The Christmas Light (6 page)

“Are you headed inside?” The voice is somewhere behind her. “Are you going in?” She turns to see a woman pulling grocery bags out of her car. “I have a couple more of these if you have a free hand.”

“Sure.” Kaylee walks to the back car door and pulls two bags from the seat.

“I’m Lily, by the way.” Kaylee follows her up the stairs. “Are you here for practice?”

Kaylee follows her through the door. “No.”

Lily leads her through the church and into a small kitchen and begins to pull out packages of water bottles, cutting away the plastic packaging and putting the bottles in the refrigerator. The young girl is pretty in a simple way with shoulder-length brown hair and colorless eyes. They are colorless but not in the sense that they are not brown or blue (because they are blue) but colorless in the sense that she doesn’t seem to see the pinks of joy or the reds of hope or the yellows of laughter anymore. “Did you drop someone off?”

Kaylee hands her a few bottles of water. “No, I don’t know anyone here.”

Lily stops stocking the refrigerator and laughs. “I am so sorry! It looked like you were headed up the steps so I thought you were here for rehearsal. You must think I’m crazy!”

Kaylee hands her three more bottles of water. “No big deal. I was driving by.”

Lily refrains from asking why she was standing in front of the church if she was just driving by because she thinks there’s something wrung out about Kaylee’s face, making it seem full of sadness. She reaches for another package of water bottles and notices Kaylee’s belly for the first time. There it is again. That unnamed sadness spreading through her. “I shouldn’t have assumed that you were coming here. Thanks so much for helping me, though. I’m glad you followed the nudge and decided to stand there.” She closes the refrigerator door and hands Kaylee a bottle of water.

“What do you mean, I followed the nudge?”

Lily walks to the cabinets and stops. “You know how sometimes you take a street that you didn’t plan on or you call a friend out of the blue? You don’t really know why, you just kind of felt a nudge to go down that street or to text a friend. We get a lot of people who just kind of wander into the church and they can’t really explain why. It’s just a nudge, you know.” She opens a cabinet and talks over her shoulder. “Sometimes, they come into the building just to sit.”

“Why do they just sit?”

“Probably looking for a quiet place to think. Some of them may feel God is a little closer here. Lots of reasons, I guess.” She stops her work and looks at Kaylee. “Do you live in the downtown area?”

Kaylee shakes her head. “No. I was just driving by.”

Lily notices that she has said she was driving by again, but knows that Kaylee wasn’t just driving around. She had driven to the church and gotten out of the car for some reason. She pulls out a box of tea and a box of cocoa, shaking them. “Interested?”

Kaylee points. “Cocoa. Thanks. A lady told me about the Nativity you’re doing and when I got in front of the church I recognized the name.”

Lily reaches for two mugs and fills them with water before setting them inside the microwave. “You should come. Bring your parents.” Kaylee doesn’t respond and an abrupt, releasing quiet settles on the room. “When are you due?” She takes the grocery bags off the table and wads them up, nodding at a chair. “Feel free to sit.”

Kaylee leaves her coat on but sits at the table. “The beginning of February.”

The microwave beeps and Lily removes the mugs, pouring the packets of cocoa inside. She worries about saying something dumb but can’t avoid the elephant in the room. “Do you have any names picked out?”

“I don’t know. I actually like Abby for a girl and I haven’t thought of a name for a boy yet.”

“There’s lots to choose from,” Lily says, setting a mug in front of Kaylee. “Are you excited?”

Kaylee takes hold of the handle and stares into the mug. She doesn’t answer and Lily groans inside. She has already said something dumb and now there is the danger of this young girl drifting away and never being seen again. She sits at the table and reaches out, patting the girl’s arm. “You may not see it now but you’ll be okay.” Kaylee looks at her with watery blue eyes. “It might take a while. I hope it won’t but it might. It won’t be painless. I hope it is but it might not be. But you will be okay.”

“How do you know?”

Lily shrugs. “Because I’ve seen it over and over. I’ve seen broken people who were held together by no more than a thread who are now okay. I’ve seen trapped people who are now free. I’ve seen hurt people who are now healthy. It took time for all of them but they are okay. Circumstances do change. Sometimes it just takes a long time to get there.”

