What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (13 page)

“How about a photograph album?” Lily suggested. “Undermine her with sentiment.”

“With pictures of Ben? That’s a little blatant.”

“No, doofus. Pictures of the three of you, doing things together. Ben just happens to be in them.”

“Mmm.”

“Music? Who’s some singer she likes, who will make her think of Ben? Or go with poetry. How about love poetry?”

“Would any of those work on you?”

“No.” Lily turned the car into the mall parking lot. “But I’m a hard sell. Your mom’s a romantic. I had her for English, remember?”

“I wish I knew what it is Ben won’t take out of that script.”

Lily grinned. “Yeah, me too.”

“Sometimes I wish I had your parents.”

“No, you don’t. They’ll talk about anything. My parents are a walking case of Too Much Information.”

The mall was piping “White Christmas” into the parking lot through a speaker in the palm trees. The sun was out and it was at least 70 degrees. I wonder what a white Christmas is like. We went in and cruised, and when Lily wasn’t looking I got her the new Norah Jones CD. I got Felix a coffeemaker, which Mom had agreed to go in on.

A store selling suncatchers and incense had a row of bronze figures in the window and Lily pointed a finger at one. I peered in at him, a little man with an elephant’s head, sitting lotus-fashion.

“For your mom,” Lily said. “He’s Ganesh, the remover of obstacles.”

“That might backfire,” I said. “He might remove Ben.” But they had a little brass Buddha that I thought she’d like, and Buddha is all about being at peace with things, according to Mom. That’s what I mean about Mom being kind of a generalist, religiously. I bought her the Buddha, thinking that maybe he could tell her to be at peace with Ben.

For Ben I had a list of geek presents to pick from, like wireless mice and flash drives. I’d consulted Wuffie on Grandpa Joe, who is always impossible to shop for, and bought him a koi for his koi pond, which the water-garden people will keep till he picks it up. I’m going to wrap a plastic one for him if I can find one. I also went to Body Works and got gardenia hand cream for Wuffie and Grandma Alice.

Jesse of all people was in there, staring at the body wash.

He spotted Lily first. “Reindeer! Come and help me.”

“What are you looking for?” I followed her over.

“Oh.” He looked at me wildly, the way guys do when they’re on bubble-bath-and-pink-ribbon overload. “My, uh, mom …”

I showed him the gardenia hand cream. “My grannies both love this.”

“Is that an old lady smell? She’s not … uh, what do
you
like?”

“Well, my mom likes the gardenia, too, but these are my faves.” I pointed at the coconut lime and the freesia. “Does your Mom take baths or showers?”

He stared at me. “I don’t know.”

“ ’Cause the bubble bath is better than the body wash if she takes baths, but it’s no good in the shower.”

“I told her she should come with me,” he said. “I mean, not her come with me to shop for her, but …” He trailed off, grabbed the coconut lime body wash, and ran off.

For some reason, Lily was cracking up.

11

The camels arrived Friday morning in a horse trailer. They
do
spit. They spat at Father Weatherford while the handlers unloaded them. He looked revolted, but he blessed them. There were three of them and the handler tied them to a palm tree beside the stable, where they ate some thatch off the roof and scratched their butts on the tree trunk. We put the sheep in a pen and tied the goats up inside the stable, where they ate the straw from under Baby Jesus.

The procession was actually pretty cool. We waited until after dark, and the older angels carried candle lanterns. The candles glowed on their feathers and the magi’s crowns, and on my cloak, and we looked like a stained glass window. That’s what Felix said. He wore a shepherd costume and carried the shovel.

The stores were all lit up with Christmas lights and some of them gave us cookies after we sang. There were a lot of people lined up along Ayala Avenue to watch us, especially around the arcade and on the sidewalk across the street. My whole family was there, naturally, and I saw Jesse with his mom and his little brother and sister, and Lily and her mom and dad. Everyone had cameras, and the flashes made about as much light as the lanterns. Jesse waved at me and held his up to show me he’d taken my picture.

