Awash in Christmas Spirit

This holiday season, I had a shift at Rhode Island Hospital that was pretty rough. This wasn’t something I had to deal with back at home. In the middle of the Christmas party, some poor guy was wheeled in with a tree branch, complete with steel ornament hooks, through his upper leg. The decorations had been taken off already, and there was blood everywhere. I’m sorry, I have to gross you out because I work in the emergency room. It’s a lot of responsibility for a fifteen-year-old, but I’m the only one with the Talents for the job. So even though I’d rather be studying fourth-dimension architecture, I get it done.

“Beth,” the EMTs cried amidst all their medical lingo. “Where’s Beth?”

I dropped my delicious piece of Yule log cake Nancy had brought from the Italian bakery on Atwells Ave and grabbed some gloves. I braced myself on the side of the plastic gurney.

“Ready?” I asked when the patient had been sedated and hooked up to monitors.

They backed the branch out and a nurse daintily laid it on a tray, covered in gore. The little metal hooks made a trail on the gurney between the branch and the guy’s leg, and it seemed like there were even more inside the wound. They must’ve had that tree decorated to the gills.

“Can we get a magnet?” I said to break the tension.

I knew they couldn’t bring a big enough magnet that close to the medical machinery. I used my telekinesis to hold his femoral artery away from the hole while several of us plucked the hooks away. Still holding his artery with my telekinesis, I stripped off the gloves, found a less gory spot on his leg, and called upon my healing Talent to slow the bleeding even further.

“Looking better,” said the doctor, and that was my cue to let the guy’s artery fall back into place and concentrate on regenerating his tissues and skin. I placed my hands firmly on either side of the wound and stared at it, imagining a whole leg in its place. Over the course of maybe five minutes, muscles knitted, veins reconnected, and a new layer of skin covered the wound so well no one would ever know about his freak accident unless they asked why his leg was hairless there. I’ve never been good at hair follicles.

I’m glad I saved the guy’s life and leg so he could continue to enjoy the festivities, even though I had to go home after that and miss the rest of the holiday party to sleep it off. Such a complicated procedure, using two Talents at once, was a lot to ask of one little person. I hardly know anyone with a single Talent, much less two, so no one really understands. And there seem to be crazier injuries every day. But this Christmas, my first in Rhode Island, was still the best by far.

Why? Because I spent most of my years growing up in that little town in California behind a heavy plastic curtain. The adults thought I had allergies, but really my illness was the result of some confusion with my Talents coming in and overexposure to aluminum. I actually swallowed a pull-top tab without knowing aluminum is my kryptonite, the substance that takes my Talents away and makes me feel lousy. It stayed in my system until some doctors extracted it.

“Santa’s at the mall.” My mom’s glad tidings opened every Christmas in California.

“It’s only November,” whined Emily, my big sister, every year before she left for college. “Thanksgiving isn’t even over!”

I would watch them on my monitor from inside my sanitized room, wishing I could go with my sister. Santa Claus at the mall was the only Christmas tradition outside the home, but I hadn’t been allowed to leave my room for years. I couldn’t expect to ever take part in any tradition again. I pushed the intercom button. “You should go and send me a live video feed.”

Emily flopped over on the couch and writhed, chucking pillows to every side. “No, not that. Please, Beth. No one can see me taking videos of Santa Claus!” She rolled onto the floor and covered her face. Then she parted her fingers to look up into the camera and give me an icy stare. My picture wasn’t transmitted out there to them, but she knew I was getting her message of irredeemable hatred.

I pushed the intercom button with a laugh. “You and Mom and Dad can go together this weekend. It’ll be a family bonding time.” That only brought about more ugh faces and moans.

In the end, I didn’t get to see much because Emily kept sticking the camera in her pocket or behind her back. I knew my dad would do a better job filming, but I only wanted to see the world through my big sister’s eyes.

That glimpse of Santa, our plastic tree in the living room, and presents wrapped in shiny paper—seen via monitor—were all the Christmas to be had in California. There hadn’t been snow since I was a baby, there were no firesides to gather around, no sleigh rides, no Nutcracker ballet, no caroling about town.

The year Emily came home for Christmas after her fall semester at Brown, I’d had my aluminum out the previous summer, and because I was no longer sickly, Emily found me a bit more tolerable. One sisterly thing she did was sit with me in my room while I explained how I could carry out the physics in M. C. Escher paintings and then also—wow, who would’ve thought—she took me to the mall to see Santa! Of course I was much too old for such an event by then, being almost fourteen, but I looked on it with the eyes I would’ve had if I could’ve gone when I was eight or nine.

Emily parked the family sedan in a handicapped spot—I guess she was still used to thinking of me as sickly? Holding me by the hand, she waltzed in the grand front entrance and we could see down the length of the mall to where Santa awaited the good little boys and girls in a chair festooned with red velvet bows and sprigs of holly.

