The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  Santa came in a red pickup truck with a giant electric nose strapped to the grille. Sheriff Travis—not a real sheriff but a former one, the man who along with a mildly retarded assistant was in charge of Severna Forest security—was in the back, lounging on a pile of presents. “It’s all a big fix,” Calvin whispered to Jemma as Santa took a seat on the throne beneath the tree, and the presents were unloaded and piled around him.

  “I know,” Jemma said, because he’d already explained it the year before. The presents weren’t from Santa at all, but from their parents. They bought them in stores and wrapped them themselves and labeled them and dropped them off in a secret room at Mr. Duffy’s store. Calvin was puzzled and a little angered by the whole exercise, and was always rooting in his advancing vocabulary for words to describe it, an infringement, a travesty, a farce, but he had stopped asking their mother and father why the real Santa permitted it to happen because they always said the same thing: Because it pleases him to do so.

  Jemma sipped on a cup of hot chocolate, waiting for the C’s. She went up just after Calvin, and did the curtsy just like all the other girls before her did. Calvin would not bow before the false Santa, or even shake his hand. They took their presents and walked back to their mother, and held on to them patiently, waiting for Santa to stand, after the last gift had been distributed, and cry out, “Open them now, children! Open your gifts and see how Santa loves you!” Jemma found that she could wait calmly to open her present, and that her agitation had not increased one iota from the time she got her present to when Oliver Zork claimed his, because she knew that this lesser Santa distributed lesser presents. She got a rubber ball and paddle set. Calvin got a fancy top.

  Some stationary caroling followed. Jemma grew a little nostalgic as she sang, thinking back on previous days when this had all impressed her more, when she’d thought it was the real Santa up there on the throne, when the tree had seemed bigger and the hot chocolate hotter, when it had been so hard to remember the words to the songs, and she had liked the present she’d got so much it almost seemed like Christmas had already come, a little bit. Somehow the nostalgia soured back into the waiting feeling again as they walked home, her mother not holding her hand anymore but working the ball and paddle set vigorously.

  “Did I ever tell you the story,” Calvin asked them as they approached their hill, “about the girl who tried to kill Santa?” Their mother said yes, but Jemma said no, though she had heard it before, always on the way back from the tree, and always at this same spot. Jemma liked the story, and wanted a distraction from the waiting. So even though she knew that she’d be listening to a story she already knew, on a night when all stories were endless and all journeys endless, when the hill would stretch infinitely above her, and she still had an eternity to pass even before bedtime, and even though she knew that listening to this story would be its own special torture, she said yes.

  “She wasn’t a bad girl,” Calvin said. “Well, yes she was, but not in the way you think. She got excellent grades and was very polite and helped her mother around the house and never complained even on Christmas Eve that she was bored or that time was passing too slowly. She sold lemonade in the summer and hot brownies in the winter, door to door here in the Forest to raise money for starving children in Armenia and South Antarctica and Bowie and McLean, and she went to church every Sunday and was very quiet, and knew all the prayers, even in Latin, because this was a long, long time ago.

  “And she looked like a nice girl, with very pretty curls that were almost blond, and big green eyes and a heart-shaped face, and she mostly acted like a nice girl, but she had a bad habit of creeping out at night and stabbing little animals with a big knife her father had unwisely given her for a birthday present. He worked in a museum, where they had knives like that, and he thought she should have it because it was pretty and because it used to belong to a princess. So he gave it to her, not realizing that he was encouraging in her this very bad habit.

  “She went out every night, and at first she killed little rabbits, and then she killed cats, and then she killed dogs, and everyone in the Forest became very afraid, because they thought that a terrible black man had come to kill their pets. Nobody thought it would be the sweet little girl who lived up on the hill—yes, in our very house. Could anyone bad live there? people asked when they noticed which way the trail of blood pointed. The answer, they thought, was no.

