“I’m not supposed to …” the nurse said.
“We understand,” the shorter man said. “Will you join us in a moment of prayer? Precious Lord, we seek—”
The door opened, and as they all turned to look at a boy with a bleeding forehead, Mel slipped down the hall and up the stairs.
Where would they have taken her? he wondered, peering into rooms with open doors. Did a hospital this small even have separate wards, or were all the patients jumbled together?
She wasn’t on the first floor. He hurried up the stairs to the second, keeping an eye out for the men in the navy-blue suits. They didn’t know her name yet, but they would soon. Even if they couldn’t get it out of the admitting nurse, Cassie would have given them her health-insurance card. It would all be in the computer. Where would they have taken her? X-ray, he thought.
“Can you tell me how to get to X-ray?” he asked a middle-aged woman in a pink uniform.
“Third floor,” she said, and pointed toward the elevator.
Mel thanked her, and as soon as she was out of sight, he took the stairs two at a time.
Cassie wasn’t in X-ray. Mel started to look for a technician to ask and then saw B.T. down at the end of the hall.
“Good news,” B.T. said as he hurried up to him. “It’s not broken. She’s got a sprained knee.”
“Where is she?” Mel asked, taking B.T.’s arm.
“Three-oh-eight,” B.T. said, and Mel propelled him into the room and shut the door behind them.
Cassie, in a white hospital gown, was lying in the far bed, her head turned away from them as it had been in the frozen weeds. She looked pale and listless.
“She called her sister,” B.T. said, looking anxiously at her. “She’s on her way down from Minnesota to get her.”
“She told me I was lucky I hadn’t gotten into worse trouble than a sprained knee,” Cassie said, turning to look at Mel. “How’s my car?”
“A dead loss,” Mel said, stepping up to the head of the bed. “But it doesn’t matter. We—”
“You’re right,” she said, and turned her head on the pillow. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve come to my senses. I’m going home.” She smiled wanly at Mel. “I’m just sorry you had to go to all this trouble for me, but at least it won’t be for much longer. My sister should be here tomorrow night, and the hospital is keeping me overnight for observation, so you two don’t have to stay. You can go to your religious meeting.”
“We lied to you,” Mel said. “We’re not on our way to a religious meeting,” and realized they were. “You aren’t the only one who had an epiphany.”
“I’m not?” she said, and pushed herself partway up against the pillows.
“No. I got a message to go west, too,” Mel said. “You were right. Something important is going to happen, and we want you to come with us.”
B.T. cut in, “You know where He is?”
“I know where He’s going to be,” Mel said. “B.T., I want you to go get the road atlas and look up a town called Empyrean and see where it is.”
“I know where it is,” Cassie said, and sat up all the way. “It’s in Dante.”
They both looked at her, and she said, half-apologetically, “I’m an English teacher, remember? It’s the highest circle of Paradise. The Holy City of God.”
“I doubt if that’s going to be in Rand McNally,” B.T. said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mel said. “We’ll be able to find it by the lights. But we’ve got to get her out of here first. Cassie, do you think you can walk if we help you?”
“Yes.” She flung the covers off and began edging her bandaged knee toward the side of the bed. “My clothes are in the closet there.”
Mel helped her hobble to the closet.
“I’ll go check her out,” B.T. said, and went out.
Cassie pulled her dress off the hanger and began unzipping it. Mel turned his back and went over to the door to look out. There was no sign of the two men.
“Can you help me get my boots on?” Cassie said, hobbling over to the chair. “My knee’s feeling a lot better,” she said, lowering herself into the chair. “It hardly hurts at all.” Mel knelt and eased her feet into her fur-edged boots.
B.T. came in. “There are two men down at the admissions desk,” he said, out of breath, “trying to find out what room she’s in.”
“Who are they?” Cassie asked.
“Herod’s men,” Mel said. “It’ll have to be the fire escape. Can you manage that?”
