Divinity

I know.

Everybody thinks I don’t.

Grandpa Jack is dying.

Mom grabs my hand, I pull it back. I’m ten, not a baby now. I look up at the bright lights in the church fellowship hall. Tiny dots on the underside of the plastic covers, dead bugs trapped inside. A fly graveyard.

The nice lady, Tammy, holds out a green stick of spearmint. “Here, Bly. For you,” she says.

I take the gum and smile. “Thank you,” I say, polite like Dad tells me to. Tammy pats my head. Her smile is bright as a star.

“Music, everybody.” It’s the preacher’s wife, hair like a brown mouse but not quiet. She’s passing caroling sheets to everyone, crisscrossed with hatch marks like I make on the eyes of my sister’s Ken dolls, the ones I borrow to be in my army when I need someone to die.

The picture on top of the song page is my favorite. I remember it all year. Mary and Joseph, Baby Jesus, star shining behind them. On the right beside the song lyrics, two boys and a girl dressed in German clothes. I’ve seen those costumes at the Christmas market downtown with Mom: one boy wears a red-and-green cap, the other holds a trumpet and hay. The girl has white stockings and carries a branch of holly that looks like a tiny tree.

The picture makes me happy because I know we’re going to sing. Also there’s candy at Margaret’s. Peanut brittle that rattles my head when I crunch it and it sticks to my tongue. We’ll go to Lee and Margaret’s as the last stop, after we’re all sung out, throats dry and lungs frozen. Margaret has hot cocoa, too, the best kind, full of foam and sugar. There’s a picture of me somewhere with a bubbly mustache, holding a mug in front of Margaret’s tree. I was six years old, I think. Maybe that’s why I look forward to her house all year.

“All right, we have cider here, and then let’s practice, everyone.” Katherine, the preacher’s wife, waves her hand at a folding table. A silver saucepan blows up steam from its insides, reddish-brown liquid with little pieces of oranges floating in it. I thought it looked like throw-up until I tasted it last year. Delicious. You just have to drink around the chunks.

“Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king.”

Katherine’s voice sounds like a bugle, clear and high but kind of sweet, too. I take the foam cup of cider from Tammy. She’s always watching out for me. I smile and sip and close my eyes. The music wraps me like a hug.

Dad arrives, hugs Mom from behind. She turns in her green coat, tucks her blonde bangs behind her ear and gives him the biggest smile. He smiles back, but it’s tight and fake, the way cashiers at the grocery store smile when they see Mom wheel the grocery cart toward them with me hanging off the side.

Mom offers Dad her cup of cider. He shakes his head, looks around, finds my sisters, Fay, Jennifer, and Cora, all buttoned up in their coats. Dad makes good money at the stainless-steel plant. He’s welding manager, which means he can buy us nice clothes. Usually.

Then Dad finds me. His eyes see the foam cup of cider I’m holding, my head cocked so I can hear the song: “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.”

I smile, and this time Dad returns a mostly real one. But his face looks like it did when he tried to make friends with a dog who had a broken leg once: cautious, watching for snapping teeth.

I feel sorry for him. And angry. He has to know I know about Grandpa Jack. I’m a bad son, but I don’t care. He should have told me before now.

The notes of Katherine’s song lift me high, spin me out of the church hall and back to a memory. I’m watching Grandpa in his rocker. This is before the sickness. He doesn’t have a beard like Lincoln, but the kindness in his eyes reminds me of Abe. The wood stove beside him gives off heat I can feel behind my closed eyelids. This memory holds up, is so much better than the later ones, when the nurse started visiting Grandpa in his back room with her thick-soled shoes, weird smell on her scrubs, giving him little paper cups with shiny pills like candy inside.

I paste the picture in my mind, like I do in art class when the glue gets all over my fingers and Ms. Granger has to wipe off my hands with a rag. I want to always remember Grandpa like this, even though he is going away now.

“Mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die.”

I swallow back a growl. I wish adults wouldn’t lie about this stuff. People die, no matter what songs say. I think of Grandpa, flat on his back behind that white door with a green tinsel wreath. That big building, with so many rooms.