It actually got cold that night. You never know in Southern California; we’re as likely to be wearing shorts at Christmas as not. When we got to the stable, Noah kind of snuggled up next to me and put his arm around me, like Joseph would for Mary. I was glad of it because we were supposed to pose for half an hour, and once I got off the donkey, who was pretty warm, I started to shiver, even in my starry cloak. Then I felt Noah’s hand sliding along through the layers of the cloak into my robe.

“Stop it!” I hissed at him. I wanted to smack him but I couldn’t, because all kinds of people were watching us. Anyway, we were supposed to be a
tableau vivant
, a bunch of living statues (except for the camel who was still scratching his butt on a tree). “Quit it!” I said.

“Aww.” He looked at me sideways without moving his head much. He has this goofy grin.

“Remember your relationship with God,” I whispered.

“I’m more interested in my relationship with you.”

“You don’t
have
any relationship with me,” I said. I was getting exasperated. “And if you don’t move your hand I will tear it off and stuff it up your butt just as soon as this pageant is over!” And then I winced because I was a little too loud and the lady who was taking our picture heard me.

“
You
aren’t going to heaven,” Noah said out of the side of his mouth.

I couldn’t help a snort of laughter. That did it. One of the shepherds giggled just because it’s contagious. Missy Escobar’s shoulders started shaking while she tried to hold her box of frankincense still, and then everyone was cackling, even though they didn’t know what at—just at us kneeling there in the cold, pretending to be Biblical figures even though the head angel got caught smoking pot behind the gym last week, and two of the shepherds are on probation at school for exploding their chemistry experiment on purpose, not to mention Noah, who is perpetually grounded or in trouble.

Father Weatherford came whisking up in his vestments and glared at us, and we tried to stop. We really did. But sometimes you just can’t. Life is just too funny, or maybe too scary, and you know you’re not holy, and the camel is so silly looking, and the more you try to behave, the more you just want to lie down on the floor and howl. Untied dogs for sure. We got it back together eventually, but I know Father Weatherford felt we’d let him down, so we stayed as still as we could for the next ten minutes until he gave the signal and the angels sang “O Holy Night” again, and everyone applauded.

Mom came up afterward to tell me how beautiful it all was. I thought she was going to give me the Serious Talk about Acting More Maturely, but she didn’t. Then when Ben came over, she started talking to Felix as if she just hadn’t happened to notice Ben. While Ben, on the other hand, definitely noticed them. So I was grateful when Jesse came over to show me the pictures he’d taken of us. I had to stay for the cast party afterward, and Father Weatherford invited Jesse to stay, too. He probably thought he’d be a good example for us. I thought the last thing Jesse would want to do would be go to a church social with a bunch of kids, but he said sure.

Father Weatherford and some of the Youth Group parents had laid out a spread of Christmas cookies and hot spiced cider in the parish hall. Someone brought marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate so we all flopped down on the floor by the fireplace with our plates and cups and made s’mores. Jesse sat next to me. He had to keep his left leg out straight at a weird angle, and the android-looking calf part of it stuck out, so of course the little kids all wanted to know what it was. I thought he might get mad, but he actually pulled up his cuff some more and showed it to them. When they asked too many questions, he taught them how to toast s’mores.

Father Weatherford put Christmas carols on and we ate and listened to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” The firelight made little flickering orange lights and shadows that danced across everyone’s face. It was beautiful and magical, so naturally Noah started waving his charred drippy marshmallow around like an idiot, saying, “Look, it’s Char Man!” The marshmallow was all black and starting to split in two. He poked it in the fire again and it went up in flames.

“There is no such person,” Missy Escobar said. “And don’t get that in my hair.”

Noah made a horrible face at her. “You don’t want to find out some dark night.”

One of the littlest kids said, “What’s Char Man?”

