Margot Early - A Spirit of Christmas p.03

Chapter 7
“No more,” Keti begs the ghost of her childhood playmate Edith.

“Is something troubling you, Keti?” Edith asks.

“What is the use in looking back?”

“To see where your life has taken you. In order to make use of the time you still have.”

The time she still has. Keti looks at her wrist. The gold watch is not there just now. It’s at home in the top drawer of her nightstand. She still wears it, yes.

Bah! Humbug.

No, that isn’t how she feels about Christmas at all. Not now.

She and Edith and Marley stop outside another house in Bounty, and Keti regards the relatively sedate neon sign outside. The Last Resort—Girls, Girls, Girls.

Ah. Her other brothel.

Two more Christmases must have passed. Two? Yes. She was thirty-one that year; Keti remembers it well.

She’d been living back at home and had begun to work exclusively from Bounty, traveling as seldom as possible, trying to be part of Martin’s life.

The result was another rift, of course.

And this particularly snowy night.



Fatima was six feet tall, with the exquisitely sculpted cheekbones of a native of Somalia. How she had ended up working as a brothel prostitute in Bounty, Nevada, was a long story, involving her sister Sammar, a wealthy man and Sammar’s determination that Fatima not be subjected to what she, Sammar, had been through. Ritual female circumcision, which compared in no way, Keti now understood, to male circumcision as it was practiced in the western world.

Keti discovered this only because Sammar was in the brothel tonight, Christmas Eve. Well, it was Christmas Day, in fact 2:00 a.m. And Sammar, who was pregnant but was being allowed to visit Fatima for the holidays, was in labor.

“You have to go to the hospital,” Keti said.

“No. No hospital.”

Fatima, whose English was much better than her older sister’s, explained that at the hospital the baby would be delivered by cesarian section, which was against Sammar’s beliefs—except to save the mother’s life, that is.

Keti was damned sure that prostitution—legal brothel prostitution, as Fatima practiced it, and also hooking in Las Vegas, as Sammar did—was also against their religious beliefs. The sisters’ situations troubled her in a way such things usually didn’t. Sammar had believed she could become a model in the United States. Both she and her little sister had been taken to Las Vegas, and modeling had never been part of the picture. Now, Fatima, at least, was better off. She lived at the Last Resort for three weeks of every month and in a trailer in Bounty, which she now owned, for the remainder of the time. No pimp.

So why did it bother Keti so much?

Probably because it was so clear to her that neither of these women had initially planned to become a whore. Now one of them—who was no responsibility of Keti’s whatsoever—was in labor in Keti’s brothel. “Well, maybe it will save her life,” Keti reasoned with Fatima.

“She knows she can have her baby the regular way, as she would at home.”

How Sammar’s pimp had allowed the pregnancy to happen mystified Keti as much as anything else. She herself felt no joy or excitement over the situation. It was all ghastly. The identity of the baby’s father was unknown to Sammar. Her pimp might even be the father.

I can’t take care of this woman or her baby.

But Sammar was crying and Fatima was holding her hand, and her eyes pleaded with Keti.

Fatima was the highest earner in either of Keti’s brothels.

Keti did need to take care of Fatima, which meant helping Fatima to believe that her life at the Last Resort was a good one. So she said she would take a look at Sammar’s labor, which seemed quite advanced. Why hadn’t Fatima come to her earlier in the evening? But maybe she, like her sister, had been afraid that Keti would force Sammar to go to the hospital.

It was when Keti agreed to look at Sammar that she discovered why western physicians would choose to deliver Sammar’s baby by cesarean section—and why Sammar had wanted to spare her younger sister the painful ritual she had experienced as a child.

The woman had no vulva that Keti could see. It was baffling to Keti that Sammar managed to work as a prostitute at all, and still harder to imagine that she’d ever become pregnant, given what had been done to her. Yes, there was an opening, but there was certainly no sign of elasticity. The last thing Keti wanted to do was hurt the feelings of Fatima’s sister; after all, this was the way the woman was. What could she do about it?

She belongs in the hospital, she thought.

“Will you please let me get you to a doctor?” she asked.

Tears and hysterical head-shaking from Sammar.

If this woman died here at the brothel, there would be no end to the trouble and red tape. Keti might somehow even be accused of manslaughter.

The answer seemed obvious. Call 911, have Sammar transported to the hospital and pay the medical bills, as a gift to Fatima.

It wasn’t what she did.

Instead, Keti hurried out of Fatima’s suite and down the hall to the office. She knew Martin’s home number. She never used it, but she knew it. He’ll be at the Collins house, though.

“Hello?”

“Thank God. Martin, it’s Keti. Please come over. There’s a pregnant woman here, not one of mine, but a sister. She had something done to her in Africa, and it doesn’t look, well, usual to me.”

“Tell me.”

“She’s in labor, Martin. Can’t you just come?”

“Why don’t you take her to the emergency room?”

Tersely, she explained.

“This kind of thing could cost me my license, Keti.”

“Well, it’s not the world’s best situation for me, either. But, I’m telling you, it’s demeaning to this woman to have her baby by cesarean, and her life’s bad enough as it is. She’s determined to give birth vaginally. And actually, I believe she can. Damn it, Martin, can’t you please just help?”

Silence. Then, “I’ll stop by.”

“I don’t think we have a lot of time. She’s not in a good way.”

“Is the baby crowning?”

“God, what do I know? Everything looks different, but I think I can see the baby’s head. Please come.”



It was clear to Martin that now there was no time for the hospital, barely time for a local anesthetic to take effect before he performed an episiotomy to make it possible for Sammar to push the baby out. In Somalia, did the women simply tear? he wondered. He handled only the most routine pregnancies in his own practice, referring complicated cases to obstetricians in the nearest larger city.

Keti assisted him in Fatima’s rooms at the brothel, and two of the other women came in to watch, as well, though Keti sent one outside with a flea in her ear for making noises of disgust and horror at Sammar’s mutilated genitals. Martin silently applauded her action. He wouldn’t have thought of it, but Keti was right to make Sammar feel she was beautiful rather than an object of disgust just because she looked different from Western women.

Keti and Fatima supported Sammar, holding her up as she squatted, helping her move to a hands-and-knees posture when she was ready to do that.

The baby came out in two pushes, certainly not the most elegant birth Martin had ever attended.

Afterward, they eased Sammar back against the pillows on the bed, and Keti said, “Here’s your little girl,” handing her the infant, wrapped in a warm bath towel.

Sammar looked at the newborn with oddly expressionless eyes.

The eyes, Keti realized, of a prostitute.

A streetwalker, she told herself.

Because Fatima wasn’t like that.

Not yet, Keti.

A later Christmas, a few years on

Fog swirled outside Keti’s restored Bonanza Victorian. A Christmas party was in progress, and the curb outside was lined with Mercedes-Benz sedans, even a Jaguar, so ill-suited to a Nevada winter. But there was that old pickup truck of Martin’s, too.

“Hey, Bobby, check this out.” One of the unruly sons of Martin’s brother Paul held up a piece of Keti’s Spode china. He made as if to drop it, saying, “Oops,” and both boys laughed.

Keti noticed them as she came down the stairs, stepped into the dining room and relieved them of the plate. “Thank you,” she said matter-of-factly. She was an attractive woman at thirty-five, though her appearance had become the slightest bit brittle. Her blond hair was carefully styled now in order to look unstyled. It fell to her shoulders in loose curls that were casual and soft and succeeded in looking expensive. She wore a black sequined dress, long-sleeved and backless, with black patent leather pumps.