The other people in the church hall wet their throats with cider and join Katherine’s song. The tune is nice, even if the words are wrong. I smile, decide to focus on the happy way these songs used to make me feel. When I look back at Dad, his eyes are closed and he’s listening to the hymn.

* * *

Russ downshifts his Silverado pickup as they coast along the boulevard, lighted snowflake ornaments overhead. Fay, his oldest daughter, rides on the passenger side with Bly, and Cora, his youngest, sits between Russ and Bly on the seat. His wife Emmy and his middle daughter, Jennifer, ride with the preacher’s wife, Katherine.

Dad, Mom. That hospital room. His father declined so quickly Russ hasn’t had time to grieve. Maybe that’s the source of the logjam in his throat. If he starts crying, he isn’t sure he’ll be able to stop. His father, healthy and hearty six months ago, now hamstrung by pain so intense he takes a whole rainbow of pills before lunch.

Bly worries Russ most. His son was born on a wet Thursday in June, has Down syndrome. From the start, Bly was unbelievably kind, a grinning, gap-toothed Buddha. Grandpa Jack, Russ’s dad now in the hospital, was the special target of Bly’s affection. The old man and boy went everywhere together, flea markets, fishing trips, baseball games, and state fairs. Usually a chatterbox, Bly has gotten so quiet since Grandpa Jack got sick. Russ caught him pulling the head off a Captain America figurine two weeks ago in his room, saying, “Grandpa goes to Heaven now.”

Half of Russ wishes his father would get it over with, fall asleep and never wake up, and the other half is terrified he will. Stop it. You’re a terrible son.

What will his mother do when Dad is gone? What will he do? His parents own the small house they raised Russ in, and his mother is still mobile, but there is no getting around the fact that most of her care will eventually fall to him.

Lung cancer is his father’s official diagnosis. Ironic, considering he lived through America’s most carcinogenic decades without touching a cigarette. The only guess Dr. Merkel would hazard was that the churning air of the Firestone tire warehouse where his father worked fouled his lungs.

Russ blames himself for not insisting his dad get the hacking cough he developed last March checked out. By July, when they finally discovered the mass, it had blackened one-fourth of his right lung, and the oncology team had said they could try radiation but weren’t optimistic.

They’d been able to keep his dad’s sickness a secret from Bly at first, shuttling him to and from a cancer clinic in Sheffield. But when an appointment interrupted Bly’s weekly Thursday visits with his grandfather for a fourth time, they’d had to come up with a story. Emmy told Bly his grandfather was away at important meetings, interviewing for a new job that might take him to the city. Russ still remembers the confused look that descended over Bly’s face: half confusion, half sorrow, all fear.

Russ glances at Bly now, beneath the Christmas lights passing overhead. His son holds Fay’s hand. Russ can barely see Bly’s nose above his coat collar, and his eyes are nearly crinkled shut. From the angle of his body resting against the seat, Bly looks relaxed.

“Daddy?” Cora’s voice slips up between them.

“Yes?” Russ glances down at his youngest daughter in her white coat, sandwiched like a marshmallow between his brown Carhartt and Bly’s black parka.

“Anna told me it’s impossible to have a baby without, you know …” Cora’s voice trails off, her pink cheeks twisting into a flushed smirk. She turns her blue eyes on him, glowing ice in the dark. “So how could Mary have Jesus?”

Russ swallows, glances at Bly and Fay behind her. Bly swivels Russ’s way, one corner of his collar covering his left eye, his right pupil fixed on his father, waiting for his answer. Russ considers telling Cora the standard line, about God choosing Mary, but he can’t make himself do it. “I don’t know,” Russ finally says.

Cora shrugs. “Okay,” she says, crooking her white sleeves into a cradle and rocking an imaginary bundle. “I’d like to have Jesus for a baby.”

Russ exhales between his teeth. Cora is eleven but still plenty credulous, equally at home with Barbies or the fairies in her head. She doesn’t care about proof as much as a good story. He turns back to face the road. A few snowflakes, more ash than flurry, float through the truck’s headlights.

Russ feels Bly’s eyes on him. He glances at his son. Bly’s pupils are impossibly wide in the heated gloom. Russ can’t make out his expression — not hatred, not exactly disgust — maybe a mixture of both. Bly has never looked at him that way before.

