Miracle and Other Christmas Stories

by Connie Willis

  “Here it is,” I said, handing it to her before she reached Common Garden Parasites.

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling. She handed it to the customer. “Have you been to our book signing yet? Darla Sheridan, the fashion designer, is in the store today, signing her new book, In Your Easter Bonnet. Hats are coming back, you know.” “Really?” the customer said.

  “She’s giving away a free hat with every copy of the book,” the clerk said.

  “Really?” the customer said. “Where, did you say?”

  “I’ll show you,” the clerk said, still smiling, and led the customer away like a lamb to the slaughter.

  As soon as they were gone, I pulled out Organic Gardening and looked up “light-sensitive” in the index. Page 264. “Pruning branches above the infection and cutting away surrounding leaves to expose the source to sunlight or artificial light will usually kill light-sensitive parasites.”

  I closed the book and hid it behind the Shakespeare plays, laying it on its side so it wouldn’t show, and pulled out Common Garden Pests.

  “Hi,” Gary said, and I nearly dropped the book. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” I said, cautiously closing the book.

  He was looking at the title. I stuck it on the shelf between Othello and The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Identity.

  “I realized you were right.” He looked cautiously around. “We’ve got to destroy them.”

  “I thought you said they were symbiotes, that they were beneficial,” I said, watching him warily.

  “You think I’ve been taken over by the aliens, don’t you?” he said. He ran his hand through his hair. “See? No hat, no toupee.”

  But in The Puppet Masters the parasites had been able to attach themselves anywhere along the spine.

  “I thought you said the benefits outweighed a few aches and pains,” I said.

  “I wanted to believe that,” he said ruefully. “I guess what I really wanted to believe was that my ex-wife and I would get back together.”

  “What changed your mind?” I said, trying not to look at the bookshelf.

  “You did,” he said. “I realized somewhere along the way what a dope I’d been, mooning over her when you were right there in front of me. I was standing there, listening to her talk about how great it was going to be to get back together, and all of a sudden I realized that I didn’t want to, that I’d found somebody nicer, prettier, someone I could trust. And that someone was you, Nan.” He smiled at me. “So what have you found out? Something we can use to destroy them?”

  I took a long, deep breath, and looked at him, deciding.

  “Yes,” I said, and pulled out the book. I handed it to him. “The section on bees. It says in here that introducing allergens into the bloodstream of the host can kill the parasite.”

  “Like in Infiltrators from Space.”

  “Yes.” I told him about the red mites and the honeybees. “Oil of wintergreen, citrus oil, garlic, and powdered aloe vera are all used on various pests. So if we can introduce peppermint into the food of the affected people, it—”

  “Peppermint?” he said blankly.

  “Yes. Remember how Penny said nobody ate any of the candy canes she put out? I think it’s because they’re allergic to peppermint,” I said, watching him.

  “Peppermint,” he said thoughtfully. “They didn’t eat any of the ribbon candy Jan Gundell had on her desk either. I think you’ve hit it. So how are you going to get them to ingest it? Put it in the water cooler?”

  “No,” I said. “In cookies. Chocolate chip cookies. Everybody loves chocolate.” I pushed the books into place on the shelf and started for the front. “It’s my turn to bring Holiday Goodies tomorrow. I’ll go to the grocery store and get the cookie ingredients—”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I need you to buy the oil of peppermint. They should have it at a drugstore or a health food store. Buy the most concentrated form you can get, and make sure you buy it from somebody who hasn’t been taken over. I’ll meet you back at my apartment, and we’ll make the cookies there.”

  “Great,” he said.

  “We’d better leave separately,” I said. I handed him the Othello. “Here. Go buy this. It’ll give you a bag to carry the oil of peppermint in.”

  He nodded and started for the checkout line. I walked out of Barnes & Noble, went down Eighth to the grocery store, ducked out the side door, and went back to the office. I stopped at my desk for a metal ruler, and ran up to fifth. Jim Bridgeman, in his backward baseball cap, glanced up at me and then back down at his keyboard.

