The pendant on Anne Faith's
neck went warm and as Marietta gripped the jagged cross slightly after grabbing
it from Anne; her palm hitched it, and blood welled. Marietta's water-sense recognized it: the way
you recognize a hand
you've held before. Not arriving. *Returning.* The rain on the
windshield thinned into
something softer and five years gone, and the Omaha parking lot
folded backward like a
page turning itself, and they were twelve years old again— and it smelled of
lavender.
They were in an apartment
with a radiator that barely worked, on the one night a year the distance between
heaven and earth had never agreed to close.
*"For unto you is
born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord."*
*— Luke 2:11 (KJV)*
Marietta and Anne Faith's
soul that Christmas Eve was the color of a window nobody had
looked through in a long
time.
Gray. And cold around the
edges. And dusty in a way that wasn't about dust.
They were twelve years old
and sitting on the floor of their apartment with their back
against the radiator that
barely worked, watching the snow come down outside like it had
somewhere to be that
wasn't here. The tree was up — a small one, a real one, the kind
their mom bought every
year because she said plastic trees smelled like giving up. The
lights were on. The star
at the top was a little crooked.
Their mom Maryanne was at
work.
She was a nurse at St.
Mary's, and St. Mary's didn't close for Christmas Eve, because
people got sick on
Christmas Eve the same as any other night, and someone had to be
there. She'd left them a
note on the kitchen table with a twenty-dollar bill and a
drawing of a lopsided
heart. The note said: *Back by midnight baby's. Chinese food in the
fridge. I love you bigger
than the sky.*
They had read it three
times. Then Marietta put it in her pocket where she could feel the
edges of it.
Still.
The apartment was quiet
the way apartments get quiet when you are the only person in
them and the quiet knows
it.
-----
Outside the window, six
floors down, a man sat on the steps of the building across the
street.
Marietta and Anne had
noticed him an hour ago when the snow started. The man wasn't
young and wasn't old — it
was hard to tell through the window and the dark and the
falling white. He was
wearing a coat that looked like it had been through two winters
more than it was supposed
to. He had a cardboard box beside him that had seen better
days. He was just —
sitting. The way you sit when you have run out of places to go and
have decided that this
place, this cold step, is the place you will spend whatever time
is left before something
changes.
Not moving. Just there.
"Somebody should help
him," Marietta said.
"We're only twelve
and six floors up and it's snowing," Anne said.
"Somebody else
will."
They looked away from the
window.
-----
The thing about Christmas
when you are twelve and in a not-quite-warm apartment is that
it asks you a question you
didn't ask it to ask.
The question was not: are
you happy?
The question was quieter
and more grievous than that. It came in through the smell of
the pine tree and the glow
of the crooked star and the way the Chinese food in the
fridge had their mom
Maryanne's handwriting on the container — *My girls* just their
names, in her loopy
letters — and it said:
You girls are always in
Mama's thoughts and prayers. Love you.
And the honesty, the thing
they didn't want to say even in the private, was: if they
could be faithful to love
as their mother Maryanne had been all her life.
Their dad had been gone
for years. Not gone like dead. Gone like left. Gone like he had
passed away from whatever
weird reason, but mom never talked about. Their mom Maryanne
never said anything bad
about their dad. That was the thing. She never said a word. She
just worked her shifts and
bought the real tree and drew lopsided hearts on notes and
they loved her for it so
much it ached.
But loving someone for
being brave does not make the absence of the other person hurt
less.
They picked up the Bible
from the end table. Their great grandmother's Bible — she'd been
gone three years now, but
her Bible lived here, and sometimes they picked it up not to
read it but just to hold
something that she had held. The cover was soft from forty years
of her hands. The pages
were thin as breath.
Marietta opened it the way
she used to — not to any particular place, just wherever it
fell.
Luke 2.
*And there were in the
same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over
their flock by night.*
They read it slowly. Not
because it was hard — they had heard it every Christmas their
whole life — but because
this year it sounded different. This year the shepherds felt
real in a way they hadn't
before. Real the way the man on the steps across the street was
real. Real the way cold
was real.
*And, lo, the angel of the
Lord came upon them; and the glory of the Lord shone round
about them: and they were
sore afraid.*
Sore afraid. Anne Faith
liked that. Not just afraid — *sore* afraid. The kind of afraid
that lives in the body.
That you feel in your chest and your stomach and the backs of
your knees.
She knew what that felt
like.
*And the angel said unto
them, Fear not.*
They stopped on those two
words.
Fear not.
Not: *it's going to be
okay.*
Not: *everything will work
out.*
Just: *fear not.* As if
the angel knew that the fear was real, the night was real, the
cold was real — and was
saying *fear not* anyway. Not because there was nothing to fear.
Because there was
something greater than the thing they feared.
