But then where would the punishment be?
“The drivers today,” said Mr. Fielding, “will be Remy and Morgan.”
His voice was hard. He had named one too few student drivers.
“Woooo-ee!” said Lark. “And what did you two get up to in the backseat?”
The class laughed and made backseat sex jokes.
Mr. Fielding gestured for Remy and Morgan to go first, making it the only time that his students had walked ahead of him to the car.
Our execution, thought Remy. He’s going to take us to the stop sign and get rid of us.
The strange lack of anger that had possessed her for so many days was still there. She cooperated fully. It was as if she yearned for punishment. Did little mice and rabbits yearn for the owl to swoop down? Surely all creatures fought to live, not to surrender.
Mr. Fielding drove, and they went in his car, not the student driver car. Remy and Morgan neither looked at nor touched each other, but merged in a strange vibrating fear. They had no idea what Mr. Fielding meant to do.
A cemetery stretched for many acres on the edge of the old part of town. It was the sort of cemetery where you could have any kind of stone you wanted, so there were cenotaphs and obelisks, curling angel wings and glistening marble slabs like steps to the Pentagon. Many tired flags stood on pencil thin sticks to mark the graves of veterans, and, horribly, bronze baby shoes marked the graves of children.
Mr. Fielding drove on narrow gravel paths at five miles an hour. “Is this a lesson in death?” said Morgan.
“I’m looking for Denise Thompson’s grave.”
Mr. Fielding parked. They got out of the car and walked between a dozen grassless graves. Even the ground was dead. They talked in whispers, as if the dead were listening in.
Nestled against Denise Thompson’s stone were bouquets of real flowers, frozen black. Dead like Denise. Her name and her dates were chiseled into the stone.
Remy tried to be a ball of nothingness, a mitten in a pocket, a plastic flower. When Mr. Fielding jammed his hands into his pants pockets, she almost expected him to pull out a gun and kill them both.
“It was my fault,” he said. “It’s always the fault of the grown-up in charge, and so it’s my fault. I want you to know that.”
Morgan said irritably, “There was no grown-up in charge, Mr. Fielding. We were on our own and we were stupid, and it isn’t your fault.”
At last they touched, Morgan first, his arm wrapping her waist, pulling her in against his side. She could barely feel the real Morgan through the thickness of her puffy jacket.
Their teacher regarded them sadly. “I’m trying to make it easier for you.”
“But why?” said Remy confusedly. “You’re the one who came over and said we had to pay.”
“I don’t know why. I don’t know anything about this. I’m trying to spread the blame, I guess.”
“It isn’t peanut butter,” said Morgan. “Blame doesn’t spread.”
They stood for a long time, like some terrible poem they made you study in school. Eternal staring at sentences about death. We’ll be here for days, thought Remy, but when we get in the car and I look at the dashboard clock, it’ll have been only five minutes. Kind of like Mrs. Willit’s sermons.
Mr. Fielding went back to the car, and Morgan and Remy followed.
Mr. Fielding turned the key too long, grinding the gears hideously.
Morgan said, “Thank you.”
For a minute Remy could not figure that one. Thank you?
For letting go, she realized. My mother won’t let it go, my father won’t start, Morgan’s mother won’t let it go, his father is doing his duty.
But Mr. Fielding is letting it go.
She tried to think who was the responsible adult here, and who knew how to teach, but still, like chance and death, none of it made sense.
* * *
On the afternoon of December twenty-fourth Morgan showed up. Mrs. Marland was not polite.
“May we please talk for a minute?” said Morgan. “The Van Holland baby has an earache. We need Henry to be Jesus after all.”
Her mother’s voice was as ugly and rusty as abandoned garden tools. “Use an empty manger.”
“Empty?” repeated Morgan.
“I think it would be very symbolic.”
“But isn’t the point … that Jesus … um …” Morgan could not seem to remember the point.
“That Jesus is always there,” said Mac, the least likely person in America to have paid attention to Sunday school lessons. “Love is always there.”
“Remy and Morgan are proof that it’s all emptiness,” said Mrs. Marland. “I was stupid. I actually believed that good things would happen if you did your best.” She looked at her daughter. “That good parents would have good children.”
Henry came in, dragging his blanket. He had the dazed grogginess of a child napping with his eyes open. Is that my life from now on? thought Remy. Dragging from room to room and never waking up from this nightmare?
“Mom,” she said finally, “you do have good children.” She was not crying. Perhaps her need had gone beyond tears into the dry desert of not being loved. “I was very dumb for ten minutes, Mom, and being smart about it now doesn’t change it. I don’t excuse what Morgan and I did. I know Denise Thompson is still dead. But you’re still my mother.”
Her mother didn’t even bother to look at her.
Remy was desperate for love, so she lifted her little brother up on her shoulder. His four-toothed grin completely filled his face. He had his sister and he was high enough to look around. What else was there? Henry spread soppy kisses on his sister’s face, resting his hot little open mouth against her cheek.