She nodded. Mel helped her to her feet and went and got her coat. He and B.T. helped her into it, and each took an arm, and helped her to the door, opening it cautiously and looking both ways down the hall, and then over to the fire escape.
“I should call my sister,” Cassie said, “and tell her I’ve changed my mind.”
“We’ll stop at a gas station,” B.T. said, opening the door fully and looking both ways again. “Okay,” he said, and they went down the hall, through the emergency exit door, and onto the fire escape.
“You go bring the car around,” B.T. said, and Mel clattered down the metal mesh steps and ducked across the parking lot to the car.
The emergency-room door opened and two men stood in its light for a moment, talking to someone.
Mel jammed the key into the ignition, switched it on, and pulled the car around to the side of the hospital, where B.T. and Cassie were working their way down the last steps.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing Cassie under the arm, “hurry,” and hustled her across to the car.
A siren blared. “Hurry,” Mel said, yanking the door open and pushing her into the backseat, slamming the door shut. B.T. ran around to the other side.
The siren came abruptly closer and then cut off, and Mel, reaching for the door handle, looked back toward the entrance. An ambulance pulled in, red and yellow lights flashing, and the two men in the door reached forward and took a stretcher off the back.
And this is crazy, Mel thought. Nobody’s after us. But they would be, as soon as the nurse saw Cassie was missing, and if not then, as soon as Cassie’s sister got there. “I saw two men push a woman into a car and then go peeling out of here,” one of the interns unloading that stretcher would say. “It looked like they were kidnapping her.” And how would they explain to the police that they were looking for the City of
God?
“This is insane,” Mel started to say, reaching for the door handle.
There was a flyer wedged in it. Mel unrolled it and read it by the parking lot’s vapor light. “Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up to the Greatest Show on Earth!” it read in letters of gold. “Wonders, Marvels, Mysteries Revealed!”
Mel got into the car and handed the flyer to B.T. “Ready?” he asked.
“Let’s go,” Cassie said, and leaned forward to point at the front door. Two men in navy-blue suits were running down the front steps.
“Keep down,” Mel said, and peeled out of the parking lot. He turned south, drove a block, turned onto a side street, pulled up to the curb, switched off the lights, and waited, watching in his rearview mirror until a navy-blue car roared past them going south.
He started the car and drove two blocks without lights on and then circled back to the highway and headed north. Five miles out of town, he turned east on a gravel road, drove till it ended, turned south, and then east again, and north onto a dirt road. There was no one behind them.
“Okay,” he said, and B.T. and Cassie sat up.
“Where are we?” Cassie asked.
“I have no idea,” Mel said. He turned east again and then south on the first paved road he came to. “Where are we going?” B.T. asked.
“I don’t know that either. But I know what we’re looking for.” He waited till a beat-up pickup truck full of kids passed them and then pulled over to the side of the road and switched on the dome light.
“Where’s your laptop?” he asked B.T.
“Right here,” B.T. said, opening it up and
switching it on.
“All right,” Mel said, holding the flyer up to the light. “They were in Omaha on January fourth, Palmyra on the ninth, and Beatrice on the tenth.” He concentrated, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital.
“Beatrice,” Cassie murmured. “That’s in Dante, too.”
“The carnival was in Crown Point on December fourteenth,” Mel went on, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital, “and Gresham on January thirteenth.”
“The carnival?” B.T. said. “We’re looking for a carnival?”
“Yes,” Mel said. “Cassie, have you got your Bartlett’s Quotations?”
“Yes,” she said, and began rummaging in the emerald-green tote bag.
“I saw them between Pittsburgh and Youngstown on Sunday,” Mel said to B.T., who had started typing, “and in Wayside, Iowa, on Monday.”
“And the truck spill was at Seward,” B.T. said, tapping keys.
“What have you got, Cassie?” Mel said, looking in the rearview mirror.