They sat with that for a
while.
The tree's lights blinked
once, like they were lamps in the dark.
-----
They looked out the window
again.
The man was still there.
The snow was coming down
harder now — not violent, not dramatic, just steady and
indifferent the way Iowa
snow got in December, the kind that didn't care whether you were
watching it or not. It was
accumulating on the man's shoulders. On the cardboard box. On
the steps around him.
He's going to freeze,
Marietta said to Anne.
They thought about the
note, with the twenty-dollar bill.
Anne Faith thought about
being twelve and the rules their mom had about leaving the
building alone after dark
and how she would probably be upset and how they would have to
explain it.
Then they thought about
the shepherds in the field, in the cold, keeping watch.
They thought about fear
not.
They went and got their
coats.
THE STEPS
The cold hit their faces
at the front door the way cold does when you've been inside a
warm place — not
gradually, not with warning, just: *here it is.* All of it.
The air smelled of snow
and something underneath it that was old and clean and faintly
sweet, the way the air
sometimes smelled at Christmas, the smell that didn't have a name
exactly but that Anne
associated with their great grandmother's kitchen and the feeling
of being somewhere that
loved you.
They crossed the street.
The man looked up when
they got close. His eyes were brown. Tired. The specific tired of
someone who had been tired
for long enough that being tired had stopped being a state and
became a permanent
address.
But not unkind.
Not unkind at all.
Marietta said,
"Hi."
The man said, "Hey,
kiddo's."
Anne said, "We have
twenty dollars. I don't know if that helps. There's a bodega on the
corner that's open, I
think, and they have those hot sandwiches in the case." She held
out the bill. Their hands
were already going red from the cold.
The man looked at the
twenty. Then at Marietta and Anne, then back at the twenty.
"That's your
Christmas money," the man said.
"Yeah," said
Marietta."
"You sure?" Said
the man.
Anne and Marietta thought
about the question in the apartment. *Is this enough?* They
thought about the
shepherds, sore afraid, keeping watch. They thought about their mom
Maryanne drawing a
lopsided heart at 5 a.m. before a twelve-hour shift because she wanted
them to know they were
loved even when she couldn't be there to say it.
"Yeah," Marietta
said. "We're sure."
The man took the bill. He
looked at it for a moment with the expression of someone
receiving something they
had stopped expecting — surprised, like a gift unexpected on
Christmas morning.
"My name's Ray,"
the man said.
"I'm Marietta, and
this is my sister Anne Faith."
"Marietta, Anne
Faith." Ray said the names the way you say a name when you want to make
sure you've got it right.
"Anne, Faith. Marietta." You girls are beauty in the darkness of
this world.
Anne Faith blinked.
"I guess. We can't stand to see a man freeze out here, it's cold
out."
Ray nodded slowly.
"She knew what she was doing."
-----
They were quiet for a
moment, the two of them, in the snow, which was still falling
steady and indifferent and
beautiful in the way only snow at night is beautiful — lit
from below by the
streetlights, each flake carrying its own small illumination, the whole
of it together making the
dark a little less dark.
They all looked up.
Past the streetlights,
past the snow, past the flat winter ceiling of cloud — one star.
Just one.
Not bright the way stars
are bright in pictures. Not dramatic. Just — there. Steady and
patient and impossible to
ignore once you'd noticed it, the way certain truths are
impossible to ignore once
you've looked at them directly.
"That star's been
there all night," Ray said. Not to them specifically. To the air. The
way people say things
they've been holding for a while and have finally decided to let
out.
Anne Faith looked at it.
"It's not moving."
"Nope." Ray
said.
"Stars move. They
rotate with the earth." Marietta replied.
"Yeah." Ray was
quiet. Then: "Maybe this one's got somewhere specific to be."
Marietta and Anne felt
something move in their chest that was not happiness and not
sadness.
But it was maybe the place
where both of them lived. The place underneath the question.
The place that had been
waiting all evening for something to land in it.
Not an answer. Something
better than an answer.
Presence.
*For unto you is born this
day,* the angel had said. Not unto the people who had it
together. Not unto the
people who were okay. *Unto you.* The shepherds in the field in
the cold keeping watch
over everything they had, which wasn't much, which was just sheep
and darkness and the long
ordinary weight of an ordinary night.
*Unto you.*
-----
Ray stood up. He tucked
the twenty into his coat with the careful deliberateness of
someone who has learned
not to lose things.
"You should get
inside," he said. "Your mama know you're out here?"
"She's at work."
Marietta and Anne Faith both simultaneously said.
"Mm." Ray looked
at them with the eyes of someone who understood things about working
mamas. "She a good
one?"
"The best one,"
Marietta said. And meant it without qualification, without the shadow of
the absence underneath it,
just — the straight truth of it, clean and certain.