A tear makes its way down Kaylee’s cheek and onto the table. “Have you seen stupid people who are okay?” Lily’s eyes are brimming with hope, and another tear falls in front of Kaylee as she shakes her head.

“I’ve never seen stupid people,” Lily says. “But I have seen people who have made mistakes who are now okay. My own dad made some choices many years ago that almost cost him his family: my mom, sister, and me. My mom was ready to leave because of his choices and he was ready to let us go but he didn’t. It wasn’t a good time for us but he’s okay now and I think he’s a great man. Things turn around.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Her voice is so small that Lily has to lean in close to hear. “I am,” Lily says.

Kaylee looks into her cocoa, searching for something. “My boyfriend doesn’t want anything to do with me or the baby. I’m sure you were dying to know that.”

Lily swirls the cocoa inside her mug. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine not being interested in a baby or in you.”

“My parents hate me because of this.”

Lily shakes her head. “No they don’t. I’m sure they feel sadness because they didn’t imagine you pregnant at … how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“They didn’t imagine you pregnant at sixteen when you were a little girl but they don’t hate you. It’s impossible.”

Kaylee turns her head, squeezing her eyes shut to keep tears from falling. “Do you have kids?”

“Not yet.”

“Then how do you know that?”

“Because I can tell that you’re loved. I can tell that your parents have raised you to be a person who helps when someone needs it. A child can’t be like that without having first been loved and taught how to help people. Do you know how many teenagers would have helped a crazy woman that they don’t even know bring heavy boxes of water into a church?” She laughs, looking at Kaylee. “Very few. So in the few minutes that I have known you, I know that your parents love you and that it’s impossible for them to hate you.”

Kaylee looks into the cocoa. “My dad got transferred and we were supposed to move in November. Now he’s waiting until February, after the baby comes.”

Lily waits for more but Kaylee is quiet. She reaches out and squeezes her arm. “Your parents decided to wait so that you weren’t moving right when the baby was coming. That’s a good thing.” Kaylee shakes her head. “It is. They don’t want anything to happen to you or the baby and they want to keep you here with your doctor. You don’t need to read anything else into that.”

“He’s starting his job three months later than he was supposed to.”

“So what? It’s three months out of an entire lifetime. And I’m sure he could move there ahead of you and start working but he’s not doing that because he wants to be here.” Kaylee looks at her and wants to believe that what she says is true. “Just wait until tomorrow. You’ll see it’s all going to be okay. It took a lot of tomorrows for my family to be okay but we are.”

Kaylee feels a kick under her ribs as if the tiny soul inside agrees. A glimmer of hope flashes through her and for the first time in months the air around her seems different.

*   *   *

“Did you have fun?” Jennifer asks, opening the car door for Avery.

The little girl takes her place in the booster seat and reaches for the seat belt. “I think so. There are some boy angels, they’re triplets and they are some really awful kids.”

Jen slides behind the wheel and laughs, tossing the script for the Nativity on the passenger seat. “Really? How awful?”

Avery puts two fingers on her face, thinking. “So awful that Miss Miriam’s face turned purple.” Jen looks at her over her shoulder. “Yeah, it was like her body quit working and she couldn’t even talk because they were so terrible.”

Jen laughs at the thought but Avery’s face is straight, as always. The sameness of her face worries Jen to death sometimes. “I met a girl like me named Sofia, except she has blond hair instead of red.”

Jen slaps the back of the seat. “And I met Sofia’s dad!” Avery is quiet and doesn’t respond, so Jennifer turns forward and starts the car. She’s driving past the shops on Main Street, complete with Christmas displays and lights, when she hears Avery whisper something from the backseat.

“I didn’t hear you, VV. What’d you say?”

“What color hair does he have?”

Jennifer shakes her head, unsure of what Avery is asking. “What color hair does who have?”

Avery is looking at her mom in the rearview mirror. “Sofia’s dad. Her hair is blond. What color is his?”

This is the first interest that Avery has shown in people in months and Jen smiles, looking over her shoulder. “He has sandy-brown hair.”

“Is he tall? Sofia isn’t tall.”

“He is tall,” Jen says, remembering.

“Like Dad.”

