The Children's Hospital

41

Snow is falling all over Severna Forest, from the brown brick gates to the steps of the clubhouse, from Beach Road to the top of Waste-Not Hill, settling on the rotted ruin of Calvin’s old tree fort down by the river, and outside Jemma’s window, collecting silently, layer on layer upon her sill while she sleeps. She’s been dreaming all night of snow — it began to fall just as she settled into bed, while she raised her bottom in the air and pushed her face into her pillow, burrowing into the blankets until they were twisted just right and the pillow heaped up in pleasing mounds on either side of her head. Turned toward the window she could see it striking against the glass, and as she fell asleep she saw the usual red darkness behind her eyes broken up with bright white motes. She was a cold princess riding a swan made of ice, a liberated snowman who went campaigning all over the country to free other snowmen from static servitude, and she was the snow itself, cast high over Severna Forest and settling forever over every house and person.

It is almost something that we can do together, to become the snow. Or rather, we can do it at the same time — I am as invisible to the dream Jemma as I am to the waking one and you cannot see me behind her and above her and beside you. We are settling along the sloping green roof of Mr. Duffy’s store, and along the railings of the clubhouse porch; all over the golf course, up on the hills and down in the dells and over the traps full of cold sand, we are draped as a blanket. Over the Nottingham’s house, over their oblivious dog in the yard, over Rachel’s house and her new bicycle — with her birthday so close to Christmas she usually never gets good presents but this year was an exception — with its fancy pink banana seat with the lambskin cover that Rachel forgot to remove for the night and the long, luxurious handlebar tassels that stream like glory when she flies down a hill. It’s so much better than your bike, but she has forgotten it outside, and you are free now to cover it up and muffle its brilliance. She will be lucky to find it before the next thaw.

Down beyond the fifth hole, where the railroad tracks run right by the river, we settle gently on the tracks, and over the teenagers playing a new game — they lie between the tracks and let the train pass over them. We muffle their shouting, and after the train passes they keep staring up into the sky, and they get a different feeling, looking into the heart of the storm. Instead of the usual strange exalted sadness that comes after the train passes they feel an unusual peace and in a fit of vulnerable, sentimental foolishness they think it is the spirit of Christmas gently attacking them just when they thought they had become forever immune to its treacly power, but really it is just the wonder that comes of staring into the heart of an angel and a girl.

We perish on the river, snowflake by snowflake, but miss nothing of what dies, and the river freezes a little more with every touch, until we are settling on it, too. It’s a lovely sensation, you decide, to feel stretched and pulled down over the whole town, to fall from so high and settle so low, to feel you are a giant who has thrown herself affectionately and protectively over every house, crouching everywhere to gather every home in your arms. You feel the hearts and minds and lives of every creature inside as a bright warmth in your belly, where I only feel like I have eaten a bug, and your dream increases in beauty even as you start to wake, while I fall back to the world, anxious and disappointed and yearning to be free. When you wake you forget what a dreadful day you’ve entered into, and you spend a whole minute kneeling on your pillow to stare out the window at the wonderful snow thrown over the trees and the houses and the river, feeling a kinship with it that you can no longer understand, until you remember what day it is, and moan, and knock your head against the glass.

Jemma hated Christmas Eve. Every year she woke up already wanting the day to be over. She’d sit on her bed, not believing that a whole twenty four more hours would have to pass before Christmas would come, staring at the clock on her wall: faceless Holly Hobby with her arms twisted hideously behind her back, her pointing finger would take forever just to move from one minute to the next. The pervasive quality of waiting ruined the day. In the morning her father engaged in the annual construction of waffle houses, building them plank by plank with maple syrup caulk and cinnamon stick tenons while Jemma watched, her nose sitting just above the kitchen counter, her belly aching not just with hunger but with anticipation. The ache persisted even after she’d eaten the house, from the whipped-cream smoke rising from the chimney down to the square kiwi doormat, and no matter how many grilled cheese sandwiches she ate for lunch or how deeply she dived into the moo goo gai pan during the traditional Christmas Eve Chinese dinner — no matter how much she ate she remained hungry for the next day. Time seemed to pass slower and slower the closer she got to the following dawn, so a sled ride down the hill took half as long at nine in the morning than at four in the afternoon. She would sit on her sled watching the trees go by as slowly as a parade, so she could pick out the ones with testaments of love carved into the bark, and notice the winter squirrels perched in the naked branches, their mouths moving in slow motion as they chattered at her. Distances stretched twice as long as on other days, so the trip into town seemed as long as the trip into DC on a regular day. Water for hot chocolate took twice as long to boil, a videotape took forever to rewind, even a glass of water took forever to fill from the refrigerator spout. The whole day was full of extra time. Jemma used it all to fret, and to consider how Christmas, when it came, would pass in an instant, and she would come to herself suddenly on the twenty sixth of this month feeling like she’d missed it all somehow, even though she’d spent a whole lifetime, the day before, in suffering, suffering anticipation.