She had her finger on an open page. “It’s Christina Rossetti,” she said.” ‘Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.’”
“They’re skipping all over the map,” B.T. said, turning the laptop so Mel could see the screen. It was a maze of connecting lines.
“Can you tell what general direction they’re headed?” Mel asked.
“Yes,” B.T. said. “West.”
“West,” Mel repeated. Of course. He started the car again and turned west on the first road they came to.
There were no cars at all, and only a few scattered lights, a farm and a grain elevator, and a radio tower. Mel drove steadily west across the flat, snowy landscape, looking for the distant glittering lights of the carnival.
The sky turned navy blue and then gray, and they stopped to get gas and call Cassie’s sister.
“Use my calling card,” B.T. said, handing it to Cassie. “They’re not looking for me yet. How much cash do we have?”
Cassie had sixty and another two hundred in traveler’s checks. Mel had a hundred sixty-eight. “What did you do?” B.T. asked. “Rob the collection plate?”
Mel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. “I won’t be back in time for the services on Sunday,” he told her. “Call Reverend Davidson and ask if he’ll fill in. And tell the ecumenical meeting to read John 3:16—18 for a devotion.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Mrs. Bilderbeck asked. “There were some men here looking for you yesterday.”
Mel gripped the receiver. “What did you tell them?”
“I didn’t like the looks of them, so I told them you were at a ministerial alliance meeting in Boston.”
“You’re wonderful” Mel said, and started to hang up.
“Oh, wait, what about the furnace?” Mrs. Bilderbeck said. “What if the pilot light goes out again?”
“It won’t,” Mel said. “Nothing can put it out.”
He hung up and handed the phone and the calling card to Cassie. She called her sister, who had a car phone, and told her not to come, that she was fine, her knee hadn’t been sprained after all, just twisted.
“And I think it must have been,” she said to Mel, walking back to the car. “See? I’m not limping at all.”
B.T. had bought juice and doughnuts and a large bag of potato chips. They ate them while Mel drove, going south across the interstate and down to Highway 34.
The sun came up and glittered off metal silos and onto the star-shaped crack in the windshield. Mel squinted against its brilliance. They drove slowly through McCook and Sharon Springs and Maranatha, looking for flyers on telephone poles and in store windows, calling out the towns and dates to B.T., who added them to the ones on his laptop.
Trucks passed them, none of them carrying Tilt-a-Whirls or concession stands, and Cassie consulted Bartlett’s again. “A cold coming we had of it,” it said. “Just the worst time of the year.”
“T. S. Eliot,” Cassie said wonderingly.” ‘Journey of the Magi.’”
They stopped for gas again, and B.T. drove while Mel napped. It began to get dark. B.T. and Mel changed places, and Cassie got in front, moving stiffly.
“Is your knee hurting again?” Mel asked.
“No,” Cassie said. “It doesn’t hurt at all. I’ve just been sitting in the car too long,” she said. “At least it’s not camels. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”
Yes, Mel thought, I can. I’ll bet everyone thought they were crazy. Including them.
It got very dark. They continued west, through Glorieta and Gilead and Beulah Center, searching for multicolored lights glimmering in a cold field, a spinning Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy, listening for the screams of the roller coaster and the music of a merry-go-round.
And the star went before them.
A Final Word
The giving (and getting) of gifts is inextricably bound up with Christmas and the Christmas story—from the Magis’ gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the partridge in the pear tree, from the turkey “bigger than a boy” that the formerly stingy Scrooge sends the Cratchits to the small bottle of cologne the still-stingy Amy buys for Marmee so she’ll have enough money to buy some drawing pencils. From heart’s desires like Ralphie’s “Red Ryder repeating carbine with a compass mounted in the stock” and Susan’s “a real house,” to the more symbolic, like Amahl’s crutch and the ham the Herdmans brought the Holy Family.
