Noche Buena
Lou picked the movies.
A month ago she had lain awake ruling them out: an hour and a half in the dark next to it, with nothing to do but think. Now she bought two tickets for a Wednesday matinee of a Christmas film about a divorced couple snowed into the same mountain cabin, and a large popcorn, and didn't think about any of that until the lights went down and Morgana leaned over in the dark and whispered, "Is that the same dog as the poster?"
"Probably not. They use about six."
"Six dogs?"
"For the different tricks."
Morgana sat back and watched the rest of the film with her whole attention, as if the dog might be swapped while she wasn't looking. Lou ate most of the popcorn. The divorced couple got back together, which nobody had doubted, and the dog had a scene in a sleigh, which was frankly unnecessary. When the lights came up there were eleven other people in the theatre and three of them were crying.
"Which dog was best?" Lou said, on the escalator.
"The one with the snow on its face. In the window."
"That was a good dog."
They came out into the parking lot under a sky the colour of dishwater. It was four o'clock and already getting dark. Lou found her keys and then stood with them in her hand, the way she did sometimes now, not quite ready to get in the van and drive her home.
"So what are you doing," she said. "For Christmas."
"Nothing."
Lou looked at her.
"Theo flies to his sister's on Monday," Morgana said. "He goes every year. She has three boys and a dog that eats socks." She said it fondly. "He asked me to come. I said no. He'd spend the whole time watching me instead of his nephews."
"So you'll be where?"
"At home." Morgana pulled her coat closer. "It's fine. I'll swim. I've never really had one, you know. Not one of my own. She had them. They were mostly hotels."
Lou heard herself say it before she had decided anything.
"You're coming to my mother's."
Morgana turned and looked at her.
Lou stood very still in the parking lot with the keys in her hand and listened to what she'd just said. It was still out there in the cold between them. She couldn't reach out and take it back.
It hadn't come from her head. It had come from somewhere much older and lower down, from thirty Noche Buenas at her mother's table and a hundred aunties who would sooner have died than let a single person in the parish eat alone on the twenty-fourth. It came from her father, who had brought home the new man from the factory one year, a Polish guy with no English, and sat him at the head of the table. It was a reflex. It was a thing her family did with their hands before their heads caught up.
Her head was catching up now.
Morgana was still looking at her. Lou saw the moment she understood that it was real. Her whole face opened.
"Really?"
"It's loud," Lou said. "It's very loud. There's about thirty people. There's a karaoke machine. You'll eat until you hate yourself and then my Tita Nena will put more on your plate."
"Really, though?"
Lou looked at that face, at the delight going right up through it like someone had turned a light on, and thought, Oh, God. Oh, God, what have I done.
"Yeah," she said. "Really."
She called on Friday night, because there were things that had to be said and she wasn't going to say them in a movie theatre parking lot.
Morgana picked up on the first ring.
"I need to tell you some things," Lou said. "About Thursday."
"Okay."
Lou was sitting on her kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard, because that was where she'd ended up. The cat was in her lap. She had written the things down on the back of an envelope, which was stupid, because she knew them by heart.
"My mother is seventy-nine," she said. "She lit a candle for you. She prays for you every night before bed. She thinks you're a sweet girl who did a lot of drugs and nearly died, and that God heard her and sent you back."
There was a short silence on the line.
"So here's the thing," Lou said. "You don't do anything. To anybody. Not my mother. Not my sister, not her husband, not the kids. Not anyone at that table. You don't read them. You don't listen to what they want. You don't make anyone feel anything they weren't going to feel on their own." She looked at the envelope. "You come, and you eat, and you're a person. That's it. That's all you are, in that house."
"Okay," Morgana said.
"I mean it."
"I know you do." There was a pause. "Lou."
"What."
"You know those are only words. Me saying yes to them."
Lou closed her eyes.
"I know," she said.
"If I were the other thing. The thing your verse is about. I'd say yes to all of it, and mean none of it, and you'd find out at the worst possible time." Morgana's voice was very even. "I'm not saying that to frighten you. I'm saying it because you've already thought it. I don't want you to think I haven't."
"I know," Lou said again. She pressed her thumb into the corner of the envelope until it bent. "Say it anyway."
"I won't do anything to anyone in your mother's house."
"Okay."
"I promise."
"Okay." Lou let out her breath. "Okay. That's... okay."
"Is that all of them?"
"That's all of yours." Lou looked down at the cat, who looked back up at her without sympathy. "I've got another list. For them."