  “So the dogs kept dying, and then it was ponies, and then horses, and then an elephant, just passing through, poor sweet Simba visiting with the circus, asleep down by the river. She stabbed him right in his brain. She had killed something as big as a house, but it wasn’t enough for her. She needed more. It almost would be sad, that she still needed more, that she never got what she wanted even though she worked so hard for it, but don’t feel sorry for her. You may have noticed by now how thoroughly bad she really was. I shouldn’t have said that she wasn’t.

  “What was she to do? No self-respecting circus would come near Severna Forest now, she’d have no second chance at another Simba, or at a giraffe, which would have been even better. She could travel to the zoo and kill a lion, smaller but fiercer than an elephant, or walk to the sea and stab at a whale. Or she could kill a person, the worst and mightiest creature of them all, much smaller than an elephant, but enough to satisfy her, she thought. Enough that she could just put her knife away afterward and never have to touch it again. That’s what she thought.

  “It was a problem, though, to pick one. She looked around in her classroom at all the boys and girls and knew that none of them would do, and looked at her teachers, and almost stabbed her science teacher after washing his blackboards for him. But he was asleep on his desk, and looked so sweet and innocent and small as he slept that she just couldn’t do it. Because he wasn’t enough, and she knew it.

  “She was very sad, then, though everyone else in the Forest was happy, because they thought that the big black man had moved on to greener killing fields. Then at Christmas she figured it out. She stood just where we were standing and the stupid fake Santa gave her her present, but not the one he thought he was giving her. He handed her a Raggedy Ann doll, but what he gave her was a perfect kill. She was one of those girls who got good grades, but wasn’t very smart—she could name all the counties in Ireland, but you could sell her her own underwear. She thought he was the real Santa, and thought for sure that if she could kill the real Santa, then she’d finally have what she wanted, and she could bury her knife. So she creeped out of her house—yes, our house too—as soon as her parents brought her home and went back down to the clubhouse, where the fake Santa and his helpers were having a party. She followed him home when he stumbled out—he’d had too much to drink, which should have clued her in that he wasn’t the real Santa. She followed him up this hill, thinking he was on his way to where he’d hidden his sleigh in the woods, and wondering if she should maybe kill all the reindeer too, but finally she couldn’t wait anymore. She ran up behind him and stabbed him in the back. Right here is where she did it.”

  Calvin stopped and pointed at the ground. “Right here he fell down and bled like stink and he would have died if something else hadn’t happened. Do you know what?”

  “I’m cold, Calvin,” said their mother, but he paid no attention to her, and neither did Jemma.

  “Santa,” Jemma said breathlessly.

  “Santa indeed. The real Santa came, gliding up silently behind in his sleigh, and she only knew he was behind her when she noticed the smell of reindeer all around. She turned around and saw him, and he was so awful and glorious that she dropped her knife. I’m sorry! she said, and she really was, and she cried. She was really, really, really, really sorry, but it was too late. He said to her, What you do to the least of these fake Santas, you do to me, and he threw a holly berry at her. It turned her to coal, and his reindeer stomped on her and broke her into a thousand pieces. If you dig in the snow here, you’ll probably find one.”

 
“No digging!” said their mother, because Jemma was already bending down. She handed Jemma back her ball and paddle, took both their hands, and trudged with them, for a hundred years, toward home.

  “Where’s your father?” their mother kept asking then, as the it grew later and later, “Where’s you damn father?” then “Where’s your goddamn father?” then finally, just before she sent them to bed, “Where’s you fucking father?” She called the hospital repeatedly, only to discover he was still in surgery. “The graft failed,” she said, bitterly and mockingly, perched on her stool in the kitchen, speaking in her gin voice. “The child is bleeding. Well what about my graft? What about my bleeding? Who’s going to help me?”

  “I’ll help you,” Calvin said, serious and calm. “What do we have to do?” This was all well after dinner, ages after they got home. They spent the evening drinking hot chocolate and stringing endless lengths of popcorn for the tree while they delayed dinner over and over, the orange chicken growing increasingly soggy and the lobster sauce more gelatinous, until it had to be eaten or abandoned altogether.