* * *

We’ve made it through eight of our eleven stops. Next is Old Lady Janice, a round woman whose white hair is never puffed out far enough from her head, which makes it look like a tiny Ping-Pong ball on top of a watermelon. She’s got three chins, which makes me snicker. I grab Fay’s hand. We’ve ridden in Dad’s truck from house to house, and I’ll need Fay’s help not to laugh at Janice tonight. Dad parks the truck and Fay opens her door so we can step out.

“Okay, Bly?” Fay asks, and I smile up into her eyes, which are brown like chocolate. I think of the hot cocoa at Lee and Margaret’s.

I nod. Thumbs up.

We pile out, crunch through the frozen grass to Janice’s door. She lives in a small house, a shack really, and a star hangs above its chimney that looks a lot like the one on my carol sheet. I wonder if Jesus’ barn was in a poor part of town. I saw bars on the windows of two stores when we turned down this street.

Janice’s round old-lady face comes up behind the fogged glass door. She’s smiling, and her hair is fluffed up as much as it can go. But the light from the living room behind her still shows the silly shadow of her tiny head. I snort into my coat sleeve. Fay’s hand grips mine, hard.

Janice throws open the door. “I thought you weren’t coming!” she says, too loud.

Janice is simple. I overheard Grandma say that once, not in a mean voice, to Fay and Cora, to explain her big smile and loud voice, and I wondered what she meant. I don’t see anything wrong with Janice, except her head.

Katherine steps up on the tiny porch and lifts her caroling sheet. Janice holds out her hands. Her Christmas dress waterfalls down her elephant curves, and I catch a sparkle of velvet. She’s dressed up, just for us, tonight.

We can’t fit inside the house, so we push under the roof of the porch. First notes.

“It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old.”

Carols sound better outside in the cold air. Just voices and no piano, even though I love the way Mrs. Bruner pounds beautiful booms out of our church’s big black grand. I close my eyes as the rest of our group joins Katherine’s clear voice, feel the floorboards hum. Lucky to be alive on a night like this, is what I think as the words go spinning out into the dark, touching the snowflakes, which are bigger and falling faster now.

I see Dad watching me, an almost-smile touching the corners of his mouth.

Three houses later, I scrape my shoes over Lee and Margaret’s shoveled sidewalk. Last stop. Rows of Rudolph inflatables line this block.

Margaret opens the door. Hair poofy like Janice’s, but a regular-size head. The Christmas lights on the house across the street reflect in her big glasses. Huge smile. Margaret’s always smiling.

“Come in, everybody!” she says. Warm air pushes out of the door, hugs me hard. “Bly!” Margaret opens her arms and gives me a huge squeeze. Old lady stink, sour perfume, but I smell peanut brittle on her apron.

Stamping feet, shivering arms. Gloves clapped together. There’s space for everyone in this living room, and we push inside like a bunch of puppies around a hearth. No standing on a porch here. Scarves unwind. A few older carolers sit on the green corduroy couch.

“Who wants hot chocolate?” Margaret’s voice is almost lower than Dad’s but still warm, like Grandma’s. I frown. Grandma, back at the hospital with Grandpa. Tubes, wires, beeps, and candy pills. I shake my head, look at Lee and Margaret’s tree, determined to enjoy this. But I feel like I’m forgetting something.

Chapped bare hands, free of mittens, raise all over the room. Margaret counts them off silently, still smiling. “You go ahead and sing,” she says, motioning to the pass-through window connecting their living room to the kitchen. “I’ll get the cups while I listen.”

I’m staring at the small angel ornament on their tree, the figurine with a halo made of sparkly pipe cleaner, when it comes to me. Lee. That’s what’s missing. He’s usually sitting in the recliner beside the fire, legs crossed at his knobby knees, old-man shins peeking out under the cuffs of his brown pants. Like Grandpa beside his stove.

Katherine’s nose is bright red as she thumbs through the carol sheet. She points at a middle page. “‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’?” she asks. Papers shuffle as everyone finds the place.

“Where is Mister Lee?” I ask, and the room stills. Shining eyes turn my way. I feel cold, even though I’ve still got my black parka on. I see Dad step out from behind Mom, move my way.