She suffered through breakfast, through the morning’s recreation, though lunch, through an afternoon of static sledding and eternally boring movies that never ended—A Bugaloo Christmas, A Little Pony Village Christmas, Smurfette Saves Christmas… Again! She suffered through tasteless afternoon snacks, and suffered even when it became necessary to run the inevitable early-evening errand. Jemma followed her mother through the supermarket, on a quick trip, having just dashed into the store, leaving Calvin in the car, to buy eggs for the morning and a set of replacement lights for the string on their tree that had gone dark, but the time between one step and the next was interminable. Her eyes were level with her mother’s belt — wide and black and shiny, the sort of thing Santa might wear, except it cinched a puffy yellow snowsuit instead of a red velvet coat.

“Is this line moving?” she asked her mother, who by this time of the evening traditionally began to ignore most of what she said, so Jemma had to repeat herself a few times before getting a perfunctory, “Shush.” The line was not moving. The conveyor barely inched along. The stuttering clerk engaged in extended conversation with every person in line, and talked for what seemed like at least five minutes with her mother about ways to make your eggs fluffy, all while more slow, silent people shuffled into line behind them, everyone looking at their shoes or at the snow falling thickly outside, but no one looking at their watches or noticing how time had almost stopped. Outside Jemma looked for her footprints in the snow, but they had already been covered. It always took her mother a long time to find the car, and tonight in the darkness and the snow it seemed to Jemma that they would wander forever among the white lumps that were anonymous and identical except where one was lit up inside, so the whole thing shined red and gold as if heated from within. They walked toward two of these, thinking it must be Calvin, keeping a light on for them, but they both drove away before they could reach them. Then, just as Jemma sensed that her mother was about to begin cursing at the snow, Calvin’s head and chest popped out from a lump ten cars down and waved to them.

“Over here,” he called out, and honked the horn with his foot. Their mother, when they were in the car, scolded him for opening the sunroof and getting snow in the car, then thanked him for saving their lives.

“They would have found our frozen corpses on Christmas morning,” she said. “I want you to tell your father that.” He was in surgery that night.

“I would have come looking for you before then.”

“And found our frozen corpses. I was ready to die already. Weren’t you, Jemma?”

“What time is it?”

“Never mind that. Are you ready to see Santa?” There would be a distribution of gifts that night under the Severna Forest Christmas tree, an annual tradition.

“Not the real Santa,” Calvin said.

“What time is it?”

“No, of course not. A licensed representative, like all the others.”

“I wouldn’t stand for it if I were him. I’d make them pay.”

“Oh, they pay. And there’s a long form, and a special school. Sheriff Travis was gone for months. Don’t you remember?”

“What time is it?”

“Almost time, Jemma. Look at the snow. It’s quiet and content and never complains or asks what time it is. You should be like that. Calvin, you are my eyes. Seatbelts off? Here we go!”

She hated to drive in the dark, and hated worse to drive in the snow, because she saw poorly at night, and the snow blinded and distracted her. She ran stop signs and stopped at green lights and made several wrong turns on the long ride home, but neither Calvin’s shouted warnings nor the strange, backward hissing noise their mother made by sucking air through her teeth every time they nearly wrecked made the trip go any faster, or distracted Jemma from the waiting.

At first, watching the snow was not particularly instructive. It drifted, slowly, or rushed slowly at the windshield and struck the glass and melted, or stuck on top of the snow already piled on the hood. Only after they were home, the tree lights fixed and the eggs put away, and after they had bundled themselves up again for the walk down to the tree — everyone had to walk or ride a sled, unless the weather was truly dangerous, in which case the event would be canceled — did the snow actually soothe her. Walking hand in hand with her mother, she leaned back her head and looked up, catching snowflakes in her open mouth, and something in the pattern of snowflakes lessened the tension in her belly. She stumbled a few times, and hardly noticed when the teenagers, hooting and holding flares aloft, passed them on sleds as they walked down the hill, or noticed the exhausted parents dragging their kids on toboggans up from Beach Road. She noticed the tree first as a multicolored stain on the falling snow. She looked ahead and saw the white star shining over top of the clubhouse roof, and then saw the whole thing as they rounded the building and walked over the yard. The tree, a thirty-foot Douglas fir, was there all year round, but the day after Thanksgiving men came with a cherry picker to string the lights and set the star.

Santa came in a red pickup truck with a giant electric nose strapped to the grille. Sheriff Travis — not a real sheriff but a former one, the man who along with a mildly retarded assistant was in charge of Severna Forest security — was in the back, lounging on a pile of presents. “It’s all a big fix,” Calvin whispered to Jemma as Santa took a seat on the throne beneath the tree, and the presents were unloaded and piled around him.

