Jemma had her answer in moments. Felt paws and porcelain hands began to claw up through the dirt, followed shortly by the bodies of ragged bears and dogs and cats, dolls in rags with shattered eyes, robots with broken antennae, giraffes and hippos and elephants leaking stuffing. They crawled from their graves and lurched toward Jemma who, safe in her rubbery feeling, waited for them calmly. They only wanted hugs; she knew it as soon as one got close to her. It was a teddy bear, armless, legless, and unstuffed, just a head on a furry poncho. It smelled just like Aunt Mary’s terrible, terrible breath, a mixture of cat box and rotten meat, but Jemma hugged it tight. She hugged the broken dolls and the broken robots and the dull board games missing their pieces. She had enough hugs for every one of them, but they soon overwhelmed her, burying her under wool and silk and organdy and steel, until the mist settled in through the thin spaces between bodies and touched her skin. Then she was in her brother’s bed again, feeling like it had all gone very well, and that she had passed some sort of test.
“The Power will come!” cried the Spirit, and then it was gone. Jemma was alone with her sleeping brother in a dark, clear room. She did not have long to wait. There came an ominous knock on the door, four strong blows that Jemma was sure would wake everyone, but there was no change in Calvin’s snoring.
“Come in,” Jemma whispered. She thought it was Santa this time, good old regular Santa come to comfort her, or explain the significance of what she’d seen. Then she thought it was a headless Santa. Then she realized it was an empty Santa suit — empty but mighty, it would have fit a Santa who was eight feet tall. “Who are you?” Jemma asked, though she already knew.
It never spoke, but only pulled open its robe with invisible fingers. The robe disrobed, revealing what it had covered, the most beautiful light Jemma had ever seen. It was as strong and bright and warm as the sun, but cold as a faceful of snow. Jemma lay in it, feeling warm and cold, cherished and unnoticed, elevated and, finally, terrified, before she finally fell away, passing out or passing deeper into sleep, but still feeling the presence against her face. She was never aware of waking, but realized with a start that it was morning, and that the sun was shining in her eyes.
She tried to leap up and jump on the bed, but her legs were still full of the rubbery feeling, so she fell on her brother. “Calvin!” she shouted, over and over. It took so long to wake him up she thought for a moment that Santa had killed him in the night.
They hurried downstairs, stumbling in their slippers and drug hangovers on the landing and the stairs, slipping on the last step and tumbling together to the carpet, then both clawing over each other and helping each other up as they made for the basement staircase. They slipped again at the top of those stairs, but bore each other up, and took the last half of the stairs calmly. Jemma stopped at the last step while Calvin went on. She saw the flash of her father’s camera, and heard Calvin gasp. Here at the end she liked to pause, and she finally liked the waiting, because she knew it was utterly in her power now, and all she had to do to make it end was take a step, past the wall that was hiding her from her parents. She understood that this was a moment in time, about to pass. She put her hand on the wall and closed her eyes.
You must eventually take that last step, have to open every last present, feeling, on your very edges, but not knowing or understanding how they are all wrong, the Smurf mushroom house, the Junior Marie Curie Radioactive Discovery Set with the real glow-in-the-dark artificial radium, even the Bat Girl sleeping bag for which you have positively lusted these past months. They have not given you what you really wanted, just like they haven’t given Calvin what he wanted, because it is not theirs to give. Every box contains an empty, worthless secret. There is offal in your stocking. The valium-visitations of your endless night are already being forgotten, but not their secret lessons. Your parents are waiting, the camera is poised, your brother is rooting like a hog among the plenty, searching for the box that might contain the secret instruction for his going — but stay. You can stay just on this side of the corner, with time still under your thumb, for as long as you like.
42
How small a matter had it been to come forth securely, and as it were in sport to undergo death. Herein was true proof of boundless mercy, that he shunned not the death he so greatly dreaded. And there can be no doubt that, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle means to teach the same thing when he says that he “was heard in that he feared.” Some, instead of “feared,” use a term meaning reverence of piety, but how inappropriately, is apparent both from the nature of the thing and the form of the expression. Christ then praying in a loud voice, and with tears, is heard in that he feared, not so as to be exempted from death, but so as not to be swallowed up by it like a sinner, though standing as our representative. And certainly no abyss can be imagined more dreadful than to feel that you are abandoned and forsaken of God, and not heard when you invoke Him, just as if he Had conspired your destruction. Worse, though, to live everyday knowing that you never did the thing that you were supposed to, indicted by every ruined person and thing as the first, worst, and only coward. And almost as bad, to spend a whole life trying to figure it out (and isn’t it a gift and a punishment never to be allowed to think of anything else) and still never figure out how to do it.
The world is as it is, and I am as I am, and how will I ever change either one?
43
“Did you find it?” Kidney asked the dolphin. She was in an empty classroom on the fourth floor, standing on a table and leaning out the window.
“No,” said Light On The Water.
“Did you look? Did you look hard?”
“I traveled North to the penguin-water and East to the pillars of the moon and South to the republic of squid and West to the kingdom of the sun. There is water everywhere, and no land. There are no waves for sport, and no beaches whereupon I might throw myself if my heart should break. The world is water, and you have no place but here to rest your round head.”
“But did you really look? I told you to look all over the world and you’re back already. Did you cheat? I think you cheated. I don’t think you did your homework!”
Light On The Water ducked her head and slapped the water with her mouth, the dolphin equivalent, Kidney knew, of a shrug. “I have traveled far; my brothers and sisters have traveled farther, and all together we have circumscribed this endless ocean. And Shafts of Moonlight, who is a sorcerer and can see through the eyes of little fish, has been in a trance this past week, searching from little mind to little mind, borrowing eyes all over the world and always only seeing the same thing. Nowhere even a speck of dry sand.”
“Well you had better get out there and look again. It’s out there somewhere, I can feel it.” Kidney struck her heart when she said this, something that her father always did when he said something he really meant. “I know it!”
“I am tired of swimming and seeking in vain,” said the dolphin.
“Well, I’m tired of being stuck in the hospital! Who’s the boss here, anyway?”
“You are,” said Light On The Water. Kidney had figured out pretty quickly that dolphins would do anything you told them to, and had spent a lot of time ordering them to do tricks before she realized she could send them on an important secret mission, one that she hadn’t even told her own brothers and sisters about. She hadn’t even told them, or anyone else, that the dolphins did more than just laugh and play when she talked to them.