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 walclass="underline" 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.