  “You can’t help me,” she said sadly. “Santa would be furious.” She sent them upstairs with the bag of fortune cookies. After they’d changed into their pajamas and brushed their teeth, they sat on Jemma’s bed, cracking and eating the cookies. Jemma thought she knew what her fortune would say before she read it: Christmas will never come. But what she read aloud to Calvin was “Your bundle will make you very happy.”

  “Only if you smile,” he replied, “will your smile grow bigger.” They went through the whole bag, Jemma eating every cookie. Calvin stopped eating after two, but carefully folded up the fortunes to make a neat pile, to add to his jar: Laziness is its own reward; Only the chrysanthemum knows the dark secret of the caterpillar; The wisdom of the shrimp is in being small; This year will bring you almost everything you want; The moon is your friend—it follows you around.

  They did not even try to sleep. After the cookies were finished Calvin began to speak again of the little girl who tried to kill Santa, telling how she had been punished by having to serve as the angel called Stab, an avenger who descended from Heaven to poke at people who kicked dogs or ran over squirrels and didn’t even look back. And he told her that if she looked in her closet she might see, way in the back where the steam pipes sat naked outside the wall, the glint of her knife.

  Jemma ran screaming downstairs for her mother, who came up from the basement before Jemma could go down. She shouted for Calvin to come downstairs and threatened to leave a note for Santa about him. This was a threat that always subdued him.

  “But I can’t sleep,” Jemma said when her mother instructed them to go upstairs, get in bed, and turn out the lights. “I just can’t. I couldn’t ever.”

  “Just close your eyes,” her mother said, pushing her up the stairs, “and think about it.” Jemma sat down on the landing and started to cry. “Oh, now,” her mother said. “Oh, please.” She sat on the stair and lifted Jemma in her lap, cajoling and threatening and soothing, but Jemma only cried harder. “You’re too old to cry,” her mother said.

  “But it hurts,” Jemma said, because she could feel it, an ache in her belly that centered around her belly button but moved even as she was crying about it to her left side. “All right,” her mother said. “Wait a minute. Wait just a minute.” She hurried them both down to the kitchen and scooped ice cream into two bowls. “Here come the sprinkles!” she said brightly, rushing to her bathroom and back in less than a minute. She struggled with the safety cap on a bottle of medication for a few moments, but finally opened it and with two spoons crushed one pill for Jemma and two pills for Calvin. “This will make you so calm and so sleepy,” she said, and kept saying it, then singing it as they ate their ice cream, and as she led them upstairs again. “So calm,” she sang as she tucked them both into Calvin’s dinghy. “So sleepy, so calm, so very, very sleepy.” Her own lids fell to half-mast as she sang, though Calvin and Jemma, side by side with the blanket tucked just under their chins, stared at her with wide eyes. “So sleepy,” she sang as she left the room in a slow dance, spinning on her way to the door, her voice seeming to spin, also, and stretch like taffy from her mouth to Jemma’s ear.

  “Are you tired?” she asked her brother, after their mother shut the door.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. Jemma did not feel tired, either. She felt awake but not alert, and had a strange but not unpleasant feeling, like she was turning into a big marshmallow—her fingers and then her arms and then her trunk and finally her face taking a new consistency, so she felt light and slow and sticky. She knew she could move but did not want to. As they lay side by side and talked of Santa, Jemma came to realize that the ugly fretting in her belly had eased. Time was passing no faster, indeed it seemed to have slowed even further, but she came not to mind the feeling.

  “They’ll tell you things about Santa that aren’t true,” Calvin said. “And you have to try hard, sometimes, not to believe them. The first thing they say that’s a lie is that he exists at all. Of course he does, but not in the way that they say. They talk about how jolly and kind and fun he is, but they miss all the other stuff, how incredible and awful he is, how furious he can be. There’s nothing in his sweetness if you don’t consider how he’s awful, too. His sleigh has steel runners that could cut you in half if he ran over you, and the reindeer are shod with hot iron, when you look in their eyes you can see reflections of the same fire that burns at the center of the earth. Getting presents isn’t all just the sweet fun—you get what you want sometimes but sometimes you don’t. Do you see how he is the lord of fate?”