She put away the plate and glanced into the dining room. There, Martin’s niece, Tiffany, was picking her way through a piece on the baby grand piano while Bridget sat beside her. Martin stood near the French doors talking to his father.

Keti’s heart was broken. No, not broken. It wasn’t that. But somewhere in the past few years she’d lost Martin’s love. When he saw her now, he never had the old affection in his eyes. Instead, he kept her at a careful distance. He was uninterested in her and he took pains to make it obvious. Not that she feared there was another woman in his life. In Bounty, she would have known if that were the case. There were no secrets in a town this size.

She’d sold the brothels, sold them in the year after the birth of Sammar’s daughter. She’d sold them to Marlene, telling her aunt a lie Marlene hadn’t believed. But Marlene hadn’t pressed her. Keti had told Martin that it was none of his business why.

The truth? Simply, that time there had been something about the way Sammar had looked when Keti had handed her that baby…

Well, it reminded me of me.

Which made no sense at all, because Keti didn’t feel that way.

But there had been something, well, disturbing about owning the brothels after that. It had bothered her.

So now she put all her efforts into the running of the reopened Empress Mine. But whenever she called Martin and suggested getting together, he always said, “Too busy. Don’t have the time.” Polite, aloof, shutting her out.

Nonetheless, he’d agreed to come to her Christmas party. Indeed, the whole Collins clan had accepted her invitation. And when Keti had met him at the door and welcomed him inside, Martin had greeted her politely. He’d given her a casual, rather distant hug, a hug that meant nothing. Because even within that brief contact, he had shut her out.

Still, she was the hostess. She couldn’t afford to be thrown off by her disappointment, to be made miserable by it. Not now, anyway, but later perhaps.

She brought out mimeographed sheets of Christmas carol lyrics. “How about singing, everyone?”

Her guests took the pages, distributing them easily. Some went to the dining room for a refill of cider or wine or for more hors d’oeuvres and holiday sweets.



The house, Martin reflected, even smelled expensive. Yes, she had a tree, and he could smell the evergreen, yet there was also the spicy scent of Christmas potpourri and the pristine perfection of it all. It was not lived-in as, say, his parents’ house, or his sister Bridget’s house in Carson City was. Yet Keti Whitechapel lived here.

Keti, Keti, Keti. No longer the soft, caring creature who had met him outside the mine after her shift the year he’d returned from Vietnam; no longer that young woman who had been willing to show him her vulnerability. Keti had still had vulnerability back then.

Maybe she’d even had it that night at the brothel, the night the baby was born to the African woman whose name he couldn’t remember.

Certainly, something had persuaded Keti to sell those businesses.

But she seemed completely invulnerable now. Now, Martin pitied her, and yet he also feared her.

She even looked expensive. Her hair and skin and body seemed a testament to the health and beauty that money could buy. She must still be the deep person he once had known, but that depth was hidden under a brittle facade. Or so it seemed to Martin. He longed for the woman she once had been. Or for the woman he’d hoped she might sometime decide to be.

As Bridget prepared to play carols on the piano, other guests gathered around. Martin moved toward the woman in the glorious sequined dress. It was long-sleeved and dipped low in the back, showing off her muscular body.

How to reach her. “You look beautiful,” he said.

She lifted her face to see him, and she smiled, her mouth wide and voluptuous.

The old longing stirred within him, along with a knowledge that she could still be his—but only exactly as she was. Keti, successful investor, mine owner, ski resort tycoon.

She held out her song sheets, to share them with him.

Bridget said, “All right. Everyone sing. ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.’”

And Keti sang beside Martin, her familiar alto merging with his baritone.

“God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay; remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day…”

Paul’s boys, behind their uncle and Keti, held on to their song sheets but whispered with each other.

Keti had gifts for them, as for all Martin’s family, glossy wrapped packages that the boys hadn’t opened yet. They would take them back to the Collins house when they left. Every year, Keti gave presents to each member of the Collins clan, as if they were her own family.

Which, Martin supposed, they were. The only family she had, barring Marlene, who wasn’t here tonight, who was spending Christmas in London. No, Keti wasn’t completely selfish. But Martin knew he couldn’t live with her. If she was to be as she was, she must be separate from him. Life with that Keti, the Keti who really existed, wasn’t what he envisioned for himself. If he were to have a lover, a wife, a partner—and he had considered such a thing, had known women he thought might fill the bill—then it would be someone different from Keti.

Different how?

When it came to that question, he faced the knowledge that he wanted Keti, Keti exactly, if only a little bit different.

And he’d had no lover other than her since Vietnam.

Nonetheless, the logical place for her in his life was this one—what they had now. She was a lifelong friend, a former lover, someone he might know into old age as a casual acquaintance.

He could not change her and he had no right to try.

And so they must be only what they were to each other.

He felt her attention on him, even though her gaze was resting on the lyrics they held. He watched her hands as she lifted the first sheet to reveal the second carol. How many years had they sung carols together, decorated his parents’ tree together? There had been enough of them. Now, though, she was a stranger to him. Hardened and, he suspected, lonely.

Wasn’t it important for him to help ease that loneliness? She’d called him and wanted to get together. He’d made excuse after excuse. Yes, his work kept him busy. But not too busy for a friendship.

I will try to be her friend, he vowed silently. Reminding himself that she wasn’t his type and he was not tempted by her, and that their friendship would go nowhere that it shouldn’t go.



“You’re staying at your parents’ tonight, then?” she asked, as they said good-night, after the extended Collins family and many other guests had departed.

“Tradition,” he admitted. “Keti, if you want to get together—ski or something—I’d be glad to do that.”

Keti studied his eyes, searching for something. For love, he thought. Well, what he had to offer was friendship.

She said, “Okay,” and she seemed happy, happy that he had promised to spend time with her.

She needed his friendship.

Martin would give it. He owed her that.

Christmas Eve, Keti’s thirty-eighth year

Fog drifted away from Keti’s home, the beautiful home that was now a showplace. A Christmas Eve alone. No, not alone. Martin had invited Keti to join him at his parents’ house this evening. His parents’ house, where his mother lay dying of cancer.

Keti would go over, for a while, at least. Marlene was spending Christmas away again, this time in Monte Carlo, with a new husband. Marlene had invited her to join them for the holidays, but Keti had said, Not this time.

Keti would not leave Bounty now, not when Mrs. Collins might be taken from them at any time. It was not that she was particularly loving toward Martin’s mother. But the Collins family had taken her in when she’d had no one else, and for that she would always be grateful.

So long ago.

I’m thirty-eight, Keti thought. Childless and unlikely to ever have children.

She’d wanted to have Martin’s children.

Once.

She’d been a different person back then. Their love, when it was new, had made her idealistic. Now, she knew Martin as a realist. Yes, there was still some innocence about him—some kind of innocence. He was committed to his work, to endlessly helping all the families of Bounty.

Keti wasn’t poor, would never be poor again, yet she knew she was one of his projects, as well.

He was always encouraging her to read, telling her about something he’d just discovered or a poem he’d found. He’d share these things whenever they got together for a hike or some skiing, which was at least twice a month.

Martin had become a friend to Keti, and over the years she had come to treasure his friendship more and more, even as she railed against the obvious reality that he no longer wanted her for a lover.