“I know,” Jemma said, because he’d already explained it the year before. The presents weren’t from Santa at all, but from their parents. They bought them in stores and wrapped them themselves and labeled them and dropped them off in a secret room at Mr. Duffy’s store. Calvin was puzzled and a little angered by the whole exercise, and was always rooting in his advancing vocabulary for words to describe it, an infringement, a travesty, a farce, but he had stopped asking their mother and father why the real Santa permitted it to happen because they always said the same thing: Because it pleases him to do so.

Jemma sipped on a cup of hot chocolate, waiting for the C’s. She went up just after Calvin, and did the curtsy just like all the other girls before her did. Calvin would not bow before the false Santa, or even shake his hand. They took their presents and walked back to their mother, and held on to them patiently, waiting for Santa to stand, after the last gift had been distributed, and cry out, “Open them now, children! Open your gifts and see how Santa loves you!” Jemma found that she could wait calmly to open her present, and that her agitation had not increased one iota from the time she got her present to when Oliver Zork claimed his, because she knew that this lesser Santa distributed lesser presents. She got a rubber ball and paddle set. Calvin got a fancy top.

Some stationary caroling followed. Jemma grew a little nostalgic as she sang, thinking back on previous days when this had all impressed her more, when she’d thought it was the real Santa up there on the throne, when the tree had seemed bigger and the hot chocolate hotter, when it had been so hard to remember the words to the songs, and she had liked the present she’d got so much it almost seemed like Christmas had already come, a little bit. Somehow the nostalgia soured back into the waiting feeling again as they walked home, her mother not holding her hand anymore but working the ball and paddle set vigorously.

“Did I ever tell you the story,” Calvin asked them as they approached their hill, “about the girl who tried to kill Santa?” Their mother said yes, but Jemma said no, though she had heard it before, always on the way back from the tree, and always at this same spot. Jemma liked the story, and wanted a distraction from the waiting. So even though she knew that she’d be listening to a story she already knew, on a night when all stories were endless and all journeys endless, when the hill would stretch infinitely above her, and she still had an eternity to pass even before bedtime, and even though she knew that listening to this story would be its own special torture, she said yes.

“She wasn’t a bad girl,” Calvin said. “Well, yes she was, but not in the way you think. She got excellent grades and was very polite and helped her mother around the house and never complained even on Christmas Eve that she was bored or that time was passing too slowly. She sold lemonade in the summer and hot brownies in the winter, door to door here in the Forest to raise money for starving children in Armenia and South Antarctica and Bowie and McLean, and she went to church every Sunday and was very quiet, and knew all the prayers, even in Latin, because this was a long, long time ago.

“And she looked like a nice girl, with very pretty curls that were almost blond, and big green eyes and a heart-shaped face, and she mostly acted like a nice girl, but she had a bad habit of creeping out at night and stabbing little animals with a big knife her father had unwisely given her for a birthday present. He worked in a museum, where they had knives like that, and he thought she should have it because it was pretty and because it used to belong to a princess. So he gave it to her, not realizing that he was encouraging in her this very bad habit.

“She went out every night, and at first she killed little rabbits, and then she killed cats, and then she killed dogs, and everyone in the Forest became very afraid, because they thought that a terrible black man had come to kill their pets. Nobody thought it would be the sweet little girl who lived up on the hill — yes, in our very house. Could anyone bad live there? people asked when they noticed which way the trail of blood pointed. The answer, they thought, was no.

“So the dogs kept dying, and then it was ponies, and then horses, and then an elephant, just passing through, poor sweet Simba visiting with the circus, asleep down by the river. She stabbed him right in his brain. She had killed something as big as a house, but it wasn’t enough for her. She needed more. It almost would be sad, that she still needed more, that she never got what she wanted even though she worked so hard for it, but don’t feel sorry for her. You may have noticed by now how thoroughly bad she really was. I shouldn’t have said that she wasn’t.

“What was she to do? No self-respecting circus would come near Severna Forest now, she’d have no second chance at another Simba, or at a giraffe, which would have been even better. She could travel to the zoo and kill a lion, smaller but fiercer than an elephant, or walk to the sea and stab at a whale. Or she could kill a person, the worst and mightiest creature of them all, much smaller than an elephant, but enough to satisfy her, she thought. Enough that she could just put her knife away afterward and never have to touch it again. That’s what she thought.

“It was a problem, though, to pick one. She looked around in her classroom at all the boys and girls and knew that none of them would do, and looked at her teachers, and almost stabbed her science teacher after washing his blackboards for him. But he was asleep on his desk, and looked so sweet and innocent and small as he slept that she just couldn’t do it. Because he wasn’t enough, and she knew it.