“You don’t know?”

Char Man is a local legend. Almost every kid over the age of five has heard it. So Noah told him. “There was this awful fire, like, way back in the eighties. It was in all the papers. Some guy’s tractor started it in the brush down in the river-bottom. And there were, like, all these houses down there. And there was this one house where this old dude lived with his brother. The old guy was real old, and his brother was just seventeen.”

“How could he be seventeen if his brother was old?” Missy asked. She rolled her eyes at me, like,
dork
.

“Their father had two wives, and the second one had the kid when their old man was real old himself,” Noah said. “Don’t interrupt, nonbeliever. So, the younger brother took care of his older brother who’d been wounded in some war and was messed up. He was in a wheelchair.”

I couldn’t help flicking an eye at Jesse to see if that bothered him. He was fixing another marshmallow for one of the little kids and didn’t seem to notice. But he has this little tic beside his eye that he gets when something upsets him.

“Then the fire started. And the dude in the wheelchair got trapped.”

The little kids all gasped. “What happened?” one of them asked.

“He burned to death.” Noah looked at them all solemnly. He’s a pretty good storyteller. “The younger brother tried to get him out, but the flames were too hot. The younger brother ran around and around the house trying to get in, and he could hear the old guy in there screaming the whole time.”

I felt Jesse twitch, like he was flinching, and I remembered Felix’s dream about the boats burning up on the river. Jesse was staring at the fire now.

“Then the roof fell in.” Noah smacked his hands together and blew his breath out fast. “And the fire was coming down the canyon.”

The little kid clapped his hand over his mouth.

“They never found him.”

“Who, the guy in the wheelchair?” someone asked.

“The younger brother. He’d waited too long and he couldn’t get out of the canyon.”

“He died?”

Noah shook his head. “He’s still out there. Lots of people have seen him. His face is half burned away and where one of his eyes ought to be, there’s just this glob of jelly, like a marshmallow.” He held the drippy marshmallow up to his eye and hung his tongue out the side of his mouth. “He couldn’t get his brother out, see, and he went crazy. He stayed down in the chaparral and scrub brush, eating animals that had been burned in the fire. He’s still there.”

“Well, what does he eat now?” Missy asked.

“Whatever he can catch. Raw.”

“Eeeww.”

“He caught this girl who went out hiking alone last summer.”

“He did not,” Missy said. “It would have been in the paper.”

“Her parents hushed it up. What was left of her was so gross, they didn’t want anyone to see it.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“He runs down deer,” Noah said. “I saw a chicken he caught once. There was nothing left but the feet and some feathers. He ate it, guts and all.”

“That was coyotes,” Missy said.

“Naw. It was Char Man. The fire couldn’t kill him, so nothing will. He keeps coming back to where his house used to be.”

I don’t believe in Char Man, but that didn’t stop me from getting the creepy feeling that something was actually out there. I scooted a little closer to Jesse and he laughed as if he knew why, but the laugh sounded forced.

“God. I’d forgotten all about Char Man,” he said. “I was raised on that story. I heard it at Boy Scout camp.”

“It’s so stupid, but it gives me the creeps,” I said.

“Fire does that.” Jesse looked back to where the flames were melting marshmallows into gobs of goo. “It … transforms things.”

I think there was a fire when Jesse got hurt. He didn’t get burned, but I think someone did. I can’t ask him. I just can’t.

Afterward I was on trash detail, and Jesse stayed to help me and drive me home. Mom and Ben assumed I would walk, so they didn’t have a chance to say not to go with Jesse.

It’s amazing how much stuff religious, supposedly civilized people will drop. We cleaned up drink cups from the Frosty and tons of gross cigarette butts and hamburger wrappers. We bagged it up with the straw from the stable floor and lugged it all out to the dumpster in back. There was an actual coyote nosing around the dumpster, with a hamburger wrapper in his mouth. In the middle of town. He took off when he saw us.