Christmas Bells

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  She looked exactly the way Alex felt whenever he thought about his dad.

  He wished eighteen months wasn’t so long. He wished his dad was in the church right that minute, sitting next to his mom and holding her hand and making her smile. If Alex couldn’t have that, at least not right away, he wished he could at least talk to his dad on the computer again. He really wanted to make a rocket for the science fair, but he knew his mom would never let him do so much as light a single match without adult supervision. She wouldn’t let him do that even before that stupid fire, and the stupid fire had made everything worse.

  • • •

  Alex and his dad used to drive out to the open fields by the school and launch model rockets almost every weekend as long as the weather was nice. His dad had saved all of his rockets from when he was Alex’s age, and he knew everything there was to know about how to make a rocket go higher or to spin, how to know where the parachute would bring the fuselage safely down to Earth. He had taught Alex about how the weight of the rocket and the thrust of the engine affected the acceleration, and how the diameter of the fuselage and the shape of the fins and nose cone affected drag. Alex knew so much about rockets that his third-grade teacher had let him do a special report to the whole class for extra credit in science. It was the first time he had earned an A-plus in anything, and his mom had been so happy that she had made his favorite dinner that night—spaghetti with meatballs, crusty garlic bread, and a chocolate cake for dessert.

  On the last Saturday before his dad shipped out, he bought a ton of engines and they fired off rockets all afternoon. Afterward they had gone out for pizza, just the two of them, and his dad had told him seriously that Alex would be the man of the house while his dad was gone, and he trusted that Alex would take care of his mom and sister.

  Alex had felt a surge of panic. “But I can’t even drive.”

  His dad had laughed. “Okay, fair enough. But when I say take care of them, I mean to help your mother however she needs you. And don’t wait to be asked. If you see the trash can in the kitchen is full, take the bag out to the garage. That kind of thing. You understand?”

  Alex nodded.

  “As for taking care of Charlotte,” his dad continued, leaning forward on the table and regarding him seriously, “that means don’t pick fights, don’t call her names—”

  “What if she picks a fight or calls me names?”

  “Just let it go. Just walk away.”

  “What if we’re in the car and I can’t walk away?”

  His dad had smiled. “You’re very smart, Alex. I bet you can figure out what you should do.”

  When they said goodbye to him, it wasn’t as hard as Alex had expected. All the other families were there at the airport with signs and flags like the ones he and Charlotte and their mom carried, people from the VFW served big pieces of cake, and a marching band played, so it was almost like a party. His dad and the other soldiers looked really cool in their uniforms, and a senator’s wife made a speech since the senator was sick, and it was a short speech so that was good. Charlotte cried quietly the whole time, and when it was time for their dad to go, their mom got tears in her eyes, but there was no way Alex was going to cry in front of all those brave soldiers.

  Then their dad gave each of them one last hug, and he kissed their mom so long that Alex had to look away from sheer embarrassment, and then he was gone.

  The ride home was quiet. Charlotte didn’t complain when he kicked the back of her seat, so he soon lost interest, and when he asked their mom if they could get burgers and fries for supper, she replied, “Sure, honey,” almost as if she wasn’t really listening, as if she had totally forgotten that they had brought home burritos the day before and she would be breaking her own rule about no takeout more than once a week.

  But their house seemed strangely hollow and echoey when they carried their paper bags and cups with plastic straws into the kitchen, and Alex couldn’t help staring at his dad’s empty chair as he forced himself to chew and swallow, and the bacon cheeseburger that had made his mouth water when he had seen the picture on the board sat in his stomach like a rock. When he told his mother that the house felt weird, and he felt weird too, she stroked his hair and told him she knew exactly what he meant. “We’ll just have to get used to it,” she told him, kissing him on the forehead.

  As the weeks went by, Alex did get a little more used to the empty place at the dinner table, and the quiet, and his mother’s red eyes and determined jaw, but things never felt right, not completely. He never felt bad when he was singing, though, and when he mentioned that in a video chat, his dad said, “That’s great, Alex. You should keep doing the things that make you happy. It’ll make the time go faster, and before you know it, we’ll be doing fun stuff together again.”

  Alex wanted to take his dad’s advice, but most of the things he liked to do best, he couldn’t do without his dad. He could sing with the choir, of course, but he couldn’t play hockey in the driveway with their sticks and a tennis ball, he couldn’t go to Bruins games, and he couldn’t launch model rockets. He could still play hockey on the ice with his team, of course, and he could watch the Bruins on television, but all he could do with his model rockets was count the engines left over from their last launch—one B6-4 and two C6-5s, the tally never changed—repaint them, or fix a few bent tail fins.

  “Mom,” he finally asked one Saturday as she was helping Charlotte make a poster about Abigail Adams for history class, “can Jeff and I launch model rockets today?”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, glancing up from the paper and glue sticks and poster board scattered across the kitchen table. “I don’t have time to take you today.”

  He had anticipated that response and had already planned for it. “We can ride our bikes to the field behind the baseball diamonds. Everything we need fits into my backpack.”

  “Maybe so, but I would still have to take you. You can’t launch model rockets without adult supervision.”