“She was very sad, then, though everyone else in the Forest was happy, because they thought that the big black man had moved on to greener killing fields. Then at Christmas she figured it out. She stood just where we were standing and the stupid fake Santa gave her her present, but not the one he thought he was giving her. He handed her a Raggedy Ann doll, but what he gave her was a perfect kill. She was one of those girls who got good grades, but wasn’t very smart — she could name all the counties in Ireland, but you could sell her her own underwear. She thought he was the real Santa, and thought for sure that if she could kill the real Santa, then she’d finally have what she wanted, and she could bury her knife. So she creeped out of her house — yes, our house too — as soon as her parents brought her home and went back down to the clubhouse, where the fake Santa and his helpers were having a party. She followed him home when he stumbled out — he’d had too much to drink, which should have clued her in that he wasn’t the real Santa. She followed him up this hill, thinking he was on his way to where he’d hidden his sleigh in the woods, and wondering if she should maybe kill all the reindeer too, but finally she couldn’t wait anymore. She ran up behind him and stabbed him in the back. Right here is where she did it.”

Calvin stopped and pointed at the ground. “Right here he fell down and bled like stink and he would have died if something else hadn’t happened. Do you know what?”

“I’m cold, Calvin,” said their mother, but he paid no attention to her, and neither did Jemma.

“Santa,” Jemma said breathlessly.

“Santa indeed. The real Santa came, gliding up silently behind in his sleigh, and she only knew he was behind her when she noticed the smell of reindeer all around. She turned around and saw him, and he was so awful and glorious that she dropped her knife. I’m sorry! she said, and she really was, and she cried. She was really, really, really, really sorry, but it was too late. He said to her, What you do to the least of these fake Santas, you do to me, and he threw a holly berry at her. It turned her to coal, and his reindeer stomped on her and broke her into a thousand pieces. If you dig in the snow here, you’ll probably find one.”

“No digging!” said their mother, because Jemma was already bending down. She handed Jemma back her ball and paddle, took both their hands, and trudged with them, for a hundred years, toward home.

“Where’s your father?” their mother kept asking then, as the it grew later and later, “Where’s you damn father?” then “Where’s your goddamn father?” then finally, just before she sent them to bed, “Where’s you fucking father?” She called the hospital repeatedly, only to discover he was still in surgery. “The graft failed,” she said, bitterly and mockingly, perched on her stool in the kitchen, speaking in her gin voice. “The child is bleeding. Well what about my graft? What about my bleeding? Who’s going to help me?”

“I’ll help you,” Calvin said, serious and calm. “What do we have to do?” This was all well after dinner, ages after they got home. They spent the evening drinking hot chocolate and stringing endless lengths of popcorn for the tree while they delayed dinner over and over, the orange chicken growing increasingly soggy and the lobster sauce more gelatinous, until it had to be eaten or abandoned altogether.

“You can’t help me,” she said sadly. “Santa would be furious.” She sent them upstairs with the bag of fortune cookies. After they’d changed into their pajamas and brushed their teeth, they sat on Jemma’s bed, cracking and eating the cookies. Jemma thought she knew what her fortune would say before she read it: Christmas will never come. But what she read aloud to Calvin was “Your bundle will make you very happy.”

“Only if you smile,” he replied, “will your smile grow bigger.” They went through the whole bag, Jemma eating every cookie. Calvin stopped eating after two, but carefully folded up the fortunes to make a neat pile, to add to his jar: Laziness is its own reward; Only the chrysanthemum knows the dark secret of the caterpillar; The wisdom of the shrimp is in being small; This year will bring you almost everything you want; The moon is your friend — it follows you around.

They did not even try to sleep. After the cookies were finished Calvin began to speak again of the little girl who tried to kill Santa, telling how she had been punished by having to serve as the angel called Stab, an avenger who descended from Heaven to poke at people who kicked dogs or ran over squirrels and didn’t even look back. And he told her that if she looked in her closet she might see, way in the back where the steam pipes sat naked outside the wall, the glint of her knife.

Jemma ran screaming downstairs for her mother, who came up from the basement before Jemma could go down. She shouted for Calvin to come downstairs and threatened to leave a note for Santa about him. This was a threat that always subdued him.

“But I can’t sleep,” Jemma said when her mother instructed them to go upstairs, get in bed, and turn out the lights. “I just can’t. I couldn’t ever.”

“Just close your eyes,” her mother said, pushing her up the stairs, “and think about it.” Jemma sat down on the landing and started to cry. “Oh, now,” her mother said. “Oh, please.” She sat on the stair and lifted Jemma in her lap, cajoling and threatening and soothing, but Jemma only cried harder. “You’re too old to cry,” her mother said.