She sent it to the family chat at eleven, after she had rewritten it four times.
The family chat had sixty-odd members and was mostly used by Tita Nena to send blurry photographs of the parish bulletin and by her cousin Dennis to send videos of men falling off things. Lou almost never wrote in it. When she did, people noticed.
Hi everyone. I'm bringing a friend on Thursday. It's Morgana Gray.
Yes. That one.
RULES.
No photos. Not with her, not of her, not of the food with her in the back. Nothing goes online. Not Facebook, not Instagram, not TikTok, not the parish newsletter (Tita Nena).
Don't ask about the hotel. Don't ask about the drugs. Don't ask about the video.
Don't ask her to sing.
Don't ask her to sing, Paolo.
She is coming for Christmas. She has been on the news for six months. Treat her like you'd treat anybody, and if you can't do that, treat her like you'd treat Father Arsenio.
She sent it and put the phone face down on the counter and went to brush her teeth. When she came back the phone was buzzing itself across the counter.
Her niece Bea, who was sixteen, had sent nine messages in a row, all in capitals, most of them just the word LOURDES, and one voice memo that was only screaming. Bea had been eleven when two of Morgana's old songs went into a film about girls on a road trip, and the film had been everywhere, and Bea and every girl in her class had learned the words. Lou knew this because she had driven Bea and three of those girls to the cinema, twice.
Her sister Joy had written LOURDES CORAZON and then are you serious and then I need to clean the bathroom.
Joy's husband Ray had written the one who died?? Then in the hotel?? Then, after a minute, sorry. understood. no hotel.
Her brother Paolo had written: I would never ask her to sing. Then, two minutes later: I had the first album on CD. In college. Can I say that. Then: Is that allowed.
You can say that, Lou wrote. Once.
Tita Nena had written Who is Morgana, and then, twenty minutes later, after someone had evidently explained, Ah. The one in the bathroom. God bless her. She is welcome.
Her mother wasn't in the chat. Her mother called.
"Lourdes," she said, without hello. "What does she eat?"
"Ma. It's eleven o'clock."
"I need to know for the shopping. Does she eat pork? Some of them don't eat pork now. Paolo's wife doesn't eat pork. Is she one of those?"
Lou thought of the van, and the paper bag from the bakery, and Morgana eating bread out of it like it was the first bread anybody had ever made.
"She eats everything, Ma."
"Good," said her mother, deeply satisfied, and hung up.
On the morning of the twenty-fourth Lou woke at five and lay in the dark and thought about cancelling.
She thought about it properly. She owed it that much. She lay on her back with the cat asleep on her shins and went through it all the way she had gone through it a hundred times since the parking lot, every step, looking for the one she'd got wrong.
It had walked into Saint Agnes. She had stood with her back against the oak door at one in the morning and waited for it not to be able to, and it had stepped over the threshold as if it were nothing, and sat down in a pew, and looked up at the candles. Her mother would have said that couldn't happen. Sister Imelda would have said it couldn't happen. It had happened.
It had sat in her van by a Christmas tree lot and told her what it would take from her, every morning, for the rest of her life. It had told her it might never let her go. It had told her it wasn't a charity. Nothing that wanted her would have told her those things. Nothing she had ever read about would have told her those things.
That's what it would do, said the voice. It was the voice of a girl in the sixth grade copying out Second Corinthians ten times in her best handwriting. That's exactly what it would do. Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. It would walk into a church to show you it could. It would tell you every bad thing about itself so you'd think it had nothing left to hide. And then it would sit at your mother's table, and you'd have put it there.
Lou lay in the dark and let the voice say all of it. She didn't argue. There was no arguing with it. It was right. Everything Morgana had ever done was exactly what something like her would do if it wanted to get close to someone and then do something terrible. There was no test Lou could run. There was no sign she could wait for. She could watch it be kind to a little girl on the ice for the rest of her life, and she still wouldn't know. Not on her deathbed. Not until she found out where she'd ended up.
She thought about her mother, seventy-nine, kneeling by her bed every night with her rosary, saying and for my candle singer.
She thought about Morgana in the parking lot, with her face opening up like a window.
At seven she got up and fed the cat, and showered, and stood in the kitchen in her towel with her phone in her hand and the message to cancel half written. Something's come up. I'm sorry. She looked at it for a long time.
The phone rang in her hand. It was her mother.
"Lourdes. Does she like leche flan or ube better? Joy says ube, but Joy says ube about everybody."