  I went over to the thermostat.

  And this was the moment when everyone surrounded you, pointing and squawking an unearthly screech at you. Or turned and stared at you with their glowing green eyes. I twisted the thermostat dial as far up as it would go, to ninety-five.

  Nothing happened.

  Nobody even looked up from their computers. Jim Bridgeman was typing intently.

  I pried the dial and casing off with the metal ruler and stuck them into my coat pocket, bent the metal nub back so it couldn’t be moved, and walked back out to the stairwell.

  And now, please let it warm up fast enough to work before everybody goes home, I thought, clattering down the stairs to fourth. Let everybody start sweating and take off their hats. Let the aliens be light-sensitive. Let them not be telepathic.

  I jammed the thermostats on fourth and third, and clattered down to second. Our thermostat was on the far side, next to Hunziger’s office. I grabbed up a stack of memos from my desk, walked purposefully across the floor, dismantled the thermostat, and started back toward the stairs.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Solveig said, planting herself firmly in front of me.

  “To a meeting,” I said, trying not to look as lame and frightened as the hero’s girlfriend in the movies always did. She looked down at my sneakers. “Across town.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said weakly.

  “Because I’ve got to show you what I bought Jane for Christmas.”

  She reached for a shopping bag under her desk. “I know I’m not due till May, but I couldn’t resist this,” she said, rummaging in the bag. “It is so cute!”

  She pulled out a tiny pink bonnet with white daisies on it. “Isn’t it adorable?” she said. “It’s newborn size. She can wear it home from the hospital. Oh, and I got her the cutest—”

  “I lied,” I said, and Solveig looked up alertly. “Don’t tell anybody, but I completely forgot to buy a Secret Santa gift. Penny’ll kill me if she finds out. If anybody asks where I’ve gone, tell them the ladies’ room,” I said, and took off down to first.

  The thermostat was right by the door. I disabled it and the one in the basement, got my car (looking in the backseat first, unlike the people in the movies) and drove to the courthouse and the hospital and McDonald’s, and then called my mother and invited myself to dinner. “I’ll bring dessert,” I said, drove out to the mall, and hit the bakery, the Gap, the video-rental place, and the theater multiplex on the way.

  Mom didn’t have the TV on. She did have the hat on that Sueann had given her. “Don’t you think it’s adorable?” she said.

  “I brought cheesecake,” I said. “Have you heard from Allison and Mitch? How’s Dakota?”

  “Worse,” she said. “She has these swellings on her knees and ankles. The doctors don’t know what’s causing them.” She took the cheesecake into the kitchen, limping slightly. “I’m so worried.”

  I turned up the thermostats in the living room and the bedroom and was plugging the space heater in when she brought in the soup. “I got chilled on the way over,” I said, turning the space heater up to high. “It’s freezing out. I think it’s going to snow.”

  We ate our soup, and Mom told me about Sueann’s wedding. “She wants you to be her maid of honor,” she said, fanning her
self. “Aren’t you warm yet?”

  “No,” I said, rubbing my arms.

  “I’ll get you a sweater,” she said, and went into the bedroom, turning the space heater off as she went.

  I turned it back on and went into the living room to build a fire in the fireplace.

  “Have you met anyone at work lately?” she called in from the bedroom.

  “What?” I said, sitting back on my knees.

  She came back in without the sweater. Her hat was gone, and her hair was mussed up, as if something had thrashed around in it. “I hope you’re not still refusing to write a Christmas newsletter,” she said, going into the kitchen and coming out again with two plates of cheesecake. “Come sit down and eat your dessert,” she said.

  I did, still watching her warily.

  “Making up things!” she said. “What an idea! Aunt Margaret wrote me just the other day to tell me how much she loves hearing from you girls and how interesting your newsletters always are.” She cleared the table. “You can stay for a while, can’t you? I hate waiting here alone for news about Dakota.”