Ray smiled. It rearranged
his whole face. Not a young face. Not an easy face. But a face
that had kept something
intact through whatever had worn it down to here, something that
the wearing-down had not
reached, something that smiled the way embers smile — quiet and
warm and still burning.
"Merry Christmas,
Marietta, and Anne Faith, thanks for blessing me," he said.
"Merry Christmas,
Ray."
Ray tucked his cardboard
box under his arm and walked up the street toward the bodega on
the corner, his footprints
making clean dark shapes in the new snow, and Marietta and
Anne watched him go until
he turned the corner and was gone, and the snow continued to
fall into the empty space
where he had been and filled it gently and without judgment.
UPSTAIRS
Their mom was home by
eleven-thirty.
They heard her keys in the
lock and the specific sound of her taking off her shoes at the
door — she always did
that, she said the hospital floor got into the soles and she didn't
want to bring it home —
and then her voice from the hallway:
Maryanne said,
"Baby's? You guys still up?"
Marietta said, "Yeah.
In here."
She came around the corner
in her scrubs, her hair still in the braid she wore for work,
and she looked at them
sitting under the tree with the Bible in their lap and the lights
blinking and the crooked
star, and her face did something that wasn't quite a smile and
wasn't quite tears.
"You girls ate?"
she said.
"Yeah." They
both replied.
She sat down next to them
on the floor. She was tired in the way that twelve hours of
caring for people makes
you tired — not the irritable kind of tired, the empty kind, the
kind that comes from
pouring yourself out all the way to the bottom. She leaned her head
on Anne Faith's shoulder.
She let her.
They sat there in the
quiet under the crooked star and the blinking lights and outside
the snow was still
falling, steady and indifferent and beautiful.
After a while she said,
"How was your night ladies?"
They thought about the
twenty dollars. About Ray's smile. About the star that stood
still. About the shepherds
in the field, sore afraid, and the angel saying fear not — not
because there was nothing
to be afraid of, but because something greater was arriving,
had already arrived, had
been arriving since before any star was placed in the sky.
"We gave away the
twenty," they both said separately.
She was quiet for a
moment.
Maryanne said,
"Good."
Not: *why?* Not: *we
needed that.* Just: good. The word delivered without conditions or
qualifications, the way
their mom delivered most important things — directly, without
ornament, with the weight
of someone who had thought about what mattered and had decided.
Anne Faith showed her the
star through the window. The one that wasn't moving.
She looked at it for a
long time.
"Your great grandma
used to say," Maryanne said quietly, "That every time she looked at
the Christmas star she
remembered that God thought we were worth coming down for. Not
worth saving from a
distance. Worth coming all the way down into the cold and the mess
and the specific,
ordinary, hard business of being a person." She paused. "She said
that
was the whole thing. That
was Christmas. God deciding the distance was too much..."
They both thought about
that deeply.
The distance. The closing
of it.
Their mom's head on
Marietta's shoulder now. Ray's footprints in the snow. The Bible soft
from their great
grandmother's hands. The lopsided heart on the note still in Marietta's
pocket.
*Fear not.*
Not because the night
isn't cold. Not because the distance isn't real. Not because the
absence doesn't ache in
the specific, daily, bone-deep way that absences ache.
But because Someone had
decided, a long time ago.
On a night much colder
than this one, in a city far, far, away decided the distance was
unacceptable.
And closed it.
And was still closing it.
In every act of ordinary
faith that passed between ordinary people on ordinary nights — a
twenty-dollar bill, a
lopsided heart, a head on a shoulder, a name said carefully, a star
that stood still — still
arriving.
Still.
*Unto you.*
-----
Their mom Maryanne fell
asleep on the floor under the tree before midnight. She was like
that — she could sleep
anywhere when she was that tired, easy and sudden, like a lamp
switching off.
Anne Faith got the blanket
from the couch and put it over her.
They looked at her face.
She was beautiful the way
someone is beautiful when they have been faithful to love for a
long time and it has
shaped them — not easily, not without cost, but into something that
holds its shape under
pressure. Into something real.
Marietta put her hand on
her shoulder for a second. Just that.
Then they looked out the
window one more time.
The star was still there.
Steady. Patient.
Impossible to ignore.
Anne turned off the lamp
and left the tree lights on — so she'd see them when she woke up
— and went to bed.
Outside, the snow fell on.
And the star stood still.
*"And this shall be a
sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes,
lying in a manger."*
*— Luke 2:12 (KJV)*
The verse was still
hanging in the air like a dream.
Rain again. Nebraska rain,
flat and gray and five years late. The radiator's tick became
the heater's rattle. The
crooked star and the blinking lights folded themselves back into memory.
But the cross in Marietta's
palm was still there still warm with a little blood.