“But it hurts,” Jemma said, because she could feel it, an ache in her belly that centered around her belly button but moved even as she was crying about it to her left side. “All right,” her mother said. “Wait a minute. Wait just a minute.” She hurried them both down to the kitchen and scooped ice cream into two bowls. “Here come the sprinkles!” she said brightly, rushing to her bathroom and back in less than a minute. She struggled with the safety cap on a bottle of medication for a few moments, but finally opened it and with two spoons crushed one pill for Jemma and two pills for Calvin. “This will make you so calm and so sleepy,” she said, and kept saying it, then singing it as they ate their ice cream, and as she led them upstairs again. “So calm,” she sang as she tucked them both into Calvin’s dinghy. “So sleepy, so calm, so very, very sleepy.” Her own lids fell to half-mast as she sang, though Calvin and Jemma, side by side with the blanket tucked just under their chins, stared at her with wide eyes. “So sleepy,” she sang as she left the room in a slow dance, spinning on her way to the door, her voice seeming to spin, also, and stretch like taffy from her mouth to Jemma’s ear.

“Are you tired?” she asked her brother, after their mother shut the door.

“I don’t think so,” he said. Jemma did not feel tired, either. She felt awake but not alert, and had a strange but not unpleasant feeling, like she was turning into a big marshmallow — her fingers and then her arms and then her trunk and finally her face taking a new consistency, so she felt light and slow and sticky. She knew she could move but did not want to. As they lay side by side and talked of Santa, Jemma came to realize that the ugly fretting in her belly had eased. Time was passing no faster, indeed it seemed to have slowed even further, but she came not to mind the feeling.

“They’ll tell you things about Santa that aren’t true,” Calvin said. “And you have to try hard, sometimes, not to believe them. The first thing they say that’s a lie is that he exists at all. Of course he does, but not in the way that they say. They talk about how jolly and kind and fun he is, but they miss all the other stuff, how incredible and awful he is, how furious he can be. There’s nothing in his sweetness if you don’t consider how he’s awful, too. His sleigh has steel runners that could cut you in half if he ran over you, and the reindeer are shod with hot iron, when you look in their eyes you can see reflections of the same fire that burns at the center of the earth. Getting presents isn’t all just the sweet fun — you get what you want sometimes but sometimes you don’t. Do you see how he is the lord of fate?”

“I can’t feel my nose,” Jemma said, turning toward her brother. “Is it still there?”

“Touch it and see. Noses! They try to add things, too. To say he lived in this place when he was a child, or that one year Mrs. Claus had to do all the work, or they invent elves to assist him, as if he needed any help with any of it. Why would you live at the North Pole when you are present everywhere, in every place and every time, and always will be, always? Why would you add another reindeer to eight, a perfect number? Rudolph is the worst lie of all. Santa would no more be afflicted with that misfit than, than… he just wouldn’t. It’s disgusting, what they do. Why can’t they just leave him alone and accept how he’s perfect, and needs nothing added or taken away from him. Why can’t they just leave him alone? How come?”

“Everybody likes Santa,” Jemma said slowly, not sure how to answer the question.

“Oh, they say they do. But do they really? Do they think it’s easy knowing all the wrong things everybody’s done, to wake up every year after Christmas and think it’s a new day, and a new beginning, and that they’re not going to disappoint you this year? But then he knows right away. He can hardly drink a cup of leftover eggnog before all the evil is aching in his head and he has to pull the list out. Not that he actually sleeps, or would drink leftover eggnog, or even needs to write this stuff down.”

“The boat is moving,” Jemma said, because she was starting to feel as if they were drifting in the bed. When she opened her eyes it was plain that they were locked still on the carpet, but as soon as she closed her eyes it felt like they were floating down a river.

“Let it carry you away from the third lie, that Santa is bad. They say that it’s not for nothing that you can rearrange the letters of his name to spell Satan. They think that’s a clue to his real nature, that’s he’s either the devil himself or a thing of the devil, something added on to Christmas by the wicked instead of the unique and essential spirit of Christmas, somebody who is not added and who can’t have anything added to him. The stories about dolls who come alive to strangle little girls and toy guns loaded with real bullets, and about his watching in his crystal snowball for all the horrible things to happen on Christmas morning and laughing and laughing and laughing — they’re all lies. Don’t you believe them.”

“There’s a waterfall coming up,” Jemma said, because her gaze had fallen on the plume of mist rising from the mouth of the humidifier that sat on top of Calvin’s dresser. “Do you think we’ll die?”

“How can you worry about a stupid waterfall when they tell all these hideous lies about him? The fourth one is the worst one. Just when you think that everything’s okay, that you’re old enough, that you’ve sorted out all the lies and are feeling safe from them, they start with the foul whispering—he doesn’t exist. It’s the trickiest lie, no wonder they save it for last. And there’s something about it that you almost want to believe, because it’s so much easier to just not believe, and it would be so much easier if his eye wasn’t always on you. That’s why they say it, because they lose heart, or because they know he has judged them already, that he’s seen every wrong thing they’ve done and has punished them for it, and is punishing them for it even while they say no, no, he is not. They tell you the lie and then watch you to see if you’ll believe it, and if you do they hate you because you are weak like them, and if you don’t then they hate you because faith burns their eyes. But you have to believe, especially if they test you. Will you believe? Do you believe?”