Keti’s cars, both her pale yellow Mercedes convertible and the Hummer she’d bought earlier this year, were outside her house. But instead she decided to walk to the Collins place. It was five blocks away, and her walk home would be uphill. But, of course, Martin might drive her, too.

The snow fell softly as she stepped outside in her long winter coat with its fox-fur trim on the hood. She wore black wool pants that stretched snugly over her legs and rear end. The snow squeaked beneath her Sorel boots. A stray dog saw her but seemed to cower and back away when she stared at it. Keti was glad of that. She didn’t like unfamiliar dogs and she wasn’t crazy about those owned by acquaintances, either.

Many houses were decorated with the colorful lights of the season. At the Collins house, Mr. Collins had specially lit an elaborate nativity display that was mounted on the garage door.

With a heavy heart, thinking of Mrs. Collins lying so ill inside, Keti went up to the house and knocked.

Tiffany, who was now thirteen, opened the door. She had the look of, well, a kind of poverty. A frizzy perm, too much foundation and she was out of shape, especially for someone so young.

“Hello, Tiffany,” Keti said. “How are you?”

Tiffany shrugged indifferently.

Like someone, Keti thought, with nothing to live for. Instead of someone with her whole life ahead of her.

Martin’s father stepped through a doorway and exclaimed, “Why, hello, Keti!”

She embraced him. “How is Peggy?”

“She’ll be glad you’re here. She talks about you. She’s been saying, ‘There’s something I must tell Keti.’”

Keti hadn’t been to the Collins house all that much lately. It was winter, and she’d caught a cold. And then she’d had so much to do for work, plus there’d been a necessary trip to South Africa, to deal with some mining holdings there.

She hadn’t been to see Peggy Collins for a week. But her abandonment of Martin’s mother had a price. She now realized it meant that much less time with her, the woman who was the closest thing to a mother Keti could remember.

Martin came out of his mother’s room, the room where she’d been receiving hospice care for the past month. Her husband slept beside her when her pain allowed him to and in another bed in the same room when it did not.

“Keti,” he said and immediately embraced her with one arm; in the other hand, he held a glass he’d just retrieved from his mother’s room. “She wants to see you.”

“Is she all right?” Keti asked, feeling stupid immediately afterward. Of course Mrs. Collins wasn’t all right. She was dying of cancer.

“Soon,” was all he said. “Go in.”

Peggy Collins looked significantly worse—more tired, thinner, grayer, than she had just days before.

“Keti,” she said.

The older woman seemed focused, however, when Keti came in and pulled out a chair by her bedside. She took Mrs. Collins’s hand. The skin was pale, almost translucent, and the veins stood out. Keti said to her, “You’re the only person like a mother I’ve ever known.”

“I’ve often thought if Marlene could have come into your life earlier…” But Mrs. Collins didn’t finish the sentence.

Keti said, “I’m surprised to hear you say that.”

“Well, there’s no need for you to be surprised,” was the response, which meant, Keti thought, that Mrs. Collins wasn’t about to criticize Marlene to Keti. “She loves you. I wouldn’t have had you do some of the things she’s encouraged you to do, but you make your own choices,” Mrs. Collins added. The statement seemed to exhaust her.

Keti sat silently, holding her hand. “I did sell the brothels,” she managed to say.

“Yes, and I was so…relieved.” Mrs. Collins lay quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Martin loves you so.”

“He loves his mother,” Keti replied.

“Yes, but I don’t think he even knows how much he loves you, Keti. When he is most angry, that’s when I’ve seen it.”

“He’s a good man,” Keti said. “He’s been a good person the whole time I’ve known him. I’m not like that.”

“But you’re wonderful in your own way. We can’t all be like Martin.”

“He’s good,” Keti repeated. Too good for me. At least, it had seemed so to her for the past several years, especially whenever he’d distanced himself from her. The distancing was a subtle thing, and she’d tried to account for it, but Martin had a way of making it difficult to broach such a subject. If she said, Martin, why are you avoiding me?—or Martin, why are you so distant from me?—he simply denied that it was happening.

I’m as I always am, he would say.

And so Keti had gotten the message that he was done being physical with her, done being sexual with her, done being her lover.

She still didn’t appreciate the message. Sometimes she had been so desperate for the attention of men that she had taken other lovers. But even when it was physically pleasurable, she couldn’t help comparing the others to Martin, acknowledging that none could be as close to her as he was.

Keti wanted to ask his mother one thing now. “Do you think it’s wrong, Mrs. Collins, that I like to make money?”

“Of course not.” The other woman was thoughtful. “As long as you remember to love, as well. Money can be used for so many good things.”

Keti thought, Ah, money is different for her than it is for me. I think money is to be spent by those who’ve made it. Though with discretion. And the poor should have something, yes. Enough. Didn’t the government give them plenty, out of the pockets of people who’d worked hard? Yes, fringe benefits were for those who earned them. Keti could no longer imagine a moment in her future in which her fiscal well-being would ever be threatened. She’d managed to make her financial base diverse and impregnable. It would never fail.

She sat with the other woman in silence, waiting for whatever it was that Mrs. Collins still wanted to tell her.

“Keti.”

“Yes.”

“You mustn’t isolate yourself. I can imagine how hard it is to be you. You must have people around you, true friends around you, always, Keti. Marlene won’t live forever.”

“Martin and I are friends.”

Mrs. Collins looked as if she would have liked to say something more, but she held her tongue. Then, finally, she continued. “I think you saved him—after Vietnam. He was so disconnected when we first saw him at the hospital. Only when you came here with him for Christmas did I begin to believe he’d be all right.”

“I would give Martin anything,” Keti said at last. “But he won’t take it from me.”

“Don’t you think perhaps that’s what makes it impossible for him to be with you in the way both of you might like?”

“What do you mean?” Keti asked.

“It’s hard for men to live on the earnings of women. For good men, that is.”

“So, I should give up everything I have and be a housewife for Dr. Collins of Bounty,” Keti blurted out before she could stop herself.

“You’ve grown hard, Keti.”

“Why do people keep saying that? I’ve always been hard. As long as I can remember, anyway.”

Mrs. Collins remarked, “It’s been a gift to me to have you in our lives and in our home.”

Keti couldn’t see why. She said, “You took me in when I was so vulnerable. I’m where I am today because you invited me to live here with you.”

Mrs. Collins had closed her eyes and appeared to rest.



Martin’s mother died that night. All of the family were with her—all but Amy, of course, though may be by now she and his mother were together again.

The funeral home had come for her body. It was 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Day. The Collinses were still awake, drinking wine in the living room, relieved and numb and sad.

Keti said, “My mother died on Christmas Day, too.”

Martin glanced at her. He’d forgotten this, because Keti never talked about her mother, didn’t remember her, had never known her.

He wanted Keti, and he recognized this impulse as a reaction to grief. Nonetheless, it felt like real need.

She would give herself to him, he knew. Keti was in love with him, just as she had been in love with him for years. She would always give him another chance and would always be willing to try again.

Sometimes Martin thought that the reason he was not living with her or married to her had something to do with a lack of nobility on his part. I don’t love her enough. I can’t pretend to her that I love her as much as a man should love her.

Undeniably, being with Keti was physical bliss.

Physical.

Martin loved her, but he was no longer in love with her and he could not be anymore. Her lifestyle—so driven by money and possessions—repelled him. Somewhere along the road, he’d ceased to be in love and had begun to pity her instead.

He would not toy with Keti, no matter how much he wanted her comfort tonight.