Lee’s almost as fun as Grandpa. He jingles coins in his pocket at church, but always has a spare quarter for me. Sometimes he gives me two. Once he dug through his gold Cadillac’s ashtray for a shiny half-dollar piece — the one with President Kennedy on it — just to give it to me after service.

Dad looks mad, maybe hurt, at me for asking. Or maybe he’s angry at Lee for being gone.

“Lee’s sick, honey,” Margaret says, leaning through the pass-through window from the kitchen. Her smile stays put. “Don’t worry, nothing contagious. Just tired out. He’s resting in the back room. He’s got the door open, wants to hear you sing.”

I work my lips together, smash vowels and consonants together like a silent curse. Dad sees me and freezes.

Sick?

The word is a wet chunk of ice landing in the middle of a perfect snow angel. Sick like Grandpa? I’d forgotten about the coins Lee gave me until right this second. I look down at my angry fists, imagine their bright silver moons wink-hiding in my hands. Panic squeezes my middle.

Grandpa is dying. Tonight.

I don’t know where the message comes from. I look at the angel ornament. Eyes closed, smug smile, hiding among the green branches. Did she say that? I want to rip her off the tree.

“Bly?” It’s Dad, palms on my shoulders. His hands feel heavy and hot on top of my parka, like two blazing fireballs pressing down on my spine. Don’t do that.

I shrug Dad off and walk toward the tree. Everything but the angel disappears, her tiny painted smile and curly golden hair. I see she’s holding her own songbook, mouth cracked open, and rage bubbles up my throat, a crackly, fireplace sound.

Why is everyone dying? Grandpa, Lee. Are Mom and Dad next? I might not be as smart as Fay or Cora but I deserve to know. I’ll make someone tell. I reach out, grasp the angel figurine, feel the molded feathers on her back. The pipe cleaner halo pops loose, along with her hanger. Split of fir bough, needles snowing on white carpet.

The room howls as I turn around.

Margaret peeks through from the kitchen. Dad raises his hand, opens his mouth. “Sorry, everyone. My dad’s not doing well. He’s in the hospital and Bly is upset,” is what he says. Oh, now you’re going to tell me?

I ram both fists into Dad’s stomach. Hard. Bad son. Bad son. He groans and falls back.

“Why do people die?” I scream. Katherine’s face is white behind her carol sheet. Her eyes are two pale moons.

When no one answers I run toward Lee’s bedroom. The silence fills up with sudden sound as I rush past. Mom helps Dad sit on the velvet sofa. Dad grunts. Katherine and the others buzz frightened words. Margaret’s slippers click-clack on the kitchen linoleum. She’s coming after me.

I fly down the hall past framed pictures: Lee and Margaret’s two sons; their birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese; waterskiing on Flat Rock Lake; girlfriends and babies and grandchildren.

A cracked door at the end of the hall. Yellow light paints the frame from inside the room. I’m beside Lee’s bed in a flash. I shove the angel in Lee’s wrinkled face. My fingers crush the crazy quilt draped over Lee’s legs. “Why is Grandpa dying?” I shout.

Lee sucks air. I’ve scared him. Then a shy smile peeps behind his bifocals. “Dying?” he asks, cinching his whiskery lip. “Who told you that?” His voice is calm.

I see a portrait of Lee and Margaret on their bedroom wall. “40^th Anniversary” is spelled out behind them in shiny foil letters. It was taken a long time ago: Margaret’s hair is browner and Lee just has more hair.

“She did!” I point at the angel ornament and hurl her at the center of the picture. The portrait explodes in glass splinters. Lee flinches, shields his face. The photo droops out of the frame, falls to the floor.

“Everybody knows Grandpa is dying but they’re pretending he isn’t!” I scream. “He’s dying and I don’t know what to do!”

Mom, Dad, and Margaret push into the room behind me. The space feels crowded. Too many bodies, too much sweat. No words from the silent living room now. I can hear Dad’s heartbeat. Everyone stares at the picture, then me, then the broken ornament on the floor.