Her mother tried to leave the room. Remy blocked her. “Mom, you’ve spent our entire lives telling us that love is the only thing that matters. Now when love really does matter, and I really do need you, you’re not trying.”
“I’m too mad at you to try!”
“I know that. I don’t care how mad you are at me. I’m very mad at me too. But you have to go on loving me.”
“I don’t feel like it,” snapped her mother, sounding like a two-year-old herself.
Touch me, Mom, prayed Remy. Please get close to me!
But her mother did neither.
And it was Mac who finally lost his temper. “What about me?” he yelled. At Mom, not at the ones who had done wrong, but Mom. “You think this is relaxing to live with? You and Dad, behaving like this? What does it mean, anyway? I do any little thing wrong in my entire life, and my mother and father will check out of the line? Write me off?”
His mother’s voice was ice. “It isn’t any little thing, Mac. She. Is. Still. Dead.”
“Oh, God,” whispered Morgan.
They had nearly forgotten Morgan. Now he reappeared in their sight, oddly thin and worn. Remy wondered about God: if he was really there, really about to answer or to worry.
Mrs. Marland put her arms around Remy, around Morgan, and around Mac, with Henry in the middle spurting up like whipped cream from a can. “I love you all, I do, I love you so much, but I can’t seem to get past being so mad at you!”
She was out of breath, as if the grand embrace in which she held a stranger’s son, and a stranger daughter, had been a marathon. “Nothing has ever happened to us before that your father and I couldn’t make better,” she said. “I can’t believe the first real test is death. Because nobody can make that better.”
But she had made it better. So much better.
No matter how angry Mom was, and maybe would always be, Remy was partly excused.
I know, Mr. Thompson, she said to him in her heart, that being excused isn’t part of the deal. But my mother has to go on loving me. Denise would go on loving Bobby.
Her eyes filled with tears, and through the blur she saw that the one who was healed the most was Mac; she had not even known that Mac was damaged; she had been too self-absorbed to read his fears.
&
nbsp; Mac, her holy-terror brother, was the one who most needed his family in love with each other.
Five weeks, start to finish, sign to sign.
Morgan was dazed by the swiftness of it.
Only the pageant was slow. Camels plodded, sheep stumbled, and the kings drew nigh.
Henry took one look at those crawling, baaing first graders in sheep costumes and refused to go near the manger. So Morgan decreed two Marys: the original cast member to wear the blue gown, and Remy to keep Jesus from breaking his way out of the stable.
“Bunch of perverts in this church,” Taft whispered to Morgan. “Joseph has two wives, one king’s a girl, and Queen Joanne the Normal’s in charge.”
Morgan smiled in the dark and drifted away. He was many things right now, but normal wasn’t one.
“I want you and Remy to go back to normal,” his father had said last night.
Nobody else here is going to achieve this pinnacle of success. Normalcy. Think about it, Morgan. Thank your lucky stars.
Morgan tried to believe he had a lucky star, he who had killed by accident. That was the thing, his father said: to remember that Denise Thompson’s death had been an accident. That it was only a sign.
And Mr. Thompson backing off? Had that been an accident? Or had Dad, so to speak, fixed the fight?
Did Morgan want to know?
“We’ll always go to church now,” Starr had said grumpily. “You go and kill people, Morgan, there’s no way out. Even when Dad wins, we’ll have to keep going to church.”
But he was not sure Dad would run. He had taken the stuffing out of his father, and nobody ever ran for office without it.
“Was it moral,” he’d asked his father, “for Remy and me to get off?”
“Stop talking and get dressed,” his mother had said. “No matter what the moral situation is, nobody goes to the Christmas Eve service in sweats.” She would not look at her son. Only at his clothes.
When they were leaving for church, Starr asked the question Morgan could not. “Mom, do you still love Morgan?”
Morgan held himself against the answer.
She hadn’t looked at him. She’d looked at her black gloves and her Christmas-bells coat pin. Shrugged. “I’m working on it.”
“I still love you, Mom,” he had said hesitantly.
“Apparently not enough to behave the way I taught you.”
He wanted to tell her what he had just learned at the Marlands’: that you can be very very mad and still love your kid. But he couldn’t talk to his mother the way Mac and Remy talked to theirs.
Starr was the third king, the final figure to come down the aisle. She had gotten the red robe after all. It spread behind her, velvet encrusted with glittering gems.
Morgan sighed and sent the final king down the aisle.
There was no moral to the story. It could have been any global conflict they studied in Current Events. A nightmare that began, killed, and ended. And now what? Was anybody better for it?
Starr reached the stable.
Mrs. Willit read at the rate of one syllable per motion. Morgan was sliding into a coma. It’s my pageant, he thought, and I’m so bored, I think it’s already February.
“The kings … knelt … down …”
(Starr hadn’t cared for this. “I’m a king,” she said irritably, “I don’t kneel.” “That’s the point,” said Kyle. “They kneel for Him.”)
“… and worshiped,” said Mrs. Willit.
(Starr didn’t want her crown tipping off when she bent her head and had informed the director of the pageant that she, personally, was not bowing, and the director informed his sister that he, personally, would just remove her head instead. “Oh,” said Starr.)