She sat by the fire in her expensive clothes, with gold jewelry on her fingers and her ears, and with the watch he’d given her on her wrist.

She’d signed this year’s package to him, “Love, your Scrooge.”

And again he’d felt keen pity.

Martin was in love with life. Every day was a pleasure simply because he knew he could go outside and breathe mountain air and share life experiences with those around him.

Keti was different. She was so successful and yet she did not—as far as he could tell—particularly enjoy people. Martin had known mining culture, and he knew, too, about the effects of tailings, all the waste of mining, on the environment. He saw miners with silicosis in his practice. Keti would always make sure safety measures were observed, but that was primarily to protect herself, not her miners. And she also had holdings in South Africa, where Martin believed the workers were treated less well than they were in the United States.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about the Bounty ski area, either. He skied there and he knew the patients in his practice did, too—those who could afford a season pass or at least a lift ticket. And yet Bounty had become affluent so suddenly—and at the same time it had become poor. In winter the streets were lined with the cars of wealthy visitors, there for the world-class ski runs. Whereas many of the locals lived in trailers and homes that were literally falling apart around them.

Keti had so much wealth, and she could do so much good with it if she wanted to.

Martin stopped the thought. He’d vowed long ago to quit trying to change Keti. She was who she was. She preferred a luxury hotel to a camping trip. She preferred shopping to an afternoon spent hiking or even skiing.

Yes, repellent, he thought again, looking at her and thinking that even her beauty had changed for him as it had become less and less natural, more and more expensive.

He would have liked to give her something she needed for Christmas. But there was nothing like that he could buy her, because she bought everything she needed and wanted for herself. He’d bought her a gift this year and hadn’t liked himself for doing it because she didn’t need it, might not even like it. He had yet to give it to her.

He stood up.

“Where are you going?” his father asked from his place by the fire. Surely, the older man was grappling with the hole that had just been made in their lives.

“Just outside. To look at the stars.”

“I should go home,” Keti said.

“You’re welcome to stay,” Martin’s father told her.

“Thank you. I’d like to, but I didn’t plan to leave the house for the night. I need to turn up the heat a bit to make sure the pipes don’t freeze. I hate spending money on fuel,” she added automatically.

“Your house is always cold,” Tiffany agreed. The teenager was still awake, morosely paging through a magazine.

Keti said, “When you have to pay for propane, no doubt you’ll appreciate the wisdom of putting on an extra sweater.”

“That’s the truth.” Martin’s father shook his head, half laughing, seeming lost.

“But you can afford to keep your house warm,” Tiffany said.

Keti wanted to set her straight, but she held her tongue. Honestly. Somewhere along the line, Tiffany had failed to learn that the “rich” were rich because they made sacrifices, because they were careful with money. She sighed and turned away, thinking Bah! You couldn’t tell anything to a girl like that. She hadn’t been raised correctly and so she would end up worse off than her parents before her.

Martin said, “I’ll walk you home.”

“Thank you.”



Keti asked Martin, “When will you have the funeral?”

“Probably in a few days. We’ll have to allow enough time to let people come from farther away.”

Their boots made identical squeaking noises on the snow. Keti noticed Martin was carrying a box under his arm. “Are we dropping that off somewhere?” she asked. Martin loved to leave surprise presents on people’s doorsteps for them to find on Christmas morning. On the other hand, he had as yet given her no gift.

“Somewhere,” he said and smiled at her.

Keti reflected that he bought gifts for her that he would never buy for himself. He bought nearly all his clothes secondhand. He lived frugally, ascetically, and so always had money to help other people. We are polar opposites, Keti thought. Yet it was Martin she wanted, Martin she loved.

Martin who might never again love her that way in return.

But she had tasted his love, and she could not forget it.

“How I wish,” she told him, “that you still loved me as you used to.”

He said, “Don’t consider yourself unloved by me, Keti. Maybe it’s better this way.”

“How?”

“Maybe our love will last longer this way.”

Our love. She heard those words and made herself believe in them. “Are you implying that if we’d done the normal thing and, say, gotten married, our love might have failed?”

“No.” Clipped. Curt.

“Do you think we would have fought?”

“Doubtless.” Somehow, she knew he would be smiling and she glanced up at him. Steam drifted lightly from his nose and mouth, from those sensual lips. She longed to touch the cleft in his chin, longed to feel the fine bones of his face beneath her fingertips.

She felt like a child beside him, wanting to ask, Why? Why? Why? Why couldn’t they still be together as lovers, as partners, as one.

Lately, whenever she’d asked that question, he’d simply refused to answer.

He said, “I’ll make you a deal, Keti.”

“What?”

“Come and live with me at my house for one month as I live. You can work for me, too. Hell, you’re certainly good with money. You can check out my bookkeeping. Take appointments for me. I’ll find lots of things for you to do.”

“What would that prove?”

“It would be instructive.”

“How so? It wouldn’t be real. I would know, all the time, that I had the financial security that you seem to find unimportant.”

“You’ve never heard me say financial security is unimportant. But being a multimillionaire and being financially secure don’t mean the same thing.”

“They do to me.”

Surprisingly, his gloved hand grasped hers, as if to comfort. “I know.”



Kissing under the mistletoe that her decorator had hung for effect, Martin’s lips parting, their tongues touching. “I have to go back home,” he told Keti.

Yet she felt, through his body, that he wanted to stay.

It gave her hope, this awareness that he wanted her physically, at least.

“I’m going to take you up on your invitation,” she said.

“What?”

“Living with you for a month.”

“Ah.” He put the box in her hands. “Here’s your gift.”

She looked at the small tag. To Keti. Love, Martin.

She removed the green ribbon, unwrapped the red plaid paper and opened the lid of the box. Inside were two things. A Norwegian sweater, which she knew hadn’t come cheap because she’d tried on one like it in a local shop. And a book called The Gift.

“There are lots of ideas in it,” he said. “Things we can talk about.”

She tried on the sweater, which was red, white and black. She knew it would be her favorite piece of clothing, simply because it was from him. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” She felt desperate as a woman in a Tennessee Williams play—Maggie “The Cat” trying to seduce Brick back to her bed.

“No. I’m sure that I do want to stay.” He smiled and kissed her again. “But it would be for the wrong reasons right now.”

“Such as…? That you want comfort because your mother has died? Martin, I want to comfort you.”

He shook his head and detached himself from her hands.

Keti felt something within her dry up. And sorrow welled behind her eyes.

She could not show him her own misery right now, and gave him a bright smile instead. “Okay. See you sometime soon.”

Chapter 8
Outside Martin’s house

“I would like to skip this one,” Keti tells Edith, knowing what is coming.

“But, Keti, this time you are the one who gives.”

“I tell you I don’t want to see it. I behaved stupidly, and I paid, and then I did something even stupider. I’ve paid again and again ever since. It was a terrible Christmas Eve.”

“I don’t think you really feel that way,” Edith says, the child speaking as an adult, perhaps as the kind of wise angel she had become.

The Christmas Eve Keti was thirty-nine

There was no fog tonight. Only blinding snow, falling so deep and thick that Keti worried Martin’s tires would merely spin without any traction.

“We have to go,” Keti implored him, “and I don’t think I can make it.” Another spasm racked her body, and she could barely cope. It wasn’t unbearable. But she had a feeling it might quickly become so. “I want to do it here.”

“Not a good idea. Let’s get to the hospital.”

Keti was alone with Martin, and it was happening. The plan had been for him to be with her—before, during and after. If all went well, he would be able to deliver the baby at the hospital, though he wouldn’t be the physician of record.