Lee picks a glass shard off the crazy quilt, cups it in his old hand. “Part of your Grandpa is dying, but the best part of him isn’t.”

I open my mouth to answer Lee, but a moan comes out. Best part? What’s that?

“His forever part is just moving, that’s all,” Lee says.

My cheeks are suddenly wet, which surprises me. Dad comes on one side of me and Margaret on the other. Dad grips my shoulder, gently this time. I rock back on my heels, then forward, digging my fists into the bright quilt as I stare at Lee’s pruny face. I lean against Dad’s scratchy jacket.

Moving? I turn the word over in my mind. Is that what Grandpa’s doing? “Moving where?” I ask.

Lee’s eyes sparkle. “Hard to say.”

Another animal sob. So I’ll see him later? The best part of him? Fear and pain and wild hope rip up my throat.

Lee discards the glass chip on his nightstand. When his hand comes back, it’s holding a shiny quarter. “Looking for this?” Lee asks. His smile is wider than the one in his busted wall picture.

Dad is making apology noises to Margaret. Mom starts to pick broken glass out of the carpet, hands fluttering over the portrait, which has white scratches from the shards now. Margaret waves Mom away. “It’s just a picture,” she says, and sits on the crazy quilt, old lady hips squashing flat, and looks in my face. She takes my cheeks in her hands and says, “Bly, I made you a present.”

Katherine pretends she’s discussing a song with the person beside her when we come back to the living room. Most of the carolers don’t look at me, but at Mom and Dad, who are white and trembly. Margaret doesn’t stop, goes right to the kitchen, holding my hand, pulling me after her.

“Right here.” Gravelly voice, perm shaking as she opens the china cabinet and lifts out a clear plate. The underside is cut with grooves to make a snowflake design.

Margaret sets the glass tray on the wooden table. It holds a pile of white squishy scoops, red crumbs sprinkled across the tops of a few. Like snowman poop.

Lee’s quarter is still in my hand. It’s warming up. “What is it?” I ask.

“Divinity,” Margaret says. “Candy, my mom’s recipe. I wanted you to try it before anyone else.” She lifts a piece to my nose and I smell sugar, sweet peppermint, and marshmallow. Curious, I open my mouth. Margaret pushes it onto my tongue.

If someone wrapped up all the things I love about Christmas — the smell of pine trees, roasted cinnamon, ripped Batman wrapping paper, cold air, and cookies — and smashed it into candy light as a cloud, that would be close to what I taste. Sugary spit leaks out the corner of my mouth and I smile. “Issss good,” I say. My drool hits the linoleum.

Margaret doesn’t scold. Her eyes scrunch shut, something my Grandma does when she’s cheerful. She hugs me, and her Christmas apron is my napkin, soaks up all the extra happiness around my lips.

We don’t sing after that. We talk in Lee and Margaret’s living room instead. Katherine tells me about the time her Grandma was sick, how she cried for two weeks. Chad says his brother was in a car wreck on Christmas Eve. You’d think it would be sad, talking like that, but their stories make me happier. They all think they’ll see their people again sometime. Tammy has no story, but she’s got another stick of spearmint. I take it for later.

Dad comes back down the hall from Lee’s room holding three pieces of the angel, asks Margaret if he can buy her another one. She gets some super glue, asks him to put it back together instead. When he’s finished Margaret sets it on the pass-through window sill to dry, says she likes it better now.

Lee shuffles out of his room and down the hall with his walker and plaid slippers. The coins in his pocket make silvery sounds. Lee stops to admire the angel, stirring the change in his slacks like he does at church. The noise gives me an idea.

“Jingle bells, jingle bells,” I say, more speech than song, and the whole group looks at me. Katherine joins first, then everyone else. Lee shakes his pants leg in time.

I close my eyes, hear bells and snow in every voice.

* * *

Russ sits on the green hospital chair. His mother, his wife, and the girls went home a half-hour ago. Bly insisted on staying. His son is curled up at the foot of his Grandpa’s bed, sprawled across his legs like a dozing cat.

Outside, a fountain glows in the parking lot. It’s been drained and redecorated to look like a giant Christmas candle, a ten-foot sheet-metal cylinder topped with a lighted orange flame in the center. It’s quiet. Russ’s father sleeps. Moonlight paints shadows on his sunken cheeks.

