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?”