Again, she contemplated giving up the child she’d carried for thirty-nine weeks. Again, she “prepared” for that, as if there ever could be adequate preparation.

She would be with Martin. During the birth. And after, when she must leave the hospital without the child. She would go home to Martin’s house. He’d even offered to stay with her at her place, if that was what she needed.

And she was relieved that she was going to the hospital.

She focused on two things. One, that the birth was beyond her control. This force taking control of her body was only growing stronger. Two, that she definitely wanted to get to Bounty’s little hospital, where she’d planned to give birth. What if the baby got stuck? What if Keti needed a cesarean section?

She managed to get her coat and hat and mittens on, and Martin donned his parka and gloves.

This pregnancy should never have happened.

She couldn’t give up this child, could she?

Yet how could she keep the baby?

Deceit, deceit…The truth itself would be painful, and it would lead to far more pain. Keti must grow up, must accept that Martin did not love her, not in the way that mattered most to Keti. He loved her the way that saints loved ordinary people. He didn’t want her as his wife, as his partner.

Yes, they had tried to live together. To make it work. But there had been no making it work, and when Keti had realized it, when they had admitted it to each other, though after three months instead of just one, she’d felt angry and rejected—but also like an animal who’d been freed from a cage.

Though one final gambit of hers, a colossally stupid move, had resulted in this pregnancy. Oh, and by the way, I stopped using birth control because I thought I wanted to have your baby.

It was his baby. She had intentionally conceived Martin’s child.

And now she could not keep it. Yes, she had the money and means to support a child. But she just wasn’t…motherly. And Martin did not love her. He would surely bind himself to her for the sake of the baby but never because of love for her, Keti. And she felt worse about all this than she ever had in her life, more stupid, selfish and worthless.

No, it’s not yours, she’d told him, having taken off in a wild fashion after she’d moved out. She’d simply pretended…And he’d believed her. He must have wanted to believe her, she thought bitterly.

Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.

“Careful, Keti. Watch the step here.”

Martin guided her outside, down the snowy steps. If there’d been more time, she knew he would have shoveled them for her. But now they had to get to the hospital.

The snow whipped her and chilled her face to the bones. It wasn’t just an ordinary blizzard but a raging arctic blizzard. For all that, she wasn’t aware of the fierce cold. When Martin had helped her into the truck, she rolled down the window.

He got in and turned the key in the ignition.

Another contraction. She clutched Martin’s arm. He waited. When she relaxed, he said, “It’s not too late to change your mind. And I will marry you, Keti, if you want to keep this baby.”

Yes, he’d said that already.

He would make this sacrifice so that she could keep her child and so that the child would have a father in its life.

He would make the sacrifice even without knowing it was his child.

But marriage to her shouldn’t be a sacrifice.

Her mind grappled with the thought that there was something wrong with her, that she would never marry or raise children of her own. She cared about money more than people, as Martin was fond of pointing out.

She shook her head.

He reminded her, “If you have a contraction, don’t grab my arm while I’m driving.”

“Yes,” she agreed, gazing at that perfect chin of his, trying not to cry and wondering how she was going to get through all of this. What would she even do with a baby, if she were to keep it?

I can’t.

She wondered if he was relieved by her response to his proposal. The only reason, the only reason, she would marry Martin was because he wanted to marry her. Because he wanted Keti Whitechapel for his wife.

And if he knew this was his baby, it would really be all about the baby.

God, what am I going to do?

Another contraction surged through her. She longed to lie down, to rest between these pains. At the hospital, she told herself, she could.

With Martin carefully steering a course down the road through the swirling, blowing snow, she felt strangely detached. Safe. The birth was beyond her control, and anyway, Martin was here. Martin wouldn’t let her die.

He navigated with total focus, as if he were transporting something exceptionally precious.

The baby he thought wasn’t his.



Keti had never known such pain, and she wished the nurses would quit asking if she wanted anything for it. All she could imagine was that it must hurt so much because something was wrong with the baby or its position, but everyone said that wasn’t the case. Head down, just the way he should be. Or she.

Could a baby split a woman in two? This must be happening to her. She was going to die. She stood beside a bed in the maternity suite. They would take her to the delivery room soon, surely.

They’d wanted to put an electronic fetal monitor on her, but Keti had said she couldn’t bear to stay flat on her back.

Pain relief she wanted, but she wasn’t going to give in. She wasn’t!

Martin held her arms as she lowered herself to her knees and clutched a chair for support.

She hated the gown split up the back, but somehow she’d almost forgotten about it. All she could think was that she was dying, dying in a hospital, and no one was doing a thing about it.

A nurse came in, took one look at her and said, “I think we need to get you into delivery.”



It was good to push the baby out, but it hurt more than she could ever have imagined.

“You can push,” said the doctor again, Martin’s colleague. She’d only met him twice before this. And here he was now, away from his family on Christmas Eve. No, it was Christmas now. Martin had told her.

With this push she cried out, and then experienced an enormous sense of release. A release that felt disastrous.

Martin caught the baby, but Keti couldn’t bear to look, to see him or the child. If I look, it will be all over. I’ll tell him the truth.

The minutes passed, and they took the baby away to be cleaned up, saying Keti wasn’t quite done. The placenta still had to come out. Martin’s partner tried to show the infant to her, though. They said the baby was a girl. Keti glanced at it because she couldn’t stop herself. Oh, God. Oh, God. What have I done? What am I doing? I can’t go through with this. The newborn was tiny and purplish-red and infinitely…Keti didn’t know how to define the creature; she only knew that she was amazed and that she must look no more. She turned her head away, shaking her head. Martin’s baby. Martin’s daughter.

Keti had decided what was right for her, and more important, right for this child.

A baby cannot make Martin love me in the right way. This is all so horrible, and I’m doing the wrong thing, but if I tell him the truth now… The result would be disaster. The loss of all his esteem.

Determined to look no more, she waved the doctor away.

A man’s arm wrapped around her shoulders. Martin had pulled down his mask. “I’ll be with you,” he said. “But be sure, Keti. Be very sure.”

How can I be sure of anything? she wanted to shout.

She didn’t know anything except that she’d made a decision and she was going to stand by it. A couple from Fort Collins was waiting for this baby. They were already in town, although not at the hospital. Everyone wanted to be certain that Keti had made up her mind.

Why did it feel as if her limbs and her lifeblood were vanishing on her, as if she were being torn to pieces?

I hate myself—and I’ll hate myself if I keep this child.

Martin did not let her go. She found her cheek wet—but not from her tears.

The tears were his.

Another Christmas, sometime later

Fog eddies around the foundation of an unfamiliar stone house. Keti, with Marley beside her, studies the street, the sidewalks, the snow-covered logs, the eaves dripping with Christmas lights.

“I don’t know this place,” she murmurs.

“That’s true,” Edith answers. “Come on, Keti. You must see who lives here.”

“Is this…now?” she asks, trying to guess the year from the look of things around her.

“No. Not yet. It’s about ten years ago.”



The brunette in the red wool pants and matching sweater was stout. That’s what Keti would call her. Her hair was graying, and she’d tied it back in a ponytail. The man, undoubtedly her husband, was a few years older.

The young girl was maybe six.

She was brunette.

Her eyes were brown.

Her nose was straight.

Her chin was like Martin’s.

“Just one?” the little girl said, walking around the tree and looking at the small pile of presents. “I can only open one? Santa will bring more, won’t he?”

