When We Were Animals(32)

“Let’s see,” he said. “Here it is. Eight thirty-two, ante meridian.”

I looked at my watch. It was half past nine.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re officially sixteen years old.”

So it was true. I was a year older but still periodless.

I was officially a lot of things. Sixteen was only one of them.

*



The day after my birthday was Christmas Eve, and it also happened to be the first night of Lake Moon. There would be no carolers this Christmas, no midnight masses at the church. This would be a Christmas to stay indoors.

My father and I had much to do, since our preparations for the holiday only began that morning. We got up early and picked out a tree from the Christmas tree farm by the freeway. It was my job to stand back and determine its straightness while he secured it in the metal stand in our living room. We decorated and drank eggnog. We sang along to “Good King Wenceslas,” which was our favorite Christmas song—and, as far as I have been able to tell, nobody else’s favorite Christmas song in the world.

Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the feast of Stephen,

When the snow lay round about

Deep and crisp and even.

Brightly shone the moon that night,

Though the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight

Gathering winter fuel.



We sat together across our small dining room table, and we drank cinnamon-scented mulled wine that had been heated in a saucepan on the stove. My father put a stick of raw cinnamon in each one—and even though the wine did not taste good to me, I liked to be drinking it with him, watching the steam rise from the crystal goblets set on the red tablecloth I insisted on using for the occasion.

After dinner my father put on a Motown Christmas album, and we danced together to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and then we lit a candle for Felicia Ann Steptoe and put it in the window, without somberness, to invite her ghost to visit.

There were very few presents under the tree, but they were all labeled carefully nonetheless. We made sure that some of them—both for him and for me—were labeled “From Santa,” because Santa Claus was the invisible third guest at our miniature holiday. The truth is, we made our aloneness into a gift and gave that gift to each other, and it was our true and main present to unwrap.

I ate fewer frosted sleigh-shaped Christmas cookies than I normally did, because my stomach was still bothering me. So I went to bed early and turned on the radio to be lulled to sleep by “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—and also to drown out before I even heard them the sounds that might be coming from outside. This was a holy night, a peaceful night, and I would not indulge those wild creatures in the street—not even for a second.

*



It was well after midnight when I woke up. At first I thought it was the cramping in my gut that had woken me—I thought for sure my period had finally come. But then, surfacing into consciousness, I realized that the voice I was hearing in my ears was actually coming from outside, that it was the voice of Polly. She called to me from the pitchy night.

“Lumen! Lumen, help me!”

I got out of bed, drew the curtains aside, and opened the window.

The first thing I noticed was the quality of the air that blew into the house. It was frigid in my lungs, but it made me feel much better than I had been feeling over the past couple days, and I made a resolution to get more fresh air than I had been getting.

Polly was there, standing just below my window in the front yard. Strange, I thought, that the last time Polly came and stood under my window Peter was sleeping in the den two doors down and knew nothing of it at all. Now he was somewhere out there among them.

Polly looked roughed up. There were bruises on her face, little abrasions all over the pale skin of her chest.

She was naked, her legs lost to midcalf in the snowbank. As part of my research, I had been made to understand that breachers did not feel the cold the way other people did. I was told that their blood ran hotter during those nights. A girl of science, a daughter of facts, I hadn’t entirely believed it until now. Like a beech tree, Polly’s frail white body was planted, unshivering, in the snow, her breath coming in visible puffs between her bleeding lips, her skin varicolored by the string of blinking Christmas lights hung on the eaves of the house. While she may have been hurting from her injuries, it seemed the cold was nothing to her.

“Lumen,” she said from the pool of lamplight in the street, “please.”

“What do you want?” I called down in a quiet voice. The night below was utterly silent.

“Lumen, I miss you,” she said. “Remember how we used to be?”

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s Christmas Eve, Lumen. I’m hungry. My mother used to make me pancakes in the shape of elephants on Christmas morning.”

Her mind was gone wild, her panicked eyes darting from one thing to another.

“Are you all right?” I said.

She sat down in the snowbank and pulled her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth slightly. She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

“What? What did you say?”

“My turn,” she said. “They said it was my turn. Sometimes you bleed others, and sometimes you get bled. That’s the way. It hurts, Lumen. Apples and cheese—I used to eat them when they were cut up for me. I used to be pretty.”