A tall Asian man in green pants ushered the first kid in line to Santa’s chair while a short lady wearing felt reindeer antlers over greasy hair kept people orderly at the end of the line, which stretched from the useless electronic gift gadgets store along the toy store, the cell phone store, the other cell phone store, and the puzzle store, to the engraving store. I looked up at Emily nervously as we stepped into place. Would she want to wait so long to do something so juvenile?

Piped music played, stuff about being home for the holidays, eating turkey, and going on sleigh rides. My family isn’t overly religious, but we do have a lot of Christmas records where Sting sings about the highly favored maiden and Stevie Nicks grooves about the silent night. And also a few about what would happen if Christmas Day dawned on nuclear annihilation and Santa going “postal,” whatever that means. When you take those kinds of things out of the mix, it gets a bit repetitive.

“Are you okay?” Emily asked me for the first time in my life. “Are any of these decorations made out of aluminum?”

“I think they’re all plastic and fabric and stuff.” I wanted to appear laid back in front of this changed sister who appeared to care about me now. “But do you think this line is going to move fast enough? I really only want to have our picture taken with Santa to put on the fridge for a decoration.”

She rolled her eyes. “Isn’t there something you can do about this line?”

I gazed along the procession of mothers with babies, toddlers running between everyone’s legs, and older kids stepping out of line to do somersaults, their hats and gloves flung across the holly-patterned carpet. Did she want me to sweep them out of the way with my Talent? Wouldn’t they object?

“About all I could do is what you could do: walk to the head of the line and ask to go first.”

Emily shrugged and huffed. She opened her mouth to speak, but then took my hand and pulled me to the head of the line without telling me her reasoning. She deposited me over the red tape that delineated who had Santa’s attention and who was still waiting and positioned her cell phone so that she could see Santa behind me with my head covering the child on his lap. The photo was snapped long before the green elf could heed the cries for succor from the front of the line and we ran back out the front entrance like Bonnie and Clyde, fake snow dusting our hair at the door.

A fast getaway wasn’t my first idea of togetherness, and I’d hoped for a picture of Emily, Santa, and me, all together and Christmasy. It seems like my time with my sister is always a bit lacking.

Last summer, I moved to Providence to be with Emily, and she was arrested. By the time December rolled around, she was pretty much under house arrest. It’s too bad, because Rhode Island offers something much closer to everyone’s Currier & Ives idea of Christmas. Red velvet bows and one lousy Santa who probably had halitosis? Please, California, try harder.

Dad stayed home to watch Emily, but my mom took me to Providence Place Mall, and with the picturesque half-inch of snow on the cars, sidewalks, and wreaths and lights hung from streetlamps on the way there, the mall was a dream come true.

There was too much to see. It wouldn’t fit in my eyes and seemed to flow out my ears! Gold and silver tinsel threaded through with tiny colored lights was draped from the height of the third level and along the second-level railing. Giant golden bells, tinsel snowflakes, and fully decorated trees hung from the ceiling and rotated in the drafts. Poles strewn with streamers to look like candy canes punctuated at least one entrance of every store. Tasteful orchestral versions of the most inclusive Christmas music I’d ever heard came hi-def through unseen speakers, floating through the air along with the fragrances of cinnamon, peppermint, and pine.

The larger floor areas throughout the mall sported displays of giant presents or reindeer the kids could climb on and run between, and commanding the crowning area near Macy’s, Santa. Two syllables can’t contain the majesty of this personage.

A throne made of golden swirls and whorls with a back and arm three times his size supported Santa Claus on a dais of rich green velvet surrounded by realistic life-size reindeer sculptures. The parents and kids waited patiently in coats, scarves, and mittens, loosing only the jolliest of sounds as they conversed with surrounding families. When they got to the front of the line, they had to scale no fewer than five steps to reach the towering throne.

Additional steps along the side of the throne aided the young ones in reaching Santa’s lap. When my mom and I walked around back, we saw that there was a wheelchair ramp—they’d thought of everything! No one was getting left out.

I didn’t need to sit in Santa’s lap by then for sure. My mom asked if we should get in line, said she was happy to wait with me, but I just kept saying no, no, and snapping pictures with my cell phone. By the time we doubled back to get candy cane hot cocoa at the Dunkin’ in the food court, my joy quotient was through the roof and I was too distracted to notice the giant crowd until my mother said, “What are they doing?”

Some hundred people clustered at the giant picture window, facing out as the wintry twilight fell on Waterplace Park below. My mother and I looked at each other and made our way around the two-story Christmas display toward the crowd. All the lights in the area cut out.