  “No, I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood up. “I’ve got to …”

  I’ve got to … what? I thought, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Fly to Spokane? And then, as soon as Dakota was okay, fly back and run wildly around town turning up thermostats until I fell over from exhaustion? And then what? It was when people fell asleep in the movies that the aliens took them over. And there was no way I could stay awake until every parasite was exposed to the light, even if they didn’t catch me and turn me into one of them. Even if I didn’t turn my ankle.

  The phone rang.

  “Tell them I’m not here,” I said.

  “Who?” Mom asked, picking it up. “Oh, dear, I hope it’s not Mitch with bad news. Hello?” Pause. “It’s Sueann,” she said, putting her hand over the receiver, and listened for a long interval. “She broke up with her boyfriend.”

  “With David?” I said. “Give me the phone.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t here,” she said, handing the phone over.

  “Sueann?” I said. “Why did you break up with David?”

  “Because he’s so deadly dull,” she said. “He’s always calling me and sending me flowers and being nice. He even wants to get married. And tonight at dinner, I just thought, ‘Why am I dating him?’ and we broke up.”

  Mom went over and turned on the TV. “In local news,” the CNN guy said, “special-interest groups banded together to donate fifteen thousand dollars to City Hall’s Christmas display.”

  “Where were you having dinner?” I asked Sueann. “At McDonald’s?”

  “No, at this pizza place, which is another thing. All he ever wants is to go to dinner or the movies. We never do anything interesting.”

  “Did you go to a movie tonight?” She might have been in the multiplex at the mall.

  “No. I told you, I broke up with him.”

  This made no sense. I hadn’t hit any pizza places.

  “Weather is next,” the guy on CNN said.

  “Mom, can you turn that down?” I said. “Sueann, this is important. Tell me what you’re wearing.”

  “Jeans and my blue top and my zodiac necklace. What does that have to do with my breaking up with David?”

  “Are you wearing a hat?”

  “In our forecast just ahead,” the CNN guy said, “great weather for all you people trying to get your Christmas shopping d—”

  Mom turned the TV down.

  “Mom, turn it back up,” I said, motioning wildly.

  “No, I’m not wearing a hat,” Sueann said. “What does that have to do with whether I broke up with David or not?”

  The weather map behind the CNN guy was covered with 62, 65, 70, 68. “Mom,” I said.

  She fumbled with the remote.

  “You won’t believe what he did the other day,” Sueann said, outraged. “Gave me an engagement ring! Can you imag—”

  “—unseasonably warm temperatures and lots of sunshine,” the weather guy blared out. “Continuing right through Christmas.”

  “I mean, what was I thinking?” Sueann said.

  “Shh,” I said. “I’m trying to listen to the weather.”

  “It’s supposed to be nice all next week,” Mom said.

  It was nice all the next week. Allison called to tell me Dakota was back home. “The doctors don’t know what it was, some kind of bug or something, but whatever it was, it’s completely gone. She’s back taking ice skating and tap-dancing lessons, and next week I’m signing both girls up for Junior Band.”

  “You did the right thing,” Gary said grudgingly. “Marcie told me her knee was really hurting. When she was still talking to me, that is.”

  “The reconciliation’s off, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I haven’t given up. The way she acted proves to me that her love for me is still there, if I can only reach it.”

  All it proved to me was that it took an invasion from outer space to make her seem even marginally human, but I didn’t say so.

  “I’ve talked her into going into marriage counseling with me,” he said. “You were right not to trust me either. That’s the mistake they always make in those body-snatcher movies, trusting people.”

  Well, yes and no. If I’d trusted Jim Bridgeman, I wouldn’t have had to do all those thermostats alone.

  “You were the one who turned the heat up at the pizza place where Sueann and her fiancé were having dinner,” I said after Jim told me he’d figured out what the aliens’ weakness was after seeing me turn up the thermostat on fifth. “You were the one who’d checked out Attack of the Soul Killers.”

