Then the sexton returned to his paperwork. I just sat there, my mind reeling. I thought I had received inspiration. Not knowing what to do, I did nothing. After a few minutes the sexton looked back up, probably wondering why I was still in his office. “What is it that you’rereally
trying to do, Mr. Evans?” he asked.
I looked down for a moment, then back into his eyes. “I just want to build a place where people can go to be healed.”
•
I may never fully understand what happened next. The sexton’s countenance suddenly changed. He stood up, walked over to a map on the wall, then, with a pen, made anXnear the center of the cemetery. “Here,” he said. “We could put it here.”We drove up to the site—a beautiful knoll that overlooked the city.
The sexton walked to the crest of the small hill and extended his arms outward, like angel wings. “It will go right here.” He looked around. “You’ll need more than one plot, though. You’ll need at least five. I could write an ordinance that would restrict other grave markers on this hill.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “It’s the strangest thing. There’s been a utility shed on this property for the last forty years. A few months ago it was torn down. I was supposed to sell the land, I even had buyers, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” He suddenly turned to me, seemingly as surprised at what he was saying as I was. “People will come from all over the world to see this angel.”
As we drove back to the office he said, “I get a lot of requests for this sort of thing and I have always turned them down. I don’t know why, but this angel of yours is supposed to be here.”
I drove him back to his office. His secretary followed me out to my car.
“What did he say?”
“He’s going to allow it. In fact, he’s going to request that the city donate the land.”
She looked at me incredulously. “Paul said that?”
I nodded.
“It’s a miracle,” she said.
•
We set the date of the angel’s dedication for December 6, the day of Andrea’s death inThe Christmas Box.I’m often asked why I chose the sixth. No reason, really. I suppose it’s just what came to mind.Ortho and Jared Fairbanks worked long days, often late into the night, to meet the nearly impossible deadline. They delivered the completed sculpture to the bronze foundry only a few weeks before the dedication ceremony. When Ortho went to the foundry to check on the sculpture’s progress he was asked by one of the foundry workers if there was something mystical about the angel.
“There are strange things happening with it,” he said. “It’s come together in a fraction of the time it should have, and several of our workers say they’ve had unexplainable feelings while working on it. We’ve begun to call it ‘the miracle angel.’ ”
I planned to pay for the bronze casting with profits from my book. In the meantime I had a lot of books to sell.
22
•
It is often during the worst of times that we see the best of humanity—awakening within the most ordinary of us that which is most sublime. I do not believe that it is the circumstance that produces such greatness any more than it is the canvas that makes the artist. Adversity merely presents the surface on which we render our souls’ most exacting likeness.It is in the darkest skies that stars are best seen.
THELETTER
FOR THE NEXT EIGHT WEEKSI established a book tour routine. I would fly into a city, rent a car and reserve a room at the cheapest hotel near the airport. Then I would do one or two signings and, if lucky, an interview with a local radio station.
I would also stop at nearly every bookstore I drove past. I would go all day, to the point of exhaustion, sometimes parking along the side of the road to nap in the car. I was stopped twice by police for nothing more than looking suspicious. One Dallas patrolman pulled me over because my license plate registration sticker was askew. I pointed out to him that I was driving a rental car, a fact that did not interest him in the least. As he inspected my car I put my hands in my pockets.
“What’s in your pocket?” he asked.
“Nothing. I was just putting my hands in my pockets.”
“What’s in your pocket?” he repeated, his hand now hovering near his gun.
“Nothing. My keys. That’s it. Really.”
“Raise your hands slowly and put them on top of the car,” he shouted, his voice slightly quivering.
I did as he said. He cautiously approached me, then frisked me for weapons. Finding nothing but keys, he reprimanded me for the way the rental company had positioned the car’s registration sticker, then left. I wondered if all Texas patrolmen were so pleasant.
I often wondered the same of the bookstores. With a few notable exceptions, the bookstores I visited offered little or no encouragement. Sometimes they couldn’t even muster common courtesy. At one book signing in San Diego, the manager acted annoyed by my presence. When I arrived, she hastily grabbed a chair and a stack of my books, both of which she placed in the middle of the store next to a table crowded with other authors’ books. People had to squeeze by me all night. I sold only one copy.
As humiliating as those early days were, I had more to worry about than ego. Keri and I had put all our money and our business on the line. And things weren’t going well.
A bookstore owner had warned me that even though things had gone well locally, I could not succeed nationally. I soon learned why. It’s one thing to get a chain of bookstores to buy your book, it’s something else to get the stores to sell it.
As I traveled the country from rental car to Motel 6, I found that outside Utah, not a single bookstore I visitedrecognized or cared about my book. In many cases they had not even bothered to take my book out of their back room. While it seemed inexcusable to me, it was understandable. Around Christmastime the back rooms of bookstores become cardboard jungles, with boxes of books stacked to the ceiling. With fifty to a hundred thousand different titles, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.