“Oh, yes,” said Jemma.

“Even if they beat you with giant candy canes and try to make you deny him?”

“Yes.”

“What if they put holly under your fingernail? Then would you deny him?”

“No!”

“What if they boil you in eggnog and cut off your head and stuff a goose up your butt?”

“No! I mean, yes. I mean I would still say I like Santa.”

“Like? Is that enough? And how are you going to talk about how great he is with your head cut off?”

“I don’t know!” Jemma said. The humidifier mist was getting thicker, filling up all the air in a hanging cloud that reached for the bed.

“He’d give you the power, of course. But you can’t just like him. He’d throw you right off his sleigh for just liking him. You have to love him with your whole heart and believe in him with your whole body. It has to be hard, like this.” He clenched his fists up and shut his eyes. Jemma felt his whole body go stiff as he made a noise, a grunt and groan of effort. “Like that!” he said. “You do it.”

Jemma did it, clenching her fists and curling her toes, squinching her eyes and grinding her teeth. She tried to make the same noise that her brother had. When she opened her eyes the mist cloud had reached the wall behind the bed, and was falling toward them.

“Good enough, I guess,” Calvin said. “I hope he brings me what I want this year. I hope I’ve finally been good enough — not that he gives a gift because of anything you do. I know he only gives the gifts to increase his own glory, but I still hope I’ve been good in the right way, finally. I don’t want to be found wanting again. This time I want to get it. You know?”

“An erector set?” Jemma asked.

“No, stupid. Going. Maybe this year. Maybe finally.” He took in a deep breath, and Jemma was sure he was going to use it to shout or sing, but he only blew it out in a big sigh. Then he was quiet.

“The clouds are coming,” Jemma said as the mist fell down farther. He just snored when she knocked him in the ribs, and when the mist had settled on them completely she found she could not find him anymore, not with her elbow and not with her hand. “Where are you?” she called out into the fog. She reached with both her hands as far out as she could reach to her sides, but felt only air. The fog brightened and condensed. “Where are you?” she called out again.

“Over here,” came a voice, but not Calvin’s. It was a voice that sounded like many people talking, all saying the same thing at the same time. The fog began to lift from the foot of the bed, a little at a time, as if it were being torn away in little strips to unwrap the person it was concealing.

“Santa?” Jemma asked, because it was a Santa shape that she saw through the fog, the hat and the beard and the belly. But as her vision became clearer she saw that though the thing had the shape of Santa, it looked very different from the traditional representations. It was a Santa of Santas, his body made up of tiny bodies. Jemma counted twelve of them just in the face.

“We are the Unity of Santa,” it said, eight of them pushing and twisting away from each other to be the moving lips. It stared, four little bodies bowing to her when it blinked.

“What do you want?” Jemma asked it, when it did not go away, and did not speak.

“To show you wonderful things,” it said. “Only take our hand and we will go.” It held a hand out to her, each body at the tip of each finger extending its arms and hands and fingers at her.

“Are you taking me to a Christmas past?” Jemma asked, because she had earlier in the day been reading A Christmas Carol.

“What would be the point?” it asked, wiggling its hand, and wiggling all its hands until Jemma put her own hand out to touch it. It was like touching a caterpillar or her father’s beard.

“Where are we going?” Jemma asked, suddenly quite certain that she was dreaming for all that pinching her bottom failed to wake her. The mist was streaming on either side of them, as if they were traveling fast, and she felt a wind on her face that blew colder and colder.

“North,” said the Unity of Santa. “Where else?”

At great speed, but for no more time than it would have taken her to walk from one end of the room to the other, they traveled, coming to rest when the boat-bed drove up with a squeaking crunch upon a shore of snow. They were out of the mist. As the Unity of Santa helped her out of the boat Jemma looked back at her brother — she could see him plainly though she had never been able to find him with her hands — looking very pale as he slept.

“But what will happen to my brother?” Jemma asked.

“He will sleep. Come along. She is waiting.”

“Who?” Jemma asked, but her guide was silent as they walked through ice tunnels that were sometimes so narrow that Jemma could reach up and put a hand on the ceiling, and sometimes so wide that Jemma couldn’t see the walls let alone the ceiling, until they came to a round wooden door. The Unity extracted from its pocket a key made of little Santas. It opened the door and waved Jemma through.

She found herself in the middle of Santa’s workshop. It was much busier than she thought it should be, given that Santa was already out in the world delivering presents. But all the elves were still working furiously. Indeed, most of them looked sad and tired. When she asked why the elves were all still working, her guide told her that it was for her, that all the presents they were making were for her. “If you don’t want them, then all you have to do is say the word,” said the Unity. Jemma was silent.