And her birthday would be the next day. Surely, they would give her something for her birthday.

“You think that old fat man’s going to bring you something, Charlotte?” teased the father.

The girl, Charlotte, bit her lip. She wanted an American Girl doll, the one named Kirsten, more than anything. She wanted her mother to sew clothes for her doll, and Charlotte could knit a scarf for the girl—she was learning to knit, and her older sister would help her if she got stuck.

But a full-size American Girl doll was expensive. Charlotte’s parents didn’t generally give her as many presents as some of her friends got. She walked around the tree, studying each package that was labeled for her. Finally, she picked the largest. It looked big enough. “This one,” she said.

Her father smiled and turned away slightly.

Her mother nodded and sat down to watch.

Charlotte carefully unwrapped the paper—no tearing away gift wrap for this child. Then, her small hands pried open the lid.

There it was. Kirsten, in her box. She said, “You got her for me! She’s just what I wanted!”

Both parents beamed at her. Sometimes they might seem stern, but they saw her as their treasure.



One night seems to blend into another, and Keti recognizes yet another Christmas—her last Christmas with the Collins family.



Martin parked his truck outside Keti’s Victorian.

He walked up to the stately house and rang the doorbell, listening to it chime.

Heels clacked on the tile of the foyer inside, and the door swung open.

Keti, in a red Donna Karan suit with Jimmy Choo boots and her blond hair in a smooth pageboy. She seemed more distant from Martin than ever before.

“There you are,” she said.

Martin stepped inside.

Keti murmured a hello, but she seemed scarcely to see him. “I’m ready,” she said with a shrug, “whenever you are.”

She lifted an expensive camel-hair coat from the staircase railing and began to slip it on. Then she handed Martin a tin of Pepperidge Farm Christmas cookies from the hall table.

“What are these for?” he asked.

She shrugged again. “Fluffany.”

“Why do you call Tiffany that?”

“Because she is fluffy. All fluff and no common sense.”

“Ah.” And then Martin noticed that Keti, the woman who had everything she needed and so much more besides, had no actual gift packages anywhere in sight.

Just a tin of cookies.

He blushed for her, and felt shame just as if he were the one who had been so selfish.

The house in Bounty, at the present time

Keti awakes in her bed and realizes she has been crying. Had she dreamed all of that? Obviously. But what strange and vivid dreams they had been.

That child, the girl to whom she’d given birth, the girl she could now almost make herself forget was Martin’s daughter, too, should be sixteen this Christmas. Keti doesn’t know the names of the people who adopted her. She doesn’t know her name, her daughter’s name. Though in the dream she had been called Charlotte.

And in her dream, Keti was allowed to see her as a happy child. If she could believe the dream.

And, oh, that strange bit about Edith.

She turns on a light and looks toward the mirror.

Something moves beside her, and she jumps. Marley, of course. The dog’s pale eyes are open and he’s watching her. Marley thumps his short tail and gazes at her.

Poor, starved thing, she thinks.

Then, she marvels to herself, I have a dog. How did it happen that I have a dog?

She knows perfectly well. Marley made it clear that he needed Keti; that she had to help him.

“You’re better for me than any lesson a spirit of Christmas could bring, Marley. Did you have funny dreams, too?” she asks.

It’s hard to tell from Marley’s expression.

She can see herself now in Aunt Marlene’s mirror. Remembering the envelope and the photos, she gets up to retrieve them. Perhaps one of them will be of her aunt. How did Marlene come to have those childhood pictures of her and Martin? Keti wonders. Then, she remembers. One year, when Marlene came to the Collins house, the Collinses gave her a photo album filled with pictures of Keti. Pictures they’d taken of the Collins children when they’d been playing with Keti, before she’d come to live with the family, had been included, as well.

Keti pulls the photos from the envelope.

There’s Martin again, Martin and Keti, Martin that Christmas after he’d come home from Vietnam. Ah, and here is a shot of Keti and Marlene at the Palomino Palace. A Christmas party.

Marlene died alone.

It had just happened that way—a massive stroke. One of the girls found her.

The state police had explained all this to Keti.

She remembers her dream—it must have been a dream, vivid as it seemed. But Marlene with her handcuffs, Marlene in her red suit, Marlene ancient and trapped…My dear aunt. You must be happy now, wherever you are, wherever the dead are. I don’t believe there could have been a vile judgment for you in the end.

What do I believe? Keti wonders.

She supposes she is an atheist—or something like that. And yet…

She shivers, walking herself through those strange dreams again. She remembers the kindness of the Collins family. She thinks about Martin’s determination to give to others.

He isn’t judgmental these days. But he still holds himself aloof from Keti. As if he might catch something. Greed. Granted, his face lights up with a bright smile whenever he sees her. But she wonders if the only way he knows of to be friends with her is to detach himself utterly. Because how she believes she must live is so different from how he would live if he were in her position.

She sets the photos on her night table and turns out the light. She remembers the little girl, Charlotte.

If I were to make a Christmas wish…

A single wish.

But life has taught her that the only thing she can count on is what she does for herself.

Is that what I’ve learned? she wonders.

Or is it only what she’s practiced?


Christmas Present

Chapter 9
Christmas present

Sitting up in bed, Keti has no need to be told that the church bell is again striking one. The air feels different. All that wasn’t a dream, was it? Because she believes that she has been restored to consciousness just in the nick of time, for the special purpose of meeting with the second messenger dispatched to her through Aunt Marlene’s intervention.

Beside her, Marley sighs and rolls onto his side.

Lying down again, Keti takes a sharp look all around the bed. For she wishes to challenge her visiting spirit on the moment of its reappearance. She does not intend to be taken by surprise.

But nothing happens.

The first visitor—Edith—was just a part of a dream, after all. Well, isn’t that what Keti told herself? Why is she expecting something so absurd as a second spirit?

She turns over and pets the dog, and Marley licks her face. His breath is surprisingly nice. For all his malnourishment, he must have good teeth.

“Just a dream, Marley. I wish you could talk. You could tell me your dreams.”

But a light has just appeared. A light coming from the mirror, perhaps, but suffusing everything with its glow. Yes, the source and secret of this ghostly light must be the mirror. This idea taking possession of Keti’s mind, she gets up softly and slips to the end of the bed, toward the mirror. Marley sits up, too. He sniffs.

Keti smells it, too. Food.

“Marley,” she cries softly, afraid to be separated from the dog. He comes toward her. Sniffing.

And now it’s as if the mirror surrounds them and they are in another part of the house. They’re downstairs, in the living room. Yes, it’s Keti’s own house. There is no doubt about that. But it has undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling are so hung with evergreen boughs, that it looks a perfect grove, from every part of which bright, gleaming berries glisten. Crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe and ivy reflect the light, as if so many small mirrors have been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze roars in the fireplace, as that dull petrification of a hearth has never known in Keti’s time or for many a season gone.

But that’s not the strangest part.

There’s no keeping Marley at her side. What sits before them seems the starving dog’s personal Christmas gift.

Heaped upon the floor, to form a kind of throne, are turkeys, geese, game, poultry, great joints of meat, long wreaths of sausages, pies, puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense cakes and seething bowls of cider, all making the chamber dim with their delicious steam. Reclining upon a sofa is a figure, no skinny waif. She’s all round curves, and it’s Amy Collins, happy, joyful, glorious to see. She bears a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn, and she holds it up, high up, to shed its light on Keti.

“Hello, Keti.”