  “I tried to talk to you,” he said. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I should have taken my hat off, but I didn’t want you to see my bald spot.”

  “You can’t go by appearances,” I said.

  By December fifteenth, hat sales were down, the mall was jammed with ill-tempered shoppers, at City Hall an animal-rights group was protesting Santa Claus’s wearing fur, and Gary’s wife had skipped their first marriage-counseling session and then blamed it on him.

  It’s now four days till Christmas, and things are completely back to normal. Nobody at work’s wearing a hat except Jim, Solveig’s naming her baby Durango, Hunziger’s suing management for firing him, antidepressant sales are up, and my mother called just now to tell me Sueann has a new boyfriend who’s a terrorist, and to ask me if I’d sent out my Christmas newsletters yet. And had I met anyone lately at work.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m bringing him to Christmas dinner.”

  Yesterday Betty Holland filed a sexual harassment suit against Nathan Steinberg for kissing her under the mistletoe, and I was nearly run over on my way home from work. But the world has been made safe from cankers, leaf wilt, and galls.

  And it makes an interesting Christmas Newsletter.

  Whether it’s true or not.

  Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,

  Nan Johnson

  EPIPHANY

  “But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter,

  neither on the sabbath day.”

  —MATTHEW 24:20

  A little after three, it began to snow. It had looked like it was going to all the way through Pennsylvania, and had even spit a few flakes just before Youngstown, Ohio, but now it was snowing in earnest, thick flakes that were already covering the stiff dead grass on the median and getting thicker as he drove west.

  And this is what you get for setting out in the middle of January, he thought, without checking the Weather Channel first. He hadn’t checked anything. He had taken off his robe, packed a bag, gotten into his car, and taken off. Like a man fleeing a crime.

  The congregation will think I’ve absconded with the money in the collection plate, he thought. Or worse. Hadn’t there been a minister in the paper last month who’d run off to the Bahamas with the building fund and a blonde? They’ll
say, “I thought he acted strange in church this morning.”

  But they wouldn’t know yet that he was gone. The Sunday night Mariners’ Meeting had been cancelled, the elders’ meeting wasn’t till next week, and the interchurch ecumenical meeting wasn’t till Thursday.

  He was supposed to play chess with B.T. on Wednesday, but he could call him and move it. He would have to call when B.T. was at work and leave him a message on his voice mail. He couldn’t risk talking to him—they had been friends too many years. B.T. would instantly know something was up. And he would be the last person to understand.

  I’ll call his voice mail and move our chess game to Thursday night after the ecumenical meeting, Mel thought. That will give me till Thursday.

  He was kidding himself. The church secretary, Mrs. Bilderbeck, would miss him Monday morning when he didn’t show up in the church office.

  I’ll call her and tell her I’ve got the flu, he thought. No, she would insist on bringing him over chicken soup and zinc lozenges. I’ll tell her I’ve been called out of town for a few days on personal business.

  She will immediately think the worst, he thought. She’ll think I have cancer, or that I’m looking at another church. And anything they conclude, he thought, even embezzlement, would be easier for them to accept than the truth.

  The snow was starting to stick on the highway, and the windshield was beginning to fog up. Mel turned on the defroster. A truck passed him, throwing up snow. It was full of gold-and-white Ferris wheel baskets. He had been seeing trucks like it all afternoon, carrying black Octopus cars and concession stands and lengths of roller-coaster track. He wondered what a carnival was doing in Ohio in the middle of January. And in this weather.

  Maybe they were lost. Or maybe they suddenly had a vision telling them to head west, he thought grimly. Maybe they suddenly had a nervous breakdown in the middle of church. In the middle of their sermon.

  He had scared the choir half to death. They had been sitting there, midway through the sermon, and thinking they had plenty of time before they had to find the recessional hymn, when he’d stopped cold, his hand still raised, in the middle of a sentence.