I fell asleep in the tree, with my head on Molly’s shoulder. We were wedged close to one another, so I was warm. It was snowing heavily when she jabbed me with her elbow and said, “Wake up, it’s time to go.” She climbed down the tree and hurried off. I jumped down, knocking the accumulated snow from my back and shoulders, and chased after her. She was moving back toward our houses, toward the tee of the seventh hole. When I caught up with her I could see another vague shape stumbling through the snow, about thirty yards before us. We had to get closer before I could make out the distinctive silhouette of the Santa hat.
Sheriff Travis lived down by the river, in a modest cottage that I imagine must have been lonely for all its smallness, because his children were gone and his wife was dead. He was taking a shortcut over the golf course. I knew he would cross through the woods beyond the green to Beach Road. He was singing “Adeste Fideles” in a loud voice and did not hear us come up behind him.
Molly had taken out her dagger and handed me a short length of lead pipe. “Be ready,” she said. When we were less than ten yards away, she ran at him, looking slightly ridiculous trying to rush through the deepening snow with her short legs. But there was nothing ridiculous about the blow she struck, just above his wide black belt, about where his kidney would be. He fell to his knees and she struck again, this time at his back, almost right in the middle, and then again at his neck as he collapsed forward. He screamed at the first blow, just like I thought he would, a great, raw scream like the one my father let go in the hospital room when Colm finally stopped breathing. She stabbed him one more time, in the right side of his back. In the dark his blood was black on the snow. He lay on his face and was silent. I stood in the snow, clutching my pipe and wondering if I should hit him with it.
Molly grabbed my hand and dragged me after her. She ran as fast as she could, through the woods, then along Beach Road to a point just below our houses. “I got him,” she was saying breathlessly, in a high voice. “I got Santa.” Twice we had to crouch down behind tree trunks to escape the passing headlights of the party’s last few stragglers. We tore up through the ravine, past Gulliver’s headstone, and she gave me a push up the tree by my house, saying only, “Put your coat back downstairs!” before running off to her own house. I did as she said. I would have anyway, and it grated on me that she thought I would be careless. I still had the pipe. I put it deep in my closet, where the Spider-Man toys were piled.
Back in bed I looked out my window at the storm, which was still gaining strength. It would be almost a blizzard by morning. School would be canceled. I lay watching the snow that I knew was covering our child-sized footprints, covering Santa Travis’s body. I thought of him dying, the coldness of the snow penetrating in stages through his skin and his muscle and his bone, a dark veil falling over his sight like somebody was wrapping his head in layer after layer of sweet-smelling toilet paper, like Colm and I used to do when we played I Am the Mummy’s Bride, or The Plastic Surgeon Just Gave Me a New Face. I imagined Colm, waiting patiently by the door to where he was, waiting and waiting, peering at the slowly approaching figure.
But Sheriff Travis did not die. A concerned citizen, worried because of the storm, had called his house. When he didn’t answer, people went looking for him. They found him where we left him, alive. At the hospital my father operated to repair his lacerated kidney and fretted over his hemisected spinal cord.
When Sheriff Travis woke up he said he remembered everything. Despite the darkness of the night, and the falling snow, he gave fairly detailed descriptions of his attackers. Two large black men had done it, he said, one holding him while the other stabbed him and called him “Honky Santa.” Police called on the community just outside the Severna Forest gates, and two men were arrested after Sheriff Travis identified them in a lineup. I saw them in the paper.
Molly was furious that Sheriff Travis hadn’t died. She stood in my room, kicking my bed so hard that the wall shook and the first mate sign fell down with a clunk.
“Why?” she said in a loud voice. “Why couldn’t he have died?”
I thought about her hungry blue stone while she kicked my bed some more, until my father came to the door and said, “Everything OK in here?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “We were just kicking the bed.”
“Well, please don’t.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, blushing. I looked at the sunlight on the carpet and wanted my father to leave. Don’t make her angry, I was thinking.
When he was gone she said, “It’s just not fair.”
I thought it would be many more months before she returned for me at night. I thought we would lie low, but she came back after only two weeks had passed, at the beginning of the second week of January. She had been in Florida with her grandparents over break, while a bitter cold descended over the Atlantic coast from New York to Richmond. The river and even parts of the Chesapeake were frozen over. She came for me the first night she was back.
When we went down the ravine to Beach Road, I thought for sure we were going to Sheriff Travis’s house, to finish him off. But upon reaching the road she crossed it and stepped over the riverbank, onto the ice. She turned back to me. “Come on,” she said, sliding over the ice in her rubber boots. She went past the pier and the boat slips, out to the wide center of the river. Her voice came drifting back to me: “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” I hurried after the place where I thought her voice was coming from, but I never caught up with her — perhaps she was hiding from me. It was a clear yet moonless night, and she was wearing a dark coat and a dark hat. I stopped after a while and wrapped my arms around myself. I was cold because my parents were both home and I had not dared go down for my coat. Instead I had worn two sweaters, but they weren’t enough to keep me warm. I knelt on the ice and looked down at it, trying to catch Colm’s image. I heard Molly’s boots sliding over the ice out in the dark, and I thought about a story people told about the ghost of a girl who drowned skating across the river to Westport, to see her boyfriend. On nights like this, people said, you could see her, a gliding white figure. If you saw her face you would die by water one day. I looked downriver, searching for either the ghost or Molly but seeing only the lights of the bridges down past Annapolis. There was a flash, and for a moment I thought it was the winter equivalent of heat lightning, until I heard the Polaroid whirring.
She took my picture again, and again, from different sides. I suppose she was trying to upset me, or make me afraid. Maybe she thought I would run and slip on the ice. I just knelt there, and then I lay down on my back and looked up at the stars. My father had shown me the constellation of Gemini. It was the only one I ever looked for; and though I didn’t see it then, I made out my brothers shape in any number of places. Molly came sliding up to me. She stood behind my head; I could not see her, but I could see her panting breath.
I thought she would speak, then. In my mind I had heard her speak this speech; I had played it out many times: “I need you,” she would say. “For my parents. They’re stuck in here and I must let them out. You don’t mind, do you?” Of course I didn’t. I would have told her so, if I could have. I had been expecting her to say this ever since she had stabbed the horse, because I didn’t know what animal she could turn to after that, besides me. That night Colm had said to me, “So soon!” But it was not so soon, and I had waited.
She didn’t say anything, though. She only knelt near me and put a hand on my belly. She wasn’t smiling, just breathing hard. The camera hung around her neck and the dagger was in her hand. She raised my sweaters and my pajama top so that I felt the cold on my skin and the goose bumps it raised. She put the tip of the dagger against my belly, and when she looked at me I was so tempted to speak.