“Is it an outage?” I asked everyone in general, but farther down the mall, I could see most of the stores were still lit, and Santa’s palace illuminated a line that still wrapped around the railings. The crowd focused on the window, heedless of the lack of lighting, and as my eyes adjusted, the outside view became clear.

Trying to get closer to the window in the dark, I tripped over a decorative sled. My hot cocoa lid flew off and the liquid followed in a dramatic arc. I caught the delicious nectar with my mind and directed it neatly back into the paper cup. I’d only just gained some telekinesis skill with nonsolids, which as you can imagine, is a much bigger deal than solids, which I mastered before I ever got to my telekinesis school. My mother didn’t see what a great job I did, so I had to pat myself on the back metaphorically.

I couldn’t find the lid, so I burned my tongue drinking the chocolate down to a nonspilling level. Looking between people, I caught a glimpse of an unlit pyre sticking out of the river and the barest reflected indication of the prow of a little boat filled with people with torches and knew it must be a special holiday lighting of WaterFire.

My mother and I stood on tiptoes, moved to people’s sides, and tried to slide in between them, hot chocolate first, but there was no way to see anything. I stepped back until I ran my foot into the sled I’d tripped over earlier. “Mom, come here,” I said. “Sit on top of this.”

“Why?” Her lack of willingness to follow my lead felt abrupt.

“So we can see over these people. It’s WaterFire! You want to see this.” She crouched onto the sled with a creak. “Hold on,” I told her, and that she did without question.

I imagined cradling the sled with my hand, if my hand were big enough to cradle the whole thing, and mentally lifted it until my mother and I happily hovered behind the crowd, a few feet off the holiday carpet, just high enough to avoid heads and hats.

We were in time to see the boats glide into Waterplace Park and ceremonially light the pyres around the rim, to the periodic applause of the people who watched, bundled up, close to the action. I could practically smell the wood smoke and hear the crackling once all the fires were reflecting off the rippling water.

Another Santa was visible in the warm orange light. He stopped to chat with the numerous children and receive who knew what kinds of advice as well as high-fives from parents. Living statues dressed in traditional Greek robes, one with a donkey’s head and another with a mermaid’s tail, processed from the direction of the State House and chose different places to stand as the crowd milled about them. They puzzled me, but wondering too hard what they had to do with Christmas made the sled buckle underneath us, so I accepted them as part of the festivities. Probably it was just some more of the art that’s everywhere in Providence.

“Do you need a break?” asked my mom.

“No way.”

I pulled out my phone and took a few pictures to share with Emily, but I kept getting too much glare from the food court reflected on the window. She didn’t appreciate the photos much when I went into her bedroom to show them to her.

I tried to do a better job when Dad took me to see a live reading of “A Christmas Carol.” The auditorium had a Victorian chill about it, and I listened, rapt, as the Dickens impersonator talked about wearing gloves indoors to save coal. For the entire hour and half, I live texted her about what was happening, complete with photos and short videos. We didn’t even stop for dinner afterward, and I breezed into Emily’s room to ask her if she’d received my texts.

“I turned my phone off,” she said, not looking up from whatever she was writing. “I’m busy.”

She was doing a lot of furious scribbling lately, but I was determined to distract her from that so we could have some Christmas spirit like we never had in California. I wanted us to experience all Providence had to offer as a unified whole. How could I bring back that glimmer of sisterhood from when she took me to see Santa? How to draw her in?

I outdid myself at the Messiah sing-along. Just to please my Scrooge of a sister, I looked up Emily’s friends from Brown and brought them with me. One of them was a music major, and once we were at the First Church of Christ Scientist waiting for it to start, I filmed her giving a history lesson on the Messiah’s original reception and how it may have changed over the years, how quickly Handel wrote it and how easily people in the 1700s leaped to accusations of heresy.

Audience members started looking over and paying attention as if her speech were part of the show. One of them—clearly a college student because of how crazy he was—was wearing a Darth Vader helmet and another was dressed as Where’s Waldo. A group standing at the back took turns yelling, “Freebird!” They respectfully stopped when the music began. On the other hand, Emily’s friends snickered at some of the soloists when they were doing melismas and just kind of grudgingly mouthed along to the words in the choruses—it’s a sing-along, people!—so they were more like Emily than I expected.

The musical girl reminded me of my new firestarter friend, Kelly. She loves music. You can hardly get a word in edgewise with how much she’s always talking about arpeggios and melismas. I wanted to see how an authentic Rhode Island family celebrated Christmas, and Kelly has one of those, so I asked her if I could come over for the day. I was going to bring her a present and everything! But she came up with a million reasons I shouldn’t, so on the day I had to stick around watching Miracle on 34th Street as if we weren’t in the most Christmasy place I have ever been with my California parents and surly sister.

I don’t use a word unless I mean it. Emily’s surliness became obvious when I presented my comprehensive film of the Messiah sing-along to her. She slouched on the couch while I mirrored our big TV to my phone and hit play. No recognition registered when her musical friend was giving her eloquent speech.

