and Dad still loved each other, and Great Uncle Tobias hadn’t moved out. Those were all things we could probably agree to be thankful about. So how come I felt mad instead?
I played the chords for anger, stomping doom chords, to get that out of my system. I thought about the Christmas carols I heard at the mall or on the radio, and tried making up something bright and gladdened, prancy and bouncy. That was easy, and incredibly unsatisfying. I started fitting words into the catchy melody I had come up with, and when I found myself rhyming “Presence” with “presents,” I slammed the lid down over the keyboard and stomped out of the living room. I had figured out where the anger came from. Mama wanted me to feel something I didn’t feel, thanks / glad / appreciate / love / return / blessing. Of all the sins I had committed, one I’d stayed away from was forcing anybody to feel something they weren’t feeling. I’d avoided that one without realizing it, and now I was trying to violate my own somewhat elastic code of ethics.
I paced through the front hall, then through the dining room, the kitchen, the back hall, the study and the living room again. I nearly tripped over the cord to Flint’s lights as I stalked past the tree. The tree rustled at me, and I glanced at it, annoyed. It was a scruffy little oak tree, wearing Flint’s white electric lights if they were a pearl necklace. After a minute, I went over and collapsed on the couch, amid puffy squashed pillows that belched dust. I stared at the tree. “Look at me,” it said, “look at me!”
“I’m looking,” I said.
“I see you,” it said, its voice faint but joyous, and I thought about my trees. I had collected seven before Flint figured out how to tree-speak, and each year I’d been glad to go, because something happened in the course of finding a tree that made me feel like no matter what I was like, or who I was, I was doing something right. Trees didn’t care that I’d hurt my sisters or terrorized my little brother. Trees didn’t care that I was spiteful and mean at school. Trees just wanted to acknowledge that I was a human and they were trees and here we were, on the planet together, and it was nice to think about that at least once a year.
“You are beautiful,” I told Beryl’s tree.
“You are beautiful,” it told me.
We stared at each other for a long time, and then I went to the piano and played what that felt like. It was a song with no words, and it wasn’t really about gratitude or anything like that. It just said we’re here together and I’m glad. I worked it over until it felt just right, then talked to the piano. It accepted the song. It liked it. It went on playing after I stood up, and I wandered out to the hall with my carol going on behind me. The house felt different. I ran upstairs and lay on my bed and fell asleep to the muffled sound of the carol seeping into the walls.
OPAL’S ORNAMENT
I held them all when they were babies, even Jasper. I remember when he was an infant and I was two and-a-half, I sat on the big couch and Mama put Jasper into my lap. I hugged him so hard he squeaked. Mama taught me to be gentler with my love. I adored them all, before they could talk.
Something happens when babies start talking. I’m not sure what, but you just feel differently about them.
I was thinking about my ornament. I’m sure Mama just gave me this assignment because she couldn’t think of something more useful for me to do. My gifts aren’t up to anything major; she’s already tested me on lights and Spirit invocation and fire, and I flunked them all. I’m not musical like Jasper, and even if it was all right for the eldest to tree talk, I never succeeded at that, either. So for the past six years I’ve made an ornament for the tree.
Last year, all I thought about was how to make my ornament more beautiful than the ones I’d made before; that’s been my focus since I started. Beauty is something I understand. This year, though, I thought about babies instead of silver lace snowflakes inside iridescent bubbles, or mirror-bright stars with faint images of flowers etched into their surfaces.
Babies, and traditions. If the heart of the Christmas tradition was love and thanks for the family being together, maybe I should try to illustrate that somehow. I thought about loving my family, and somehow it got all tangled up with babies—nontalking babies.
I took some woodchips I’d stolen from the wood pile, and cupped them in my hands, and thought, gift me with the beloved image of Jasper, please, and there in my hands was a tiny baby with hazel eyes, wearing nothing but diapers.
The same thing happened when I asked for the beloved images of Gypsum, Flint, and Beryl.
I set the babies on the pink bedspread and studied them, and felt my heart melting. They looked wide-eyed, curious, wistful. Jasper reached up a chubby hand. Gypsum had her hands clasped over her belly. Flint was curled on his side, leaning on his fist. Beryl’s hands lay open at her sides. I loved them all.
I took some more woodchips and asked for the beloved image of Opal, please. For a moment a tiny haze clouded my hands; when it cleared, I found the figure of a little blonde girl with wide violet eyes. She was sitting back on her heels, her hands flat on her thighs, and looking down. She wore a flannel nightgown with teddy bears on it. She looked about four. I felt like crying and didn’t know why.
I set her among the others.
I took a stick and asked for the image of the beloved Daddy. He looked just like he always does, shy, smiling, his hair a little mussed. The image of the beloved Mama made her look different: she wore a smile I couldn’t ever remember seeing on her face, so that she looked soft and pleased. The image of the beloved Tobias came out just like him, tense and relaxed at the same time, his smile broad.
I thanked my gifts for their help. I set everybody on the bedspread and spent time arranging them, seeing who they’d be next to, logically. Mama and Daddy together, of course, standing to the rear, looking down at the children. After a hesitation, I put Gypsum and Jasper next to each other, because when they were babies, they were inseparable, though since transition it’s another story. I put Beryl on Gypsum’s other side, and Flint on Jasper’s other side. That left Great-Uncle Tobias and me as loose pieces. We didn’t fit together. I knew Great-Uncle Tobias loved Jasper and Gypsum the best. I asked my gifts to change him from a standing to a sitting position, and my gifts obliged. I set Tobias at Jasper and Gypsum’s heads, just in front of Mama and Daddy.
And was left with me.
I held my image in my hand and cried.
After a while I rearranged everybody into a chronological spiral, Great-Uncle Tobias at the outer edge, Beryl in the middle. It satisfied my desire for order, but it looked stupid. I put everybody back the way they had been the first time, and then put me, kneeling at the babies’ feet, facing toward Great-Uncle Tobias and my parents. That, at last, felt right. I was a little outside, a little beyond, looking back at them. They were absorbed in each other.
I gripped a stick of wood and asked my gift for a solid cloud big enough to hold my little beloveds, and a cloud formed in my hands, puffy and pearl-gray and strong enough to support a whole family. I set everybody on it the way I had planned. I hung it in the air and stared at it for a long time. Maybe everybody would laugh at it. They had all said they liked my earlier ornaments, but maybe that was the Christmas talking and not them. Maybe Jasper would hate being a baby. I listened to all these thoughts, and wondered if there was something better I could make, and decided there wasn’t. I took my ornament downstairs to the living room, where Beryl’s tree stood, garlanded with Flint’s lights. The music of Jasper’s carol was playing, coming from everywhere, not from the stereo. A big plate of Gypsum’s cookies sat on the piano.
Daddy was alone in the room with all these things; he was