“And Mary remembered these things,” said Mrs. Willit, “and pondered them in her heart.”
In the soft light of the candles Morgan saw tears on more than one face. Did everybody have a Denise Thompson to ponder?
The pageant ended.
Candles were blown out gently, shielded by cupped hands. The lights went back on. Sheep and shepherds turned back into kids, hurling costumes on the floor, dropping crook and staff, running to the bathroom before it was too late, demanding something to eat.
“Good pageant,” Morgan’s mother managed, and turned away, quickly leaving the church to wait in the car rather than be next to Morgan.
He wondered if he would ever be a good son again in her eyes, or just a person who completed tasks.
On the far side of the church Taft waved the royal wave. Remy and Morgan waved back.
She wanted to throw herself on Morgan, take him home with her. But it was his mother’s love Morgan wanted, and his eyes followed Mrs. Campbell longingly.
“Merry Christmas,” said Remy softly, and their eyes met. Morgan held her, lightly. Not a hug full of anger and love and forgiveness like Mom’s. But a closeness that went all the way through. “Well, maybe not merry,” said Remy. “But Christmas.”
Morgan smiled. Oh, she loved his smile! “Christmas,” he agreed.
The church was full: light that sparkled gold and silver; music from the organ; scent from the pine boughs; neighborly love from families and friends.
Mr. Thompson’s punishment: May every Thanksgiving and Christmas be ruined.
She saw that you could not ruin Christmas. Christmas stayed beautiful even when you were not.
But, oh! how you could ruin a life.
Remy marveled that anything was still a risk, but it was. Remy was still afraid of things, including admitting to Morgan how deeply she loved him. His suffering was intense. Almost chosen: as if he had willed Mr. Thompson to give him something heavy to carry.
Remy’s parents collected her. Henry was asleep on Dad’s chest.
“Let’s head home,” said Remy’s father. “We still have presents to wrap.”
Morgan seemed to want to say something, but couldn’t get it past his lips. He half shrugged and half smiled. Morgan was very close to the edge. Remy did not want to put him over. But a wave good-bye wasn’t enough, not when she wasn’t sure if he’d get through the twenty-fifth. She hugged him, and the strength of his hug back was a Christmas present. “It’s a wrap,” said Morgan softly, and she knew what he meant: it was over, it was wrapped, it was done.
Mac followed Mrs. Campbell out of the church.
At the same time that Mac agreed with Mr. Thompson—Christmas should be destroyed in memory of the destruction of Denise—he completely disagreed. Mac had never thought about family, much less how much family mattered. Now he felt he was the only one who really understood.
You could be wrong, but you must be loved.
He wanted Morgan to have Christmas.
“Hi, Mrs. Campbell,” he said.
“Merry Christmas, Mac,” she said with an effort.
“It’ll only be merry,” he said to her, “if you go back inside.”
She stared at him, name-calling with her expression: You runty interfering little twerp!
“You’re his mother,” said Mac.
“And my son was a—”
“Jerk,” said Mac. “But you aren’t. You’re his mother. He needs you.”
I’m the shepherd, thought Mac.
It was the only Christmas present Morgan could give Remy: pretending it was a wrap.
He tilted his head back to control a rush of tears. It was just a sign, he thought. I’ve got to hold on to that, whether my mother can or not.
Volunteers made cleanup quick. In moments only the wreath on the door and the poinsettias on the window ledges remained. The church was completely empty, and yet it seemed to stay full, as if hope and love were still around. “I don’t think I deserve love,” said Morgan.
“No,” said Dad softly, “you don’t deserve love.”
Morgan’s heart lurched. He did not know how he could manage to get down the church steps and over to the car, never mind the rest of his life. Even Dad was against him now?
“That’s the thing abo
ut love,” said his father, wrapping a Christmas arm around his son. “Nobody deserves it. Love just is.”
The arm holding Morgan up turned him toward the arched wooden door, hung with holly.
His mother was coming back for him.
Hope and love were still around.
About the Author
Caroline B. Cooney is the author of the following books for young people: The Lost Songs; Three Black Swans; They Never Came Back; If the Witness Lied; Diamonds in the Shadow; A Friend at Midnight; Hit the Road; Code Orange; The Girl Who Invented Romance; Family Reunion; Goddess of Yesterday (an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book); The Ransom of Mercy Carter; Tune In Anytime; Burning Up; The Face on the Milk Carton (an IRA-CBC Children’s Choice) and its companions, Whatever Happened to Janie? and The Voice on the Radio (each of them an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults), What Janie Found, What Janie Saw (an ebook original short story), and Janie Face to Face; What Child Is This? (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults); Driver’s Ed (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and a Booklist Editors’ Choice); Among Friends; Twenty Pageants Later; and the Time Travel Quartet: Both Sides of Time, Out of Time, Prisoner of Time, and For All Time, which are also available as The Time Travelers, Volumes I and II.
Caroline B. Cooney lives in South Carolina.
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