Bly sits up, yellow hair standing on end from the stocking cap he used while caroling. He clambers down from the bed, rubs his eyes and walks to the back of the other empty chair, where his black parka hangs, to rummage through its pockets.

“What’re you doing?” Russ asks hoarsely.

Bly holds up a plastic baggie printed with smiling snowmen. There are white lumps inside. Margaret gave it to him as they left. “Grandpa wants some,” Bly says.

Russ almost says no, but lets Bly walk to his grandpa’s bedside. What can it hurt?

Bly shakes his grandfather’s arm, who moans and cracks one eyelid, but smiles when he sees his grandson. “Buddy,” Russ’s father says. “What do you have there?”

Bly holds up the bag. “Magic candy. Like Santa’s cookies. If you eat it you’ll live forever.”

Russ’s heart snags. Bly holds a white scoop out to his grandfather, who struggles to push himself forward on the reclined bed.

“That right?” Russ’s dad asks.

Bly nods and grins. “Margaret gave me some and helped me feel better. I want you to get better, Grandpa.”

Russ’s father smiles. No trace of the pain the old man showed only one hour ago, when the doctor pressed his chest with a stethoscope, listened to his lungs, and hurried from the room, head down. “I’d better try it, then,” his father says. He takes the candy from Bly, pushes it into his mouth. His elbow shakes as he supports himself, but his eyes light up. “Hey, that is good!”

Bly’s face is a marvel. Tears finally pool in Russ’s eyes. “I’ll leave the rest for you here,” Bly says and places the snowman baggie on the bedside table.

Russ’s father doesn’t answer, but his eyes spark like hammered gold as he settles back against the pillow.

Russ moves to the window. His father is already asleep again after chewing the candy, drawing the long, exhausted breaths of the medicated. Bly is quiet in the other chair, parka pulled over his knees and around his chin. The moon rises over the fountain, pinning the shadow of the candle to the parking lot surface. Not the most aesthetic thing he’s ever seen, but still. It’s not bad.

A shivery inhale. He’ll get through this. They all will. Russ trails fingers over the cold glass, watches his body heat fog the panes.

He is suddenly tired, so tired. Russ’s feet drag as he returns to his chair. He sits and dozes. For how long, he doesn’t know. It feels like hours. When he wakes, it’s perfectly still in the room, and the moon has moved a considerable distance.

His father’s mouth hangs open, a tiny drop of saliva sparkling in the light reflected from the waxed linoleum. “Dad?” Russ rises and touches his father’s shoulder. His skin feels stiff. Russ shivers. Sweaty pinpricks stitch his hairline. “Dad, you awake?” No response.

In his mind, Russ believes he’s pressed the red emergency button above his father’s headboard, has hurried from the room and clattered to the nurse’s station down the hall. In reality, he hasn’t budged. He understands this only when Bly’s hand grabs his beside the bed. Rustle of black nylon. His son’s head slips shyly under his arm.

“He’s moved, Dad,” Bly says.

Russ leans against his son. His throat is doing funny, terrible things.

Then Bly points, matted blond hair surging forward. “Look!”

The hospital tray Bly placed the candy in is empty.

Russ has known Bly to down an entire bag of M&M’s in one sitting. He’s been asleep, catatonic long enough for his son to eat it all. “Did you take it?” Russ asks Bly.

Bly gives him an indignant look. “She did. For Grandpa to eat there.” Another point, beside his father’s bed. Russ looks from Bly to the empty space and back again. “Didn’t you see her?” Bly asks

Russ shakes his head.

“She’s outside now.” Bly motions to the window.

Russ turns that way. At first he thinks they’ve added more colored lights to the fountain, a choreographed show, Christmas bulbs timed to syncopated carols. The window dims like a dropped velvet curtain. A smudge of feathery gold, then a leftover corona bright as an eclipse. Pulsars riot on the ceiling. But as he nears the glass, Bly’s hand in his, Russ realizes it’s long past midnight, and the fountain is dark as a tomb.

Russ smells pine and rushing winter wind. He hears a perfect, jarring, angular chord.

Then he knows.