Here and there a ray of hope broke through my gathering clouds of anxiety. Bookstores in Utah and Idaho were sellingThe Christmas Boxat even higher levels than the year before. One book catalogue, from the Chinaberry company, reported thatThe Christmas Boxwas their bestselling item, and a newspaper article in Fort Wayne, Indiana, said that my book had taken their community by storm and become the number-one-selling book in the city. But these were the exceptions, not the rule, and in most places my books were still sitting in unopened boxes. By mid-November I realized just how serious the situation was. If circumstances did not change dramatically I could expect massive returns and would end up with a warehouse full of my unsold books.
And huge debts. Even though we had managed to ship out a lot of books, it meant little. The book industry operates on consignment. If a book does not sell, it is returned to the publisher for credit. Moreover, bookstores would never reorder the book, as their computers would pull upthe book’s history and report that it didn’t sell. It didn’t matter that the book was buried somewhere in their back room.
The only thing that could save me was sales. Lots of them.
In addition to my book worries, I had other fears. After years of infertility treatments, Keri was now seven months pregnant with our third child and having a difficult pregnancy. Her doctor had put her on strict bed rest until the baby was ready to be delivered. In dark thoughts I feared a terrible irony—I was speaking daily with people who had lost children through stillbirth or miscarriage, and we were now facing the possibility of losing ours.
Despite the gravity of our situation, the doctor had reassured us that with bed rest Keri and the baby would be fine. And we still had cause to be hopeful about the book.Peoplemagazine had shown interest in my story and had already sent a photographer out to Salt Lake City for a photo shoot with my family. The photographer had spent a half day shooting pictures of me with my daughters sleigh riding.
I had also landed one nati
onal TV appearance. Or at least a national cable appearance—a full fifteen-minute segment with live call-ins onWhat’s Newat America’s Talking.
As the days ticked off toward Christmas our anxietygrew. I had been initially told that thePeoplearticle would run the week after Thanksgiving, but it didn’t. Then another week passed without it. I began to realize that my story might not run. That left us just one hope, the cable TV show. Without it all would be lost.
23
•
DURING THESE WEEKS ONEthing did go right. On December 6 we dedicated the Christmas Box Angel statue in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. The statue had been completed by the foundry and placed upon its granite pedestal just the day before the dedication.
On the day of the dedication ceremony the weather turned inclement. Then, that evening, as Keri and I got ready for the ceremony, it began to rain. It does not often rain in Utah in December. It snows. Utahns are used to snow—they practically relish it. But no one goes out in winter rain. I was angry at first.Haven’t these people suffered enough, God?I thought. I did not believe anyone would come to the ceremony.
An hour before the event, as darkness fell, cars began to arrive. They came sporadically at first, then they came more steadily, until a long line of cars snaked through the cemetery, visible only by their headlights. It reminded me of the final scene of the movieField of Dreams. If you build it,they will come.That night hundreds of grieving parents braved the elements to attend the statue’s dedication.
Among those parents was a woman named Joyce Williams. Joyce had driven from Idaho to attend the ceremony, bearing two hundred long-stem white roses that she handed out to anyone who did not have a flower to lay.
Joyce shared her story with me. More than twenty-five years ago their only son, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy named Robbie, was killed in a tragic farming accident, beneath a tractor being driven by her husband. For all those years he held his pain inside, refusing to share his feelings or hurt. Then, one day, as they drove to visit their daughter, they listened to a radio interview of me talking aboutThe Christmas Box.To Joyce’s surprise her husband became very interested. He told Joyce that he wanted a copy of the book. They stopped in a bookstore for a copy but no one had heard of it. As she turned to leave, a small green book caught her eye. It wasThe Christmas Box.They brought it home and they took turns reading it. For the first time in more than two decades, he began to speak of their son and the tremendous pain he carried over his loss. His healing had finally begun.
The ceremony that night was simple. A neighborhood children’s choir sang Brahms’s “Lullaby.” I gave a dedicatory prayer, reminding those in attendance that while the earth beneath this statue held no child, no cemetery holds a child, for in God all children live. I also told them thatthe angel was not to be worshiped or idolized. It was just bronze. The healing could come only from God and the love and support of one another. As strangers huddled together for warmth, I realized that the weather was perfect for the event. These people had endured a much greater storm than could be delivered by clouds. And the way through such storms was to hold to one another for warmth and strength. God knew what he was doing after all.
Near the end of the evening a woman said something to me that truly summed up the event. “Thank you,” she said, wiping away her tears. “Finally someone has said it’s okay to cry.”
That night my father presented me with a wooden box that he had handcrafted from burled walnut, patterned after the box I described inThe Christmas Box.