They climbed up many stairs, flights of five or ten steps set into the walls, or passing through the walls, but always rising, up toward the top of the workshop. The elves looked sadder and more haggard the farther they climbed, but the presents they worked on were ever more sublime. On what Jemma thought might be the ninth floor she found a pair of emaciated elves dressed only in little barrels painstakingly sewing her name in gold into the vapors of a small cloud.

“Oh, oh!” Jemma called out. “Is that the cloud that I asked for?” The elves looked up at her briefly with dark, empty eyes before returning to their work.

“Stupid girl,” said the Unity of Santa. “What does it look like, a pony?”

“Sorry!” Jemma said, suddenly afraid that all the wonders she’d passed would be denied her.

“There’s no sorry here,” it said. They’d come to another door, bigger than the first, and colored a deeper red. The Unity of Santa kicked it, so hard that a few of the constituents were knocked from the hat, and fell to catch hands and join with the long ropes of Santas who were its hair. It thrust Jemma into a long room, full of torchlight and reeking, Jemma thought, of winter — pine and berries and smoke and the bright sting of cold air. Jemma realized she could feel her nose again. She put her hand on it.

“Yes, hello!” A woman at the far end of the room, seated in a wooden throne, was putting her hand to her nose just as Jemma was doing. “Hello! Is this what you do to greet a body? I think I like it better than waving.”

“I was just checking to see if my nose was there.”

“It certainly is,” said the lady. She was dressed in a red velvet robe trimmed in white fur, and berries were caught up in her great loops of hair. On closer inspection, the berries seemed to Jemma to be growing from her hair, not just resting in it. As plain as the mouth below it. “Do you know who I am, little girl?”

“Mrs. Claus,” Jemma said, though not sure about that, because this lady was black, and Jemma’s mother had told her, when Jemma asked specifically if Mrs. Claus or Santa himself might be black, that it was a frank impossibility and an absurd thought, and had furthermore denied the blackness of Jesus, Nefertiti, and the Queen of Sheba.

“Clever girl,” she said. She leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs, flashing shiny boots that ran up to her thighs. “Do you know why you are here?”

“To get my presents?”

“Just that? There’s more, if you’re smart enough. Here it is: all that you have seen is nothing at all compared to what I can give you, if you answer the question I’ll pose. But if you get the question wrong then you get nothing, and then you must pay a terrible price. Too terrible even for me to speak of just yet.”

“Would I get a pony?” Jemma asked, “If I answer the question?”

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a thousand ponies. Will you answer my question?”

Jemma looked at the lady, and at the Unity of Santa, and back down the hall through the door to the workshop. She knew her brother would scold her for seeking the bird in the bush, but she did it anyway, imagining herself riding a pony that was made of a thousand ponies, a Unity of pony.

“Okay,” Jemma said slowly. Mrs. Claus stood up and walked down the marble steps that led up to her throne. She stopped on the last one and bent over Jemma, her hair swinging close enough that Jemma could tell how it smelled like moss.

“Very well,” she said. “Tell me, child, what has Santa got under his hat?”

Jemma folded her arms and ducked her chin and began to think hard. Air? That would be the sensible answer. An elf? He might just keep one there. An apple? That was possible, but not particularly likely. His hair? That was even more sensible, but Jemma thought she had a better answer.

“His head,” she said.

“No, child,” Mrs. Claus said, looking a little shocked at Jemma’s answer. “World peace. World peace. That’s what’s under his hat. Haven’t you been listening to your brother?”

“I have been,” Jemma said. “All night long.”

Mrs. Claus sighed. “A liar, too,” she said sadly. “Well, off with her head then.”

“Are you talking about me?” Jemma asked.

“Off with her head!” Mrs. Claus shouted. She jumped up and down on the steps as Jemma backed away, then drew out a long-handled axe from beneath her robe. She shook it and pointed it at Jemma, but never swung. “Off with her head!” she said again, her voice echoing in the hall. At her last words the Unity of Santa fell apart, dissolving from the head down, every member tumbling down to the floor to run at Jemma on little feet. Jemma fled. Out the door, past all the elves working in alcoves on her presents. Now they were all sharpening bits of coal, which they threw at her, only one in all nine floors proving herself a good shot. Jemma rubbed her sore forehead as she ran along the ice toward the boat, looking back just once at the swarm of Santas behind her. The boat was drifting away but she made a long leap and landed next to he brother. Then she was on her back again under the mist, listening to her brother snore beside her. She thought she was awake, or that her night visitation had ended, but then she saw them from the corners of her eyes, innumerable little hats rising over the sides of the boat, followed shortly by the pale fat Santa faces in their beards. They only spoke to her, and did not lift a finger to harm her. “The Spirit will visit you next,” they said.

She waited for the next visitor for what seemed like a whole hour before she realized that the mist was making a sighing noise, or rather that it was speaking very quietly in a voice that was like a person sighing quietly. She peered at the mist and saw a face there, fat like Santa’s face, but sadder. “I am the Spirit of Santa,” it said. “Come away with me.”