Lou looked at the half-written message on the screen behind the call.
"I'll ask her," she said.
She deleted it after she hung up. Then she went and got dressed.
At six she drove across the city in the early dark with the radio playing carols and the heater on high, and pulled into the turning circle of the tall black building by the river, and texted here.
Morgana came out of the lobby doors two minutes later with a white cardboard box held flat in both hands, like something that might spill.
She was wearing a dark green dress Lou hadn't seen before, very plain, with long sleeves, and a coat over it, and flat shoes. No jewellery but the small silver at her ears. Her hair was down. She looked, Lou thought, like someone who had stood in front of a mirror for a long time trying to look like nobody in particular, and had very nearly managed it.
She got into the van with the box on her knees.
"I went to the bakery," she said. "The one with the bell on the door. The lady behind the counter said this is what you bring to a mother's house on Noche Buena." She lifted the lid an inch to show her. There were twelve ensaymada in it, each one golden and heaped with sugar and grated cheese, sitting in its own paper case. "She called me anak."
Lou looked at the box. Then at her.
"Did she know who you were?"
"I think so. She didn't say." Morgana closed the lid carefully. "She asked if it was for your mother. I said yes. She put two extra in."
Lou didn't say anything for a moment. Then she put the van in gear.
"Ube," she said, pulling out into the traffic. "Or leche flan. Pick one."
"What?"
"My mother wants to know which you like better."
Morgana thought about it seriously the whole way to the bridge.
"I've never had either," she said finally.
"Then say both," Lou said. "Trust me. Say both."
The street was full of cars, parked along both curbs and up on the grass and two of them across a neighbour's driveway, with what Naru suspected was the neighbour's permission. Every house on the block had lights. Lou's mother's house had the most. It was small and square and two storeys high, white with green shutters, and there were lights along the gutters and lights wound round the porch rails and lights on the little bush by the steps. In the front window, lit from inside, hung a star.
It was made of something thin and pale that let the light through, shell or paper, cut into a pattern and set in a frame of five points with long tails hanging down from the bottom ones. It turned very slowly on its string. The light came through it warm and soft and fell on the snow in the yard in the shape of a star.
Naru stood on the sidewalk with the box in her hands and looked at it.
"It's a parol," Lou said, beside her. "Every Filipino house has one. It's the star. The one they followed."
"I know which one," Naru said.
Lou glanced at her. Naru kept her eyes on the window.
Through the door she could hear the house. It came out through the wood and the glass, a roar of voices on top of each other, a television, music, children shrieking somewhere upstairs, and under all of it, unmistakably, somebody singing very badly into a microphone. Lou stood on the bottom step and took a breath the way she took one before a count-in.
"Last chance," she said.
"For you or me?"
Lou didn't answer. She went up the steps and opened the door.
It came up in Naru before she could stop it.
She had felt it in the hospital corridor and at the Aldine and in a parking garage, and every time it came the same way, without her asking. Morgana's face. The woman had built it over ten years in front of mirrors and on red carpets and at the back doors of television studios, and it lived in this body now the way a song lives in a throat. Warm, a little amused, chin a fraction up. It said yes, it's me, and I'm so glad you're here. It had been made for being looked at, and the moment Naru stepped over the threshold into the heat and the noise and the smell of frying, thirty people looked, and the face came up and settled over her like a coat someone had put round her shoulders.
The room didn't go silent. It was too loud a room for that. It went down a notch, the way a crowd does when the lights change, and in the notch Naru felt every eye in the place come round.
She didn't listen to them. She had promised. She looked at them instead, the way the woman had learned to look at a room from a stage, quickly, without seeming to, finding the faces that mattered.
A woman a few years younger than Lou, small like her but rounder and softer, stood frozen in the hall with a stack of paper plates. That was the sister. Behind her a big man with a beer, staring with his mouth a little open. On the stairs a girl of sixteen or so in a red sweater, sitting very upright, with a phone held face down against her knee in both hands as if someone might take it. In the living room a man had got halfway up from the couch and then stopped, as if he'd forgotten what standing was for. On the far end of the couch an old woman in black with a rosary in her lap looked at Naru over her glasses the way you look at weather coming in.
The face held. It knew what to do. It smiled at the sister, at the man with the beer, at the girl on the stairs, a different smile for each, and Naru felt the room take each one and settle, a little, the way rooms always had for Morgana. She's nice. She's normal. She's smaller in real life.
Then a child hit her at knee height.
He was about five, in a shirt with a reindeer on it, and he had been running from someone and hadn't looked, and he bounced off her shins and sat down hard on the hall carpet and looked up at her, outraged.
"You're in the way," he said.
"Sorry," Naru said.
"Miguel," said the sister, faintly.
Miguel got up and went round her and kept running. Somebody upstairs shrieked. The man on the couch sat back down. The singing in the living room, which had stopped, started again. And Naru, standing in the hall with the white box in her hands and her coat still on, felt the face slip a little, from the edges in, because nobody had made it for a five-year-old with a reindeer on his shirt.
"Where is she?" said a voice from the back of the house. "Lourdes. Is that her? Where is she?"
Lou's mother came down the hall at speed, drying her hands on an apron that said KISS THE COOK in letters worn nearly white. She was tiny. She barely came up to Naru's shoulder. Her hair was short and steel-grey and set in waves, and she had Lou's eyes exactly, dark and direct and impossible to lie to.
She stopped in front of Naru and looked up at her.
Naru felt the face try to work on her. It smiled. It tilted the chin. It said yes, it's me.
Lou's mother didn't look at the face. She looked straight past it. She reached up with both hands, still a little damp from the sink, and took Naru's face between them, and turned it a little to the light, frowning, the way you'd check a child for fever.
"Too thin," she said.
The face went. Naru felt it go all at once, like a coat sliding off.
"You're too thin," said Lou's mother. "Lourdes. She's too thin. What do they feed you in that place?"
"Ma."
"I'm asking her." She kept hold of Naru's face. Her hands smelled of garlic and soap. She looked into Naru's eyes, the pale ones that had been in every newspaper since the summer, and if she saw anything wrong in them she didn't say. Her own eyes were very bright. "My candle singer," she said, much more quietly. "You came."
"Thank you for having me," Naru said. It was all she could find.
"Of course." Lou's mother let go of her face and patted her cheek, twice, firmly, as if closing something. "Of course. Everybody is welcome. Come. Take your coat off. What's that?"
Naru held out the box. Lou's mother took it and lifted the lid and looked inside, and her whole face changed.
"From Ising's!" she said. "On Fifth! You went to Ising's?"
"Lou told me about it. The lady said this is what you bring."
"She gave you extra." Lou's mother counted with one finger, her lips moving. "Fourteen. She gave you two extra. She never gives me extra." She closed the lid and looked at Naru with something like respect. "Ube or flan?"
Naru caught Lou's eye over her mother's head.
"Both," she said.
Lou's mother beamed. "Good girl," she said, and took her by the wrist, the box under her other arm, and pulled her into the kitchen.
The kitchen was very small and full of women.
There were five of them, or six; it was hard to count because they kept moving. They stood at the counters and the stove and the little table by the window, and every surface was covered. There were trays of something in rows. There were pots on every ring. There was a whole ham under a cloth and a pan of noodles the size of a tyre, and a rice cooker going on the floor because there was no room for it anywhere else. The window was white with steam. Somebody had a radio on, playing carols in a language Naru didn't have, and two of the women were singing along to it and one was singing along to something else.
They all turned round.
"This is Morgana," said Lou's mother, as if introducing a niece. "She's helping with the lumpia. Nena, move."
The old woman from the couch had come in behind them, rosary and all. She looked at Naru over her glasses, and then at the chair she was being told to give up, and didn't move.
"Nena," said Lou's mother.
Tita Nena moved, slowly, one chair down. Lou's mother sat Naru in the space she'd left, in front of a tray of thin pale squares under a damp cloth and a bowl of something minced and fragrant. Naru looked at it.
"You've never rolled lumpia," Lou's mother said. It wasn't a question.
"No."
"Watch."
She took a square off the pile and laid it down on the board like a diamond, one point toward her. She put a line of filling across it with a spoon, quick, not too much. She folded the bottom point up over it, and the two side points in, and rolled it away from her, tight, until the last point was left, and she dabbed that with her finger in a little bowl of water and sealed it. It took her about four seconds. She laid it on a tray beside a hundred others exactly like it.
"Like that," she said. "Tight. If it's loose, the oil gets in. Nobody likes a fat lumpia."
Naru took a wrapper. It was cool and soft and tore if you breathed on it. She laid it down like a diamond. She put the filling across it, too much, and took some back, and folded the bottom up. Her hands didn't know how to do this. Morgana's hands had been many things. They had held microphones and cigarettes and the hands of strangers at the barrier. They had never once done this.
She rolled it. It came out fat and a little crooked, with filling showing at one end.
Tita Nena, beside her, made a small noise.
"Again," said Lou's mother.
Naru did it again. It came out less fat. The third one tore. The fourth one came out almost right, and Lou's mother picked it up and turned it over and squeezed it gently and put it on the tray with the others without a word, and Naru felt something about that she couldn't name.
After that she was just one of them. The talk closed back over her head like water. The women talked to each other in two languages at once, about a cousin's new boyfriend and someone's knees and whether the ham was going to be enough, which it was going to be several times over, and every so often one of them would turn to Naru and ask her something without stopping what her hands were doing.
"Are you married?"
"No."
"Boyfriend?"
"No."
"Lourdes never brings anybody," said the one at the stove, to the room in general. "Thirty years. Never once. And now she brings you." She looked at Naru with deep interest. "How do you know Lourdes?"
"She plays drums for me."
"Oh, that," said the one at the stove, disappointed, and turned back to her pot.
Lou's mother said something in the other language, fast, low, to the woman beside her. Naru heard her own name in the middle of it, and Lourdes, and something that sounded like a question. She didn't have the words. She could have had more than the words if she'd turned toward it, if she'd listened the other way, underneath. She kept her eyes on the wrapper in front of her. She had promised.
Tita Nena, beside her, rolled lumpia with knotted old fingers that never hesitated and never tore one. She didn't say anything to Naru for twenty minutes. Then, without looking up, she reached over and pushed Naru's filling a quarter-inch further from the edge with one finger.
"There," she said. "Now it will close."
It closed.
Lou found her much later, still at the table, with flour on her sleeve and a full tray of lumpia in front of her, nearly all of them right.
"You're allowed to stop," Lou said from the doorway.
"I don't want to."
Lou looked at her. Then at the tray. Then at her mother, who was at the stove with her back to them and was very clearly listening.
"There's somebody who wants to say hello," Lou said. "She's been working up to it all night. She's sixteen and she's going to die if you don't."
The girl in the red sweater was on the landing at the top of the stairs. She stood up very fast when she saw them coming and then didn't seem to know what to do, and put her hands behind her back. The phone was nowhere in sight.
"This is Bea," said Lou. "My sister's girl. Bea, this is Morgana, and you have the rules."
"I know the rules," said Bea. She had gone very red.
"Ten minutes," said Lou, and went back down.
They stood on the landing. Behind Bea a door stood half open onto a bedroom that had been a girl's bedroom twenty years ago and was now full of coats. A bathroom fan ran somewhere. Downstairs somebody had started the karaoke again.
"I'm not allowed to ask you anything," Bea said.
"You can ask me one thing."
Bea looked at her. Naru watched her decide, and watched her put down three or four things that were too big, and pick something smaller.
"Can I tell you something instead," Bea said.
"Yes."
"The song from the movie. The one with the motel. When I was in seventh grade my mom and dad were..." She stopped. She looked down the stairs, where the big man with the beer was laughing at something, and lowered her voice. "They were having a really bad year. It's fine now. They're fine. But that year I listened to that song every night with my headphones in so I couldn't hear them. Like, every night. For a year." She was looking at the carpet. "I just wanted to tell you. That's all. I don't need you to say anything."
Naru stood on the landing and looked at her.
It wasn't her song. She had never written a word of it. A woman had written it at twenty-four, and it had gone out into the world without her, into a film she hated and a seventh grader's headphones, and the woman would never know. She was dead. She had died on a tile floor while people with drinks stood outside the door, and here was the thanks she'd been owed, arriving six months too late at the top of a staircase, to the wrong person.
Naru took it anyway. Somebody had to.
"Thank you," she said. "That means more than you know."
Bea looked up.
"She'd have..." Naru stopped. She started again. "I'm glad it was there. When you needed it. That's what it was for."
Bea nodded fast, several times, and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater, furious with herself.
"Sorry. I'm not allowed to cry either. It wasn't on the list but I bet it's a rule."
"It isn't," Naru said. "I checked."
Paolo caught her at the bottom of the stairs. He was the man who had got halfway up off the couch, and he had evidently spent the whole evening working out exactly how to say his one permitted sentence.
"I had the first album," he said. "On CD. In college."
"Lou told me you might."
"I'm not going to ask you to sing," he said quickly.
"I know."
He stood there. He