Though Amy’s eyes are clear and kind, Keti’s reluctant to meet her gaze. I’m terrified, she thinks.

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,” says Amy with a grin.

Amy wears a simple deep green robe bordered with white fur. The garment hangs loosely on her. Beneath the robe she wears nothing; even her feet are bare; and on her head she wears a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Her dark brown curls are long and free, free as her genial face, her sparkling eyes, her open hands, her cheery voice, her unconstrained demeanor and joyful air. Girded round her middle is an antique scabbard, but there’s no sword in it, and the ancient sheath is eaten up with rust.

Keti can only stare.

Amy rises, seeming altogether on a larger scale than she ever did in life. She’s giant, really.

“Amy,” says Keti submissively, “let’s get this over with. I went with Edith because she compelled me to, and I’ve learned a lesson. If you have anything more to teach me, I’d like to profit by it.”

“Touch my robe!” says Amy.

Keti does as she’s told and holds fast.

Turkeys, geese, game, poultry, meat, sausages, pies, puddings, oysters, chestnuts, apples, oranges, pears, cakes, cider, even the elk leg Marley is working on, all vanish instantly. Marley barks sharply, then lies down with a dejected whimper, and the room, the fire, the glow and the hour of night disappear, as well.

They stand on Main Street in downtown Bounty on Christmas morning. There are people here and they make a rough but not brisk and not unpleasant kind of noise, scraping snow from the pavement in front of those shops open even on this day, as skiers walk past with their equipment over their shoulders.

The sky is gloomy and the streets are choked with a thick mist, whose heavier particles descend in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the hearths in Nevada had, in a single moment, been laid with fires and were now blazing away to their hearts’ content. There’s nothing particularly cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet there’s an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might not have produced.

For the people shoveling, others headed for the slopes, even those opening shops and coffeehouses for the benefit of the tourists, are gleeful, calling out to one another. The market is open, its windows painted with holiday scenes, and Keti peers inside at aisles overflowing with fruit and vegetables.

There are the churchgoers, too, hustling toward one or another of Bounty’s three churches. The long coats of the women—camel hair, fur, bright, rich wools—stand out like splendid ornaments against the snowy landscape. Children run ahead and behind in their Christmas finery, and the men are proud and pleased.

At the same time, innumerable more ordinary-looking people emerge from the side streets, carrying their breakfasts with them. Keti recognizes the Mexican man who cleared her front walk the night before, and others…Well, there are some poor people in Bounty.

The sight of these people seems to interest Amy very much, for she stands with Keti and Marley beside her in the doorway of a bakery, sprinkling some sort of incense on their dinners from her torch. It’s an uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice when there are angry words between some of the passersby who have accidentally jostled each other, she sheds a few drops of liquid on them from it, and their good humor is restored at once. They say that it’s a shame to quarrel on Christmas Day.

They walk on, the three of them, Amy, Keti in her nightgown and bare feet never feeling the ice and snow, and Marley. They are invisible to those around them, Keti decides, for no one seems to notice them. Notwithstanding Amy’s immense presence, she accommodates herself to any place with ease; she stands gracefully beneath a low roof, just as she would in the loftiest hall.

Keti isn’t surprised when she sees where Amy eventually leads her.

Out to the end of town where the trailer park is, the trailer park that’s packed to capacity, the trailers a mere six feet apart.

Tiffany, Amy’s daughter and Keti’s goddaughter, lives here, with her four children and also the father of the youngest child.

Christmas Present with the Collins family

Martin hardly had to knock at the door of Tiffany’s trailer before his niece opened it and exclaimed, “Hi, Uncle Martin!

“Martin’s here!” she called to the others.

Tiffany was blond these days, her hair wiry from its latest perm, and Martin wasn’t sure anymore what her hair would look like in its natural state. She was wearing tight hip-huggers, and some of her bulk spilled over the waistband underneath her red sweater, which had a Christmas tree appliquéd on the front.

Martin hugged his niece, while holding on to the bags of gifts he’d brought with him.

“Come on in!” Tiffany exclaimed, smiling broadly. “Oh, I hear Tim. I better see to him.”

Her youngest child had been named Timothy, for his father. Quite a departure, Martin always thought, from Athena, Chaparral and Crazy Horse—the names of Tiffany’s older children. Crazy Horse was only four, and Martin expected that noble name to metamorphose into something else pretty quickly once he hit kindergarten. On the other hand, Crazy Horse liked his name.

But as for Tim, their own Tiny Tim, there was something wrong with him, which seemed to be the result of a long and difficult birth. He’d had a heart operation immediately after birth, hadn’t walked at all until he was two and he still wasn’t speaking at three. But his brother and sisters fought to be the one to hold him and push him in a stroller or pull him in a wagon.

Tim Senior, Tiffany’s husband, entered the foyer with a can of Budweiser in hand. “Hi, Martin. How about a beer?” His forearms were covered with tattoos, and his gray hair hung past his shoulders and, as usual, was tied in a ponytail. Martin liked Tim, who fixed motorcycles for a living and rode them as a vocation.

As Martin followed him into the living room, where a small tree stood in the corner beside a television set showing the football game of the day, Martin’s niece, Chaparral, hurled herself at him. “Martin, build me a snow fort.”

Martin’s father rose from his seat in front of the television. He’d sold the old Collins house after his wife’s death and bought the trailer next door to Tiffany’s. Then he’d given her the money to buy this one, and had settled the balance of Bridget’s credit card bills, which she had promptly run up again.

Martin and his father embraced. Mr. Collins’s eyes were still bright, the whites as clear as they always had been. Tiffany’s oldest daughter, Athena, set the table at the end of the room closest to the kitchen, using a green tablecloth that had been in the family for years. Martin smelled spices and a turkey cooking and he went into the kitchen to hug his sister Bridget and Bridget’s oldest daughter, as well as her infant. As Tiffany checked on the turkey, Bridget’s younger daughter agreed to build Chaparral and Crazy Horse the snow fort they wanted. When Martin lifted pot lids on the stove, Bridget and Tiffany hissed at him to keep out of the food. Then Tiffany relented and offered him a taste of the yams and stuffing as he picked up his nephew Tim from a seat in the corner of the tiny kitchen.

Thin and underdeveloped, Tim still needed to be seen by a host of specialists, and Martin had done everything he could to make this happen. Tiffany had learned, in California, of a French specialist who was having great success with various physical and mental exercises for late-developing children. So now Martin was trying to figure out a way for Tiffany’s son to see the man.

The bell sounded again, and soon the trailer was full, with the arrival of Paul and his family. Then George appeared, at last, with his military haircut. George was career military, which was something Martin didn’t discuss with him. Nothing he’d seen in Vietnam had made him believe in the service. So he simply embraced his brother and told him he looked great, which he did.

“He got the looks for the whole family,” Bridget said.

“Uncle Martin’s not half-bad, either,” Tiffany remarked. “Can one of you guys get the kids from outside?”

Martin thought of Keti, regretting her absence. Most other years, he’d been able to persuade her to be near them at Christmastime. Not this one, however.

He’d hurt her feelings, and they were estranged. Last year, he’d made it clear that he didn’t want to be lovers, even occasional lovers, anymore. And then he’d foolishly mentioned the tin of cookies, which was all she’d brought to Tiffany’s. Bringing that up had made him feel clumsy, ungentlemanly and worse; and it had made Keti cry, something that surprised him.