  “Dad said so,” added Charlotte, unhelpful as always. “I heard him.”

  Alex scowled at her and she smiled brightly back.

  “If Jeff’s dad or mom can take you, that would be fine with me,” his mother said, and with a whoop of delight, Alex ran off to call Jeff, only to learn that his dad was at a football game and wouldn’t be home until late.

  Discouraged, Alex glumly emptied his backpack of rockets, engines, parachutes, and tools and returned them to their shelves over his father’s workbench in the garage. The next time he talked to his dad on the phone, even though he had been told over and over that they were supposed to act happy and optimistic, he complained that he was never going to be able to launch rockets again. “We’ll launch them in fourteen months, I promise,” his dad assured him, smiling.

  “That’s forever.”

  “That’s not forever. It’s just a little more than a year.” When Alex groaned, his dad added, “The first Saturday after I get home, we’ll launch rockets. Just the two of us, or you can bring Jeff if you want.”

  “Jeff can come the next time after that,” Alex said quickly. “The first time, it’ll be just us.”

  “Good plan,” his dad said, nodding seriously. “In the meantime, why don’t you find something else cool to fly? Paper airplanes or kites, maybe. Remember the kind we made last summer? Do you still have those books?”

  “Yeah,” said Alex, warming to the idea. “Yeah, I know exactly where they are.”

  His dad looked really happy, and asked him to mail him the best paper airplane he made so he could show it to the other soldiers. In the days that followed, Alex dug the books out of the pile of outgrown clothes at the back of his closet and tested dozens of designs until he found one that, when launched from the roof of their house, flew all the way across the street, did a huge loop, and landed in Mrs. Beswick’s rosebushes. Unfortunately he celebrated with a loud ch
eer that brought his mother to the window, and when she saw the ladder propped up against the garage, she figured out where he was and yelled at him to come down from there immediately. He did so cheerfully, since he had already tested all the airplanes he had folded and had picked the winner.

  He sent it to his dad, and his dad loved it. He showed it to all his buddies and they all thought it was awesome and said that Alex would probably be an aerospace engineer when he grew up. Alex just about burst from pride when his dad told him, and he tried again to persuade his mom to let him launch rockets because it would help him practice for his future career, but she still said no.

  Before long Alex had made every single paper airplane model described in the book, some of them twice, and he had made a few original designs of his own. He found the kite book too, and made traditional kites, triangular kites, flying wing kites, box kites, and even a kite shaped like an umbrella before he lost interest.

  Then one day, in social studies class, they watched a video about a lantern festival in China. Alex watched, impressed and awestruck, as thousands of small, illuminated hot-air balloons rose into the night sky above a calm sea reflecting their pinpricks of light. They were made of oiled rice paper on a bamboo frame, the narrator explained, with a stiffened collar around the opening at the bottom from which a candle or other flame source was suspended. The flame heated the air within the lantern, causing it to rise.

  Alex thought about those lanterns all day, and later, as soon as his mom got home from work, he ran to meet her at the door and asked if he could make a Chinese lantern.

  She hung up her coat, her eyebrows drawing together in puzzlement. “You want to make a what?”

  “A Chinese lantern,” he said quickly, eager to get permission so he could get started. He had already found instructions on the Internet. “We watched a video about them in school and I think it’ll take me a few days but I could finish it on Saturday. Please, Mom?”

  “That must’ve been some video,” she murmured, not really talking to him, but then she shrugged and said, “Sure. I remember making them in art class when I was around your age.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, a thousand years ago.” She smiled, finger-combed his hair, and kissed him on the forehead. “Let me know if you need any help.”

  When he replied that he thought he would ask Jeff to help him, at least with the last part of the project, she looked surprised again but told him that was fine. He got started right after supper, collecting supplies—a plastic dry cleaner bag he found in his parents’ closet, tape, three pieces of thin wire each a foot long cut from the spool on his dad’s workbench, and a bunch of cotton balls from his mom’s bathroom. He would also need lighter fluid and matches, but he knew exactly where to find those in the garage, so he decided to wait to get those until right before the launch.

  Working alone in his room every night between homework, supper, and bedtime, Alex labored over his Chinese lantern with mounting excitement. He made the stiff collar by running strips of tape around the opening of the bag, then poked one end of each of the three wires through the tape, evenly spaced around the collar and twisted upon itself so it would stay in place. Then he twisted the free ends of the three wires together, then gave the wires another couple of twists about an inch above that one to make a little wire cage.

  On Friday night, just as he finished putting away his project for the night so he could play some Minecraft before bed, his mom surprised him by knocking on the door and then opening it right away. “Hi,” she said, peering around the room, her hand lingering on the knob. “What have you been doing in here, so quiet for so long?”

  “Just working on my Chinese lantern.”

  “Where is it? Can I see it?”

  “Can you wait until it’s done? It really doesn’t look like much now, and I want to test it first.”

  “Test it?” she said, smiling, though she looked a little confused. “To make sure it works?”

  “Well, yeah.” Was it a trick question? Parents and teachers loved trick questions.

  “Do you need any string?”