“The Messiah?” she grunted. “Are we religious now, too?”

“No,” I said, pausing the video, “it’s only one of the most Christmasy pieces of music ever. Well, the Christmasiest Easter music, anyway. It’s unique in the world! Listen to what your friend says about it.”

“My friend?” Emily croaked.

“Yes, your friend. I made sure these were the people you ate every meal with your first year at Brown, and this girl had a couple of archaeology classes with you, too.”

“Oh. You could’ve fooled me.”

Maybe that’s not surly. I’d like to study architecture and engineering and leave the words to the English majors and the medicine to the doctors. In any case, I could tell I was never getting anywhere with her. I wasn’t going to let her dampen my joy. I disconnected my phone from the TV and left her to sulk all she wanted. And the next time I did a Christmas event, I forgot all about Emily. I think doing that contributed to my enjoyment. I’m a terrible sister!

Mom took me caroling with a group of RISD students, some who dressed up in hoop skirts and muffs, harking back to Dickens again, and some who wore felt reindeer antlers with sparkling lights. I wore two layers of sweaters and a wool coat with sprigs of holly pinned to the lapel. It was dark by five o’clock and Mom and I could see our breath all the way to where we met the students. My cheeks were so pink when we got back! The air smelled of warm plumes of laundry out of the dorms and that wonderful freshness of a thin layer of Rhode Island snow on wet pavement and still-green leaves.

We followed the students down Benefit Street, Providence’s mile of history. It’s an architect’s dream and with all the lights and decorations, it would satisfy the most exacting Christmas enthusiast. As we paraded by the ancient windows and historical markers, we sang the songs the students sang, which were mostly traditional. They tried to do complicated harmonies I mostly didn’t bother trying to follow.

When we were stopped at the first house where they opened the front door to us, juggling our sheet music in black leather folders and the cup of hot chocolate the listeners gave each of us, even I could tell a few students were off key.

Still singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (the listeners were lucky it wasn’t something I had to concentrate on, like “The Holly and the Ivy,” which I never heard in California but is way popular in Little Rhody), I closed my eyes and imagined seeing inside the throat of the girl next to me. My job at the hospital has given me a thorough idea of what the human body looks like on the inside, although before I got that gig, such things would work okay if I just made it up myself. Imagination is power.

Anyway, some tiny snowflakes started to fall as if blessing this unpaid, nonmedical use of my Talent. I imagined my hand softly finessing her vocal cords into the right position and opened up her throat ever so subtly. The giant smile on her face when her notes matched the others’ wasn’t anything I put into place.

At the next house, I stood next to a boy in reindeer antlers who was interspersing his lines with coughs. I didn’t think he really had a cold. It was just nerves. So I imagined his tense vocal cords and neck and metaphorically massaged them until he was singing louder than anyone else and grinning as much as the girl, without ever knowing why. At each house, whether a Federalist farmhouse or a modified Victorian castle, I stood next to someone else, and if he or she needed help, I did exactly what was needed. We had so much cheer, some of the people at the bottom of Benefit Street gave us candy and money as well as hot chocolate.

The RISD students could hardly control their jollity. “This is the best caroling we’ve ever done!” said the first girl I helped.

“Well, we’ve only done it twice before…” started a boy I hadn’t used my telekinesis on.

“No, man, this is the best caroling I’ve ever done in my whole life,” said another girl. She made me feel warm and safe out there in the freezing wind.

I could never have done any of these things in California, even after I wasn’t ill anymore. I don’t ask a lot. What California won’t give, Rhode Island does.

The one thing that came close to ruining my first Christmas in Rhode Island was that on Christmas morning, I got a new cell phone, a tablet, several gift cards for things like ebooks and music downloads, and new pillows printed with M. C. Escher paintings just for me, not for using in the medical clinic. That’s great by itself. But then they gave Emily socks. They had candy cane pictures on them, but she didn’t act too cheerful. It was then I realized that because of her crime, she wasn’t allowed to access the internet, have a cell phone, subscribe to her academic archaeology journals, or, worst of all, go to classes or the library at Brown or finish her degree.

Sitting there in front of Miracle on 34th Street, I made a resolution to take my sister’s limitations into account and not rub them in. I’ve been there before, after all, unable to do much of anything. I know how lonely and boring it is. Maybe I can find a sleigh ride to go on and make next Christmas the best one for her, ever!

Jessica Knauss’s Awash in Talent is a paranormal urban fantasy set in an alternate version of Providence, Rhode Island. According to one reviewer, it’s “More compelling than X-Men!” Told in three parts, Beth’s incredible Talents figure prominently in each of the plots, but this is the first time she’s been able to share her own enthusiastic point of view.