then he held a tiny bone, slim as filament, up to the light.

“Who were they harming?” asked my father.

“You didn’t see how much pot they pulled out of that house,” said my mother. She was looking at me. “It is illegal.”

My father shoveled the rest of his salmon into his mouth without looking up. My mother poured herself a glass of red wine. Our Christmas tree twinkled nearby, and in the silence that followed, I could hear the inner workings of those lights, a tiny, metallic clicking.

After he drove my grandfather home, my father was called unexpectedly into work. There was a tricky delivery and the hospital was short-staffed.

My mother and I sat on the couch for a while watching a television show about one of the last uncontacted tribes of the Amazon. They had recently surrendered themselves to Brazilian authorities at the edge of the rain forest, convinced that the Brazilians held not only the power of flight—for decades, airplanes had cut across the tribe’s sky—but now also held dominion over the sun and the moon as well.

My mother shifted under her blankets. It was a dark night. The house was cold.

“I think you and I should talk more,” she said.

I stiffened in my seat.

“What do you mean?” I said.

She pointed the remote at the television, and the volume slipped away.

“What about boys?” she said.

“What?” I said.

She looked over at me, and I looked away. A cinnamon Christmas candle flickered on the coffee table, and I kept my eye on the flame.

“I never hear you talk about the boys at school.”

“Why would I talk about them?” I said.

I hadn’t seen Seth Moreno in a while, and I worried he might be gone for good. Michaela had heard that he and his father had moved to a real-time colony after his mother died.

“Do you ever talk to boys?”

“Mom,” I said. “You’re being weird.”

“Are you interested in any of them?” she pressed.

People were doing crazy things all over the world. Everyone was taking new chances, big risks. But not me. I kept quiet. I held my secrets tight.

“I’m really tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Wait,” said my mother. “Stay down here with me a little while longer. We can talk about something else.” She paused. “Please?”

I could no longer remember the way my mother’s eyes had looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn’t sleeping well, but perhaps what I was seeing was just age, a gradual shift that I’d failed to register. I sometimes felt the urge to study recent photographs of her in order to locate the exact point in time when she had come to look so weary.

Some of the real-timers insisted that time had begun to affect them differently than it did the rest of us, that bodies aged less rapidly on real time than on the clock. The idea was taking root in Hollywood, an anti-aging measure known in that world as the Slow Time Cure. It had something to do with metabolism. I sometimes wondered back then if it would work for my mother.

Later, when I finally did go upstairs to my bedroom and looked out my window, I was glad to discover that Sylvia had decorated her Christmas tree. Dozens of tiny white lights were shimmering from its branches.

Sylvia’s curtains were closed except for a sliver. With my telescope, I could see through the crack that she was in there. She was a swishing skirt, an open mouth, a streak of strawberry hair gliding past the window. For once she was not alone: A man’s arm swung quickly into view, his sleeve rolled up to the elbow. I watched as he lowered a glittery silver star onto the top of the tree.

The man curled his arm around Sylvia’s slim waist. They kissed a quick kiss. I was relieved to see her smile.

Outside, Sylvia’s car sat alone in the driveway, as if this man had come from nowhere, simply appeared in her living room by some magical means.

I watched for a moment longer.

And then it happened: I realized as he turned that I knew that man’s mouth. I knew the sharp slope of his jaw, the long angle of his hairline. I recognized that blue shirt—I remembered exactly how it had looked when it was brand-new, on Father’s Day at the steak house, the shirt starched flat and folded in a silver departmentstore box, topped with a purple card, handmade by me.