  “I can’t feel my nose,” Jemma said, turning toward her brother. “Is it still there?”

  “Touch it and see. Noses! They try to add things, too. To say he lived in this place when he was a child, or that one year Mrs. Claus had to do all the work, or they invent elves to assist him, as if he needed any help with any of it. Why would you live at the North Pole when you are present everywhere, in every place and every time, and always will be, always? Why would you add another reindeer to eight, a perfect number? Rudolph is the worst lie of all. Santa would no more be afflicted with that misfit than, than… he just wouldn’t. It’s disgusting, what they do. Why can’t they just leave him alone and accept how he’s perfect, and needs nothing added or taken away from him. Why can’t they just leave him alone? How come?”

  “Everybody likes Santa,” Jemma said slowly, not sure how to answer the question.

  “Oh, they say they do. But do they really? Do they think it’s easy knowing all the wrong things everybody’s done, to wake up every year after Christmas and think it’s a new day, and a new beginning, and that they’re not going to disappoint you this year? But then he knows right away. He can hardly drink a cup of leftover eggnog before all the evil is aching in his head and he has to pull the list out. Not that he actually sleeps, or would drink leftover eggnog, or even needs to write this stuff down.”

  “The boat is moving,” Jemma said, because she was starting to feel as if they were drifting in the bed. When she opened her eyes it was plain that they were locked still on the carpet, but as soon as she closed her eyes it felt like they were floating down a river.

  “Let it carry you away from the third lie, that Santa is bad. They say that it’s not for nothing that you can rearrange the letters of his name to spell Satan. They think that’s a clue to his real nature, that’s he’s either the devil himself or a thing of the devil, something added on to Christmas by the wicked instead of the unique and essential spirit of Christmas, somebody who is not added and who can’t have anything added to him. The stories about dolls who come alive to strangle little girls and toy guns loaded with real bullets, and about his watching in his crystal snowball for all the horrible things to happen on Christmas morning and laughing and laughing and laughing—they’re all lies. Don’t you believe them.”

  “There’s a waterfall coming up,” Jemma said, bec
ause her gaze had fallen on the plume of mist rising from the mouth of the humidifier that sat on top of Calvin’s dresser. “Do you think we’ll die?”

  “How can you worry about a stupid waterfall when they tell all these hideous lies about him? The fourth one is the worst one. Just when you think that everything’s okay, that you’re old enough, that you’ve sorted out all the lies and are feeling safe from them, they start with the foul whispering—he doesn’t exist. It’s the trickiest lie, no wonder they save it for last. And there’s something about it that you almost want to believe, because it’s so much easier to just not believe, and it would be so much easier if his eye wasn’t always on you. That’s why they say it, because they lose heart, or because they know he has judged them already, that he’s seen every wrong thing they’ve done and has punished them for it, and is punishing them for it even while they say no, no, he is not. They tell you the lie and then watch you to see if you’ll believe it, and if you do they hate you because you are weak like them, and if you don’t then they hate you because faith burns their eyes. But you have to believe, especially if they test you. Will you believe? Do you believe?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jemma.

  “Even if they beat you with giant candy canes and try to make you deny him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if they put holly under your fingernail? Then would you deny him?”

  “No!”

  “What if they boil you in eggnog and cut off your head and stuff a goose up your butt?”

  “No! I mean, yes. I mean I would still say I like Santa.”

  “Like? Is that enough? And how are you going to talk about how great he is with your head cut off?”

  “I don’t know!” Jemma said. The humidifier mist was getting thicker, filling up all the air in a hanging cloud that reached for the bed.

  “He’d give you the power, of course. But you can’t just like him. He’d throw you right off his sleigh for just liking him. You have to love him with your whole heart and believe in him with your whole body. It has to be hard, like this.” He clenched his fists up and shut his eyes. Jemma felt his whole body go stiff as he made a noise, a grunt and groan of effort. “Like that!” he said. “You do it.”