“Tonight, folks, you see the miracle of Christmas all around you. It is in the help given to a neighbor, the music resounding through stores and churches, in resplendent parades and pageants. It is in the tinsel and color and sparkle shining through each window. It is in the light of the eyes of a child. It is in our hearts.”

Dan shrugged into his jacket and plucked the key from his pocket to lock the door. He had hit all the right notes tonight. The audience had chuckled and nodded at just the right places. It had become second nature by now. Just as his grandmother had hoped, he had become a very good speaker. Very good. He knew how to move a crowd, how to fill them with questions or anger or, like tonight, fill their hearts with the blessed joy of the holiday.

He stepped quickly down the cement steps, breathing in the cold night air. He stopped and looked around him at muted lights of a city gone dark and quiet on a night when most turned to home for nurture and entertainment. Christmas Eve.

As he turned the lock of his home, a striking building on an upscale city block, his foot nudged something on the top step. Picking it up, he turned it over in his hands. A small piece from a crèche. Whose it was or how it had landed on his step he had no idea, but someone would be missing this tonight. Surely they would want it to complete the Christmas scene.

He bent down and dropped the infant Jesus back in its place as he stepped over it and shut his door. He would turn on one of those wonderful Christmas movies tonight and appreciate the stories with happy endings. He would drink cocoa and eat some fudge someone had given him. He would play games on the new computer he had indulged in as a Christmas present to himself.

And the baby Jesus lay in the quiet night outside in the cold.

Photo: Caribou-Coffee.jpg

Standing here looking at the lights, she felt a presence and turned her head to see the old chaplain standing next to her.

“Have you forgiven her yet?”

He said it as though their conversation begun with his comment in her hospital room had continued through the years. Here beside the Christmas lights the question seemed as natural as the evergreens in front of them.

“Does it matter? It’s been so many years.”

She could hardly believe it, but his standing next to her didn’t bother her as it had that very first time. It didn’t frighten her as it had in her dream, nor surprise her as it had at the grocery store. It seemed, in fact, somehow good – like he was a very old friend.

“Forgiveness always matters.”

She stood, breathing white puffs into the night while the tree lights sparkled, the darkness exposing their beauty and color.

She thought about the neighbor, the woman whose jealousy of her happy life had inflamed the hostile act. That day’s destruction was not limited to dwelling, but extended to thought and emotion, trust and memory. She breathed another vapor of white into the air. She was tired of it all. She knew now that she really did want to let it go; let all of it go. She wanted to release the debt. She nodded her head. Yes. She forgave the neighbor. She knew she could, and she really did.

Gazing anew at the Christmas lights, she breathed in their beauty and goodness. It seemed suddenly that their friendly, sparkling light shot into her soul baptizing it with warmth and brightness. She looked into the old chaplain’s compassionate eyes and saw in them her reflection.

She blinked and peered more closely. Slowly she brought her hand up to her face, the skin between her thumb and forefinger no longer webbed. As she ran her fingers over her now smooth skin, she closed her eyes against the tears pooling there. Was it true? Had the stranger’s comment long ago in the agony of her hospital room really taken place? Surely not. But she had forgiven – she knew that much – and when she had determined to let the transgression go, she really had felt a very strange pulse run through her body.

“What happened?” she asked as she opened her eyes.

But the old chaplain wasn’t there, and the Christmas lights glowed brighter into the cold, dark night.

Image: commons.wikimedia.org_.png

She exhaled a puff of white that momentarily hung in the air before vanishing into the darkness. Hugging herself with her arms, she shivered; but she would stay just awhile longer to enjoy what she had come to see. They were pretty: twinkling beauty against the cold, night air. The lights had been strung the weekend before on evergreens encircling the skating rink. The tiny white bulbs that had graced the pines all the years before had been moved to the bushes and deciduous trees outside city hall. Resting in the now bare-boned branches, the lights gave a certain panache to the surroundings of the otherwise unremarkable building by which they stood.

But the red and green, blue and purple lights now lending their sparkle to the rink’s evergreen edge were amazing. She thought, as she gazed at them, she hadn’t seen anything so stunning in a long time. A very long time.

It had been ten years now since the fire, but in her mind it was yesterday. A neighbor – one she barely knew – who had resented her happy life even as she smiled and waved each time they met had channeled her jealousy into a lighted match thrown onto her morning paper resting on the jute rug in her small, enclosed front porch. Her morning ritual to switch off the outdoor light and get the newspaper had resulted in a backdraft which sent her to the hospital for treatment she wished she could forget and a future she wished she could escape.

A morning jogger had provided testimony of the event, and the neighbor had gotten five years and the satisfaction of destroying the irritating happy life.

Knowing what had happened and why and punishing the perpetrator couldn’t change the image she saw every time she looked in the mirror. Her scarred face and neck, once pretty – some said beautiful – were oppressive to see. The scars seemed to thicken with every year and a quiet, gnawing sadness grew with them.

She had avoided anything to do with fire, even light, at first. After its inhabitant had returned from the hospital, the neighbors saw a dark house, its interior as devoid of light as its owner’s soul. Light was unavoidable, of course, and gradually she had allowed it in its many forms to filter back into her life. She had left all light switches untouched for a long time; but one day she had turned on a lamp, and the next week she turned on the kitchen light. She was able to flick those switches now, but only one room at a time. There was no point in wasting electricity.

It had been easy to remove reflective surfaces – vases, silverplate, mirrors. The bathroom mirror had stayed. It was like living with an old friend she no longer appreciated. She didn’t need a mirror to remind her of the fire’s wrath. She saw it in the pitying faces of friends and the curious, repulsed, stolen glances of strangers. She felt it in the webbing between her thumb and forefinger.

A visitor to her hospital room had told her that maybe one day her skin would be as good as new, but forgiveness was more important than skin. It had to do with the inner pain, the pain that would never go away without it. He, she supposed, was an old chaplain looking for something to do or say; but his words were harsh. Forgiveness of the neighbor? Forgiveness of someone who had caused her such grief and pain seemed ridiculous. She hoped that neighbor would live hand to mouth, that she would have trouble finding work because of her criminal record, that she was disgusted with herself. The nurse attending her just then had completely ignored him. People could give care without caring, she had thought at the time. She had ignored him, too.

She had ignored everyone at first. It was two years after the explosion when she saw the old chaplain in a dream. He just stood, looking at her, waiting. The next time was at the grocery store. Well, actually, she couldn’t be sure about that. She had thought she’d caught a glance, but when she looked more closely, he was gone. She thought about the jealous neighbor, and wondered where she was now.

to be continued…

Image: Beeston_MMB_67_Christmas_lights_switch-on-wikimedia-commons.jpg; creative commons lic.