  Alex stared at her. This had to be a trick question. “No. Why would I?”

  “To hang your lantern, of course.” His mother folded her arms and leaned against the doorframe. “When my parents had outdoor parties in the summer, they would hang lots of Chinese lanterns around the patio. They always looked so pretty, illuminated by the tiki torches and the moonlight.” Suddenly her eyebrows rose. “You aren’t planning to use tiki torches, are you?”

  “No way,” said Alex emphatically. He didn’t even know what those were. “Or moonlight.”

  On Saturday morning before breakfast Alex stuffed the little wire cage full of cotton balls, but then he had to set the lantern aside and wait impatiently for three o’clock, when Jeff was due home from his soccer game and would be able to help him launch it.

  “I thought we were going to do this at the baseball diamond,” Jeff whispered, glancing over his shoulder as he followed Alex, carefully holding the lantern, from his bedroom through the garage and outside to the driveway. Jeff was the biggest kid in class, but also the most nervous, at least when he was around Alex.

  “I didn’t want to carry matches and lighter fluid on my bike in my backpack,” Alex replied. “Hold the lantern up.”

  Jeff looked doubtful, but he held the lantern away from his chest a few feet above the driveway while Alex uncapped the lighter fluid and doused the cotton balls.

  “T minus one minute and counting,” Alex intoned. He licked his finger and held it in the air, where it quickly became cooler on one side. A slight breeze stirred the plastic bag in Jeff’s hands, or maybe Jeff’s trembling shook it. It was hard to say.

  Counting down from ten, Alex lit a match and held it to the soaked cotton balls, which quickly caught fire. Throwing the spent match aside, he held open the bottom of the bag to allow it to fill with hot air.

  “No way,” Jeff marveled as the bag expanded. “This might actually work.”

  “Get ready to let go,” Alex said, interrupting his countdown. Jeff gulped and nodded. “Three, two, one. All systems go. Launch!”

  Together they released the lantern, and it steadily rose into the air.

  “It flies,” Jeff exclaimed, watching it climb and move down the driveway with the breeze.

  “Of course it flies,” said Alex proudly, his gaze fixed on the lantern. “I wish we could’ve done this at night. It would look so awesome in the dark.”

  “It looks pretty awesome now,” Jeff breathed as they watched it float off, moving up and away, following the street as if a tiny navigator was aboard. They exchanged quick high-fives, then instinctively began to follow in the lantern’s wake, quickening their pace as it picked up speed. “Dude, I thought it was supposed to go up.”

  “It is going up.”

  “Not straight up. It’s also going down the street.” A note of panic came into Jeff’s voice. “It’s going toward my house.”

  “It’ll start going straight up again when the wind dies down.” But the wind wasn’t dying down, and soon they had to break into a jog just to keep up with the lantern. Alex tried to jump up and grab it, but it soared along at least six feet over his head.

  “It’s going to land on my roof,” Jeff shrieked, but he was wrong, because the plastic bag got tangled in the branches of the willow tree in the front yard before it could reach the house. Alex slowly backed away, watching in horrified fascination as the plastic bag folded over upon itself and came to rest on the burning cotton balls. Soon flames began to lick the branches and travel lazily from one to another.

  He was aware of Jeff yelling and sprinting for the house, and soon he came running back dragging the garden hose. As the flames multiplied, Alex shook off his shock and ran to help him, and fortunately they both had very good hand-eye coordination, proving that al
l those video games weren’t a waste of time after all. Eventually the lantern, the willow tree, and they themselves were thoroughly soaked. The fire was out, and as Alex sank to his knees on the wet grass, he realized that neighbors had come outside to their porches and driveways and were watching and pointing. Jeff’s mother had seized him by the shoulders and was scolding him, and Alex’s mother was striding across the street, her hands balled into fists, her expression grim.

  Jeff wasn’t allowed to play with Alex anymore after that, even though they had been best friends since first grade. “That boy needs professional help,” Jeff’s mother told his mom crisply the next day when she brought Alex over to apologize. He had to pay with his own money for the arborist, who was sort of like a doctor for trees, but the willow would survive, which was a relief because Alex had never intended to hurt the tree. He hadn’t intended any of the stuff that had gone wrong.

  The worst part wasn’t upsetting his mom, although that was definitely very, very bad. The worst part was telling his father the next time they video chatted. His dad looked so disappointed and worried, all Alex could do was lower his head and blink back tears and nod as his dad urged him to be good, to think things through, to make better choices, to remember that he was supposed to be helping his mother, not giving her more things to worry about.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said, and he really, really meant it. He said it over and over again but it didn’t make anything any better.

  • • •

  He had to do better, Alex told himself as Lucas led the choir through what felt like the longest warm-up in choir history. He hated the heavy, sick feeling that filled his stomach whenever he had done something bad and he knew everyone was mad at him. He wished he could talk to his dad and tell him that he would definitely do better. He wouldn’t make his mom worry anymore. He would do something for her, something special for Christmas, something to make her smile again, a good surprise to make up for all the upsetting ones he had sprung on her ever since he was little, but more often since his dad had gone away, which was exactly the opposite of what he should have been doing.