So it seemed fitting to end this book by giving some sort of gift. This is easier said than done. I can’t get you a BB gun. You’d shoot your eye out. And I don’t know what size you wear or what color you like, whether you have long hair or have sold it to buy a watch fob or the money for a train ticket for Marmee. I don’t know anything about you, really, except that you like reading Christmas stories.
When I was a kid, one of my chief joys was finding a wonderful new book or author, especially if the place I found it was in the pages of a book. When the little women read The Pickwick Papers, and played Pilgrim’s Progress, it was as if Jo was personally recommending them to me.
Kip’s father in Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit Will Travel wasn’t listening to Kip, because he was reading Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, and the three men in the boat were singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Anne of Green Gables acted out “The Lady of Shalott” by Tennyson, who wrote “Le Morte d’Arthur,” which led me to T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which was right next to Charles Williams’s All Hallow’s Eve on the library bookshelf, and Williams had been friends with J. R. R. Tolkien, who led me to Middle Earth, which led me to …
I’ve plugged some favorites in these stories—A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett in “Adaptation,” Miracle on 34th Street in “Miracle”—but there are lots of Christmas stories and movies I couldn’t manage to fit in, stories and movies I love and that my family reads out loud and watches together every Christmas.
So it seems like a perfect Christmas present to introduce you to them, the way Anne Shirley introduced me to Ben Hur and Kip Russell introduced me to The Tempest.
So here they are, twelve of them, in honor of the Twelve Days of Christmas, Twelfth Night, and Epiphany.
Merry Christmas!
Twelve Terrific Things to Read at Christmas
THE ORIGINAL (Matthew Chapter 1:18–25, 2:1–18, Luke Chapter 1:5–80, 2:1–52): The best Christmas story ever. This one’s got everything you could ask for in a story: adventure, excitement, love, betrayal, special effects. Good guys, bad guys, narrow escapes, reversals, mysterious strangers, and a great chase scene. And the promise of a great sequel.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens: The perfect Christmas story, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only way to begin a Christmas story is with, “Marley was dead: to begin with.” And just because you know it all by heart—Scrooge and Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Past, “I forged these chains in life,” and the bedcurtai
ns and the turkey and “God bless us, one and all!”—is no reason not to read it again.
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER by Barbara Robinson: This modest children’s story of a church Nativity pageant invaded by the horrible Herdman kids, who steal and swear and smoke cigars (even the girls), accomplishes the nearly impossible—the creation of a new classic—and makes the reader look at the story of Mary and Joseph and the baby “wrapped in wadded-up clothes,” as the Herdmans do, with new eyes.
“JOURNEY OF THE MAGI” by T. S. Eliot: The Bible doesn’t tell us anything about what the wise men’s journey to Bethlehem was like, or how much it must have cost them to make it. Or what happened to them afterwards, when it was time to go back home.
“THE TREE THAT DIDN’T GET TRIMMED” by Christopher Morley: Obviously inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s sickeningly sentimental “The Fir Tree,” this story of a tree that doesn’t get bought by anyone and instead gets thrown away not only avoids all the sins of its antecedent, but ends by telling a touching parable of those ultimate Christmas themes, suffering and redemption.
“THE STAR” by Arthur C. Clarke: One of the classics of science fiction by one of the masters in the field, this tells the troubling story behind the star that guided the wise men to Bethlehem.
“DANCING DAN’S CHRISTMAS” by Damon Runyon: When the dust settles on the twentieth century, it’s my belief that Damon Runyon will finally be appreciated for his clever plots, his unerring ear for language, and his cast of guys, dolls, gangsters, bookies, chorus girls, crapshooters, Salvation Army soul-savers, high rollers, lowlifes, louts, and lovable losers. I chose “Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” a story involving a mean mobster, a Santa Claus suit, a diamond vanity case, and a few too many Tom and Jerrys, but it was a tough call. “Palm Beach Santa Claus” and “The Three Wise Guys” were both a close second.