The situation still ate at him. It disturbed Martin that he should love someone so…selfish. It bothered him that he couldn’t accept her as she was. Most of all, it nearly destroyed something inside him to watch her grow harder every year, less and less concerned for the people all around her, those who worked for minimum wage or less and those who had no employment at all. How had this happened to Keti?

As they sat down at the table, his father said, “You know, I still feel so used to having Keti here for Christmas dinner.”

“Keti Whitechapel has never been here in this trailer except once, last year, when she decided not to bring anything,” Tiffany said sharply. “I can do just fine without having her name mentioned today.”

Martin eyed her in surprise as he placed his napkin in his lap.

“Let’s say grace,” Bridget suggested, and Mr. Collins led them all in giving thanks before they launched into their meal.

“I invited her,” Tiffany continued. “And by the way, you should see the inside of that house these days—well, I suppose you have, but not lately. Catch her having a party. It would cost her something. The house is worth, I don’t know, a couple million dollars, I bet. Maybe more. All the beds have fabulous mattresses and beautiful imported sheets, and no one ever sleeps there but her.”

Martin’s throat swelled shut, and he saw Keti’s face in his mind, her smile with the chipped tooth that she’d never had capped. He remembered a younger Keti, when her expression was still vulnerable. Now, she had the face of a porcelain figure, frozen in time. Hard.

“Her mother died on Christmas,” he said, as if that could be a defense for Keti’s ungenerous behavior.

“She doesn’t love anyone,” Tiffany continued. “She’s like a robot.”

“Not really, she’s not,” Martin said. Though Keti had taken other lovers, he suspected that he was the only one who had ever touched her heart. And he knew that she loved him still, might always love him. He felt responsible because of that, helpless to stop it or to cure her of her love for him.

Quite sure that he didn’t want to cure her.

Her aunt Marlene had died earlier this year, too, and now Keti was utterly without blood relatives.

Then there was the wound of giving up that infant girl…Keti had never questioned what she’d done, and always said she was certain it had been the right choice.

Or at least that was what she said to him.

Martin didn’t like to think about that child, that birth, the suspicions he’d had then, his acceptance of what Keti had told him.

Despite what his heart and eyes and reason had whispered. No, shouted…

He couldn’t look too closely at why—at any of the whys. Things he’d seen in Vietnam. Things he’d done. Parts of his character and his past he’d never examined because to do so might well open a door to self-hatred.

Where is she? he wondered. Where is Keti today? How will she react if I call her?

“Anyway,” Tiffany continued, “she’s just one of those rich people who thinks only about herself.”

“Thank you, Tiffany,” Mr. Collins said firmly.

And now Bridget looked up and said, “I’m sorry for her.”

Martin nearly left the table, knowing how Keti would react to Bridget’s pity.

Tiffany said, “Why? She’s got everything she ever wanted. She practically owns all of Bounty.”

“I’m truly sorry for her,” Bridget continued. “I couldn’t be angry with her if I tried. Who suffers from her choices? Keti, always. She has taken it into her head not to be with us, for whatever reason, and she won’t come and dine with us. What’s the consequence?”

“She loses a great dinner!” exclaimed Paul’s wife. Everybody else said the same.

“But the real issue,” Bridget said, “is that the consequence of her taking a dislike to us, or to Martin—” she added with a meaningful look at her brother “—is that she loses some pleasant moments, which could do her no harm. I am sure she loses much more happiness than she’d be likely to find amid her own thoughts, either in that huge, empty house or at her desk at the mine. If I have my way, we’ll keep asking her to join us every year. She must bear us, every Christmas, saying, ‘Keti, how are you? Please be with us.’ And maybe, as a result, she’ll at least leave a generous tip for a maid in a hotel somewhere or maybe be more lenient toward some of her employees in South Africa. And that would be something.”

They lingered over dinner, talking and laughing, getting up to go out for a short walk together before dessert. Afterward, they returned to the trailer for pie and brownies and cider and carols.

“Deck the halls with boughs of holly

Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la

Tis the season to be jolly…”

Martin sat with Tim on his lap, singing gently to the boy, and Tim tried to sing, too, but it wasn’t coherent. Still, they were all proud of him.

Next came Charades, and then everyone joined in Twenty Questions.

When it was his turn, Tim Senior held his own through a brisk fire of questioning. He was thinking of an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal. An animal that sniffed and occasionally snapped, and lived in Bounty and drove rather than walked…Each question had him laughing harder, and at a certain point Martin rose, with his nephew in his arms, and walked into the kitchen to get another brownie. He’d worked out the answer already, and saw Athena falling on the floor laughing, crying, “It’s Keti Whitechapel!”

“She’s given us plenty of merriment,” said Mr. Collins, not altogether happily. He lifted his glass of cider. “But I’d prefer to drink to her health. To Keti, who is still our friend.”

Martin reached for a glass of water beside the sink and raised it. “Hear, hear!”

“A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to Keti,” Bridget agreed. “She won’t take the wish from us, but may she have both, nonetheless.”

Keti and Amy, later the same night

Keti and Marley and the ghostly Amy are no longer at Tiffany’s trailer. Amy is taking them to another trailer, instead. A huge Mexican-American family, twenty-three people celebrating together, in a rented home that is clean but has a hole in one door, put there by some other tenant in the past. For all that, the people inside embrace each other with beatific smiles. Children are lifted high in the air. Keti thinks she recognizes the faces of a couple of the miners who work in the Empress Tunnel.

“Feliz Navidad!”

And out to the streets again, where people are rushing from one home to another. Keti is remembering Martin holding little Tim, Tiffany’s youngest, and she thinks about his gentleness and acceptance, his love of the child, which is so simple and pure.

It is dark now. Such a long night, if it is only a night, or even just an hour, because the Christmas holidays appear to have been condensed into the brief space of time she and Amy have spent together.

Still, Amy is growing older, clearly older, and somehow her hair has turned gray.

“What is happening to you, Amy?” Keti asks.

“My life in this form is very brief,” she replies. “It ends tonight.”

“Tonight!” cries Keti, clinging to Marley’s collar and checking the dog to make sure he isn’t aging, too. But, no, he’s the same and he has found a bone, probably belonging to one of the trailer park dogs, which he is carrying happily. She glances at the aging Amy and notices something sticking out from under the hem of her robe. “Is that a claw?” Keti exclaims in horror.

“It might be, for all the flesh on it. Look.” From the foldings of the garment, Amy brings out two children—wretched, abject, frightful, hideous and miserable. They kneel at her feet and cling to the fabric that enfolds her.

Keti sees a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish and yet humble. Instead of showing all the natural beauty of the young, a stale and shriveled hand has pinched and twisted and pulled their countenances to shreds. Devils lurk within the two and glare out menacingly. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity through all the mysteries of creation has monsters half so horrible, Keti thinks.

She starts back, appalled. She tries to say they are fine children, but the words choke her and she cannot voice the lie.

“Are they yours?” she finally asks.

“They are mankind’s,” Amy explains sadly. “This boy is Ignorance and the girl is Want. Beware them both, but most of all beware the boy. On his brow, I see written, Doom, unless the writing can somehow be erased.”

“Don’t they have somewhere to go, someone to care for them?”

“The government gives them what they need.” Amy echoes words Keti has often used. She shrugs, just as Keti shrugs.

Then the church bell chimes.

One.

Two.

Amy is gone, and Keti and Marley are alone on their own street. When Keti lifts her eyes again, she beholds a phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground.

Coming directly toward her.