Joyce Williams called me the day after the ceremony. That night she had planned to stay in Salt Lake City, but with so much on her mind, she decided instead to make the long drive home to Idaho. A few hours before arriving home, her car tape player broke. She had been listening to a Kenny G tape calledMiracles.
She fussed with her tape player for some time as she drove, then eventually gave up on it, finishing her ride in silence. She arrived in her city around 2A.M.In spite of the hour, she decided to stop and visit her son’s burial spot.
The ground of the cemetery was lit with newly fallen snow and all the headstones were covered with powder. All except for her son’s. She thought this curious, and as she stared silently at her son’s grave, the tape in her car suddenly began to play. The song it played was Brahms’s “Lullaby,” the same song the children had sung at the angel dedication. She bowed her head and wept.
Dear Richard,
Thank you for the beautiful story,The Christmas Box.My son Ben died three years ago, so, you see, this story holds a deeper meaning for me.
This morning I received a gift from a dear friend—your book, a white flower and a crystal angel. I immediately sat down and readThe Christmas Boxand wept for the pain of my loss, the joy of the gift and the delight of the message it brought me. I felt comforted and full of hope in being reminded that one day I will be able to hold my child again.
I have ordered flowers to be delivered to the statue dedication at the cemetery in Salt Lake City.
Most sincerely,
Sue
Dear Mr. Evans,
I have just finished readingThe Christmas Boxfor the second time. I’m sure I will read it many more times. I would like to thank you for writing this book. It is now my favorite book and I have given copies to special friends because I think the story is so important—especially to people like myself, who have had children die.
My daughter Julie died August 25 at the age of 17. My baby daughter, Clara, died the next evening. I was six months pregnant with her.
After Julie died, a lot of unusual things happened and still do. Julie was always a caregiver. She would drop important work if someone else needed her. I know she is even more of the savior now that she is not of this world.
In 1995 I started seeing your book everywhere I went and kept hearing her tell me I needed to read it. One day I had been especially bothered by her guiding me to the book, but I still didn’t buy it. I’m not sure why I resisted it so. But I went home and opened my mail. There was a package from the leader of my Compassionate Friends group. When I opened it, there was a copy of the book. I knew I had to read it immediately.
Like the angel inThe Christmas Box,I believe my Julie also plays a music box for me. It is one that must be hand wound in order to play—it can’t just get jarred into playing—yet in the middle of the night, just as inThe Christmas Box,it often plays.
Sincerely,
Mary H. Harrington
24
•
There are moments, it would seem, that were created in cosmic theater where we are given strange and fantastic tests. In these times, we do not show who we are to God, for surely He must already know, but rather to ourselves.
TIMEPIECE
ONNOVEMBER 30IFLEWto New Jersey for my cable appearance, arriving at the Newark airport around 1A.M.I got up early the next morning for the show, taking a taxi across the New Jersey Turnpike into Manhattan. A young woman came out to greet me in the lobby.
“What’s with the big bag?” she asked.
I had brought my suitcase filled with clothes. “I brought a few extra outfits in case you wanted me to change what I was wearing.”
“You won’t be on long enough for it to really matter.”
I wondered what she meant by that as she led me to a crowded greenroom. After a while she returned for me and we stopped in the hallway as she introduced me to the show’s producer—a thin, Jim Carrey look-alike about my age.
“You’re the Christmas story guy,” he said. “Sorry we had to cut your segment.”
“What?”
“We have this really funny segment with this snore-cure product. We taped one of our cameramen sleeping last night. It’s really great.”
I wasn’t amused.
“Sorry, man. No one told you?”
“No. I just flew all the way from Salt Lake.”
He frowned. “We have a little time during the cooking segment. We could squeeze in a half minute. It would at leas
t give you a chance to hold up your book.”
I did. It was a waste of time. The host asked me about my book as he stood behind a table sampling bourbon bonbons. I was gone with the commercial break.
As everyone ran off to prepare for the next segment, I unclipped my microphone.
“May I stay and watch the rest of the taping?” I asked the assistant.
“Why?” she asked curtly.
I handed her the microphone and walked out. I retrieved my suitcase and carried it to the lobby. “May I use your phone?” I asked the receptionist.
“Local, or long distance?”
“I just need to call a taxi.”
“All right,” she said grudgingly.
I waited in the parking lot for the cab. When I arrived at the hotel I went up to my room and called Keri. It was good to hear her voice.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Did you see it?”
“I couldn’t find it on TV.”
“It’s just as well. They pretty much canceled my segment.”
Uneasy silence. “Why?”
“They had some snore product.”
More silence.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m okay. Just being a good girl and staying down. How are you?”
“I’m pretty bummed. But there’s stillPeoplemagazine.”