“Okay,” Jemma said, feeling quite trusting despite how poorly she had been treated by Mrs. Claus. It wasn’t that the Spirit was not spooky — it was quite spooky — but Jemma felt safe and not afraid. The feeling like parts of her body were missing had given way to a rubbery feeling. She felt sure that if she curled herself into a ball she could bounce to the ceiling, and was sure that her rubber neck would be proof against an axe.

The spirit settled on her, cold and wet. When it lifted she was in a graveyard. She remembered this part from the book, and quickly went in search of her own tombstone to see when she was going to die. “Will nobody miss me?” she asked the spirit excitedly, but it was quiet. She found names on the tombstones — Annabelle; Corky; Pooh the Third; Mrs. Beasley; Shenandoah — but hers was nowhere.

“Who is buried here?” she asked.

“All forgotten!” the spirit sighed. It rose up in the air and threw out its arms and legs, and began to bleed away from its tips, fingers and toes rarefying into a thinner mist that spun out into threads that drifted over every grave. “No one remembers them!” the Spirit moaned, and sank its tendrils into the ground.

Jemma had her answer in moments. Felt paws and porcelain hands began to claw up through the dirt, followed shortly by the bodies of ragged bears and dogs and cats, dolls in rags with shattered eyes, robots with broken antennae, giraffes and hippos and elephants leaking stuffing. They crawled from their graves and lurched toward Jemma who, safe in her rubbery feeling, waited for them calmly. They only wanted hugs; she knew it as soon as one got close to her. It was a teddy bear, armless, legless, and unstuffed, just a head on a furry poncho. It smelled just like Aunt Mary’s terrible, terrible breath, a mixture of cat box and rotten meat, but Jemma hugged it tight. She hugged the broken dolls and the broken robots and the dull board games missing their pieces. She had enough hugs for every one of them, but they soon overwhelmed her, burying her under wool and silk and organdy and steel, until the mist settled in through the thin spaces between bodies and touched her skin. Then she was in her brother’s bed again, feeling like it had all gone very well, and that she had passed some sort of test.

“The Power will come!” cried the Spirit, and then it was gone. Jemma was alone with her sleeping brother in a dark, clear room. She did not have long to wait. There came an ominous knock on the door, four strong blows that Jemma was sure would wake everyone, but there was no change in Calvin’s snoring.

“Come in,” Jemma whispered. She thought it was Santa this time, good old regular Santa come to comfort her, or explain the significance of what she’d seen. Then she thought it was a headless Santa. Then she realized it was an empty Santa suit — empty but mighty, it would have fit a Santa who was eight feet tall. “Who are you?” Jemma asked, though she already knew.

It never spoke, but only pulled open its robe with invisible fingers. The robe disrobed, revealing what it had covered, the most beautiful light Jemma had ever seen. It was as strong and bright and warm as the sun, but cold as a faceful of snow. Jemma lay in it, feeling warm and cold, cherished and unnoticed, elevated and, finally, terrified, before she finally fell away, passing out or passing deeper into sleep, but still feeling the presence against her face. She was never aware of waking, but realized with a start that it was morning, and that the sun was shining in her eyes.

She tried to leap up and jump on the bed, but her legs were still full of the rubbery feeling, so she fell on her brother. “Calvin!” she shouted, over and over. It took so long to wake him up she thought for a moment that Santa had killed him in the night.

They hurried downstairs, stumbling in their slippers and drug hangovers on the landing and the stairs, slipping on the last step and tumbling together to the carpet, then both clawing over each other and helping each other up as they made for the basement staircase. They slipped again at the top of those stairs, but bore each other up, and took the last half of the stairs calmly. Jemma stopped at the last step while Calvin went on. She saw the flash of her father’s camera, and heard Calvin gasp. Here at the end she liked to pause, and she finally liked the waiting, because she knew it was utterly in her power now, and all she had to do to make it end was take a step, past the wall that was hiding her from her parents. She understood that this was a moment in time, about to pass. She put her hand on the wall and closed her eyes.

You must eventually take that last step, have to open every last present, feeling, on your very edges, but not knowing or understanding how they are all wrong, the Smurf mushroom house, the Junior Marie Curie Radioactive Discovery Set with the real glow-in-the-dark artificial radium, even the Bat Girl sleeping bag for which you have positively lusted these past months. They have not given you what you really wanted, just like they haven’t given Calvin what he wanted, because it is not theirs to give. Every box contains an empty, worthless secret. There is offal in your stocking. The valium-visitations of your endless night are already being forgotten, but not their secret lessons. Your parents are waiting, the camera is poised, your brother is rooting like a hog among the plenty, searching for the box that might contain the secret instruction for his going — but stay. You can stay just on this side of the corner, with time still under your thumb, for as long as you like.