Jen nods, looking at her. “Yes, like Dad.” Avery turns to look out the window and her eyes appear silver in the streetlights. “So, what’s it like being an angel?” She watches Avery in the mirror, willing her to stay engaged, but there is three feet of silence in the car now. Her eye catches the script on the seat next to her and she reads, “Then the angels come.” Tears swell beneath her lids at the words. She looks up into the sky and the stars are so thick they look as if they can be stirred with some great wooden paddle. She imagines that sky so long ago as angels spread out against it. The closest of them were surely close enough to reach for and the farthest of them were farther than the most distant galaxy. As shepherds fell to the ground in the angels’ brightness, were they baffled by their stillness? Could they literally hear the angels’ stillness and feel the beauty and the power at the same time? Jen opens her eyes wider to keep the tears at bay. Were the angels still spread across the sky above her and Avery or were they just beyond this car windshield, within reach? Did they still come with good news? She wipes a tear off her cheek, praying that they do.

SEVEN

It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.

—J
ANE
A
USTEN

Gloria stands at the back of the room and smiles, watching Miriam. Her cashmere sweater is pushed up to the elbows, which, according to Miriam, is a no-no for people of quality, and her hair has been shoved behind her ears. For years, Gloria assumed Miriam didn’t have ears. With a heavy sigh, Miriam turns back to the Ramsey triplets. “Boys! How can you spread the angelic message of hope and peace amid all this wrestling and talk of flatulence?” It started off as such a charming idea … allowing children to be part of the angel choir. All the charm wore off when the nine-year-old Ramsey triplets arrived for the first rehearsal. If Gloria had a dime for every time she heard Miriam tell them to refrain from using the word “fart” or to stop using their sheet music as swords. She had forgotten what little cause nine-year-old boys need to start wrestling on the floor. She and Miriam and a man known simply as Zee have gained several pounds in muscle from extracting the triplets from each other.

“Boys! You are angels!” Miriam says, banging her hands together. She turns to Gloria and shakes her head. “Look what I’ve done. I’ve just lied in church.” The first rehearsal was a raucous affair, bordering on chaos, but the entire choir soon learned to settle down without being told, so they could see what horrible things the triplets would do next. The boys were proficient at clunking and bonking other kids over the head and possessed uncanny skills at being loud and annoying. For anyone watching, it would seem the boys were headed straight to juvenile detention via the Grandon Community Church Nativity.

James raises his hand at his seat and begins to jump up and down so Miriam will see him. Andrew and Matthew begin to jump as well and Miriam sighs … again. The fact that the triplets were named after three of the disciples lost its irony after the first rehearsal. “Yes, Triplet One,” Miriam says. She gave up trying to tell them apart during the very first second of that first rehearsal.

“We might not be able to sing in the Nativity.”

Miriam’s not sure if she should be relieved or exasperated. “What do you mean? Why wouldn’t you sing?”

“Our mom might have a baby that night.”

Miriam puts a pencil behind her ear. “Your mother may what?”

Andrew raises his hand and Miriam looks at him, holding up two fingers, representing Triplet Number Two. “She’s gonna have a baby. We heard her tell Dad she’s pregnant again and that it’s his fault.”

Gloria covers her mouth, smiling, and Miriam nods her head. “Well, if your mother is going to have a baby it is most appropriate for it to be your father’s fault. I can also assure you that I just saw your mother and she will not be giving birth on Christmas Eve.”

“That’s good to know.” It’s Matthew. Triplet Three. “Because the hospital might get crowded with her having a baby and Jesus being born and all.”

Miriam looks at Gloria and the entire choir leans in, listening. “Jesus has already been born and he wasn’t born in a hospital,” Miriam says. “He was born in a manger. You do know the story, don’t you?”

The boys look at one another and James, Triplet One, looks back at Miriam. “What’s a manger?”

“Well, it’s a place where animals sleep and eat. The hotel was full so Joseph and Mary used the barn for Jesus’ birth. They laid him in the feed trough.”

The boys’ eyes bulge and Triplet Three sticks out his tongue. “Wouldn’t the animals try to take a bite of him?”

Now Miriam’s eyes bulge out. “Of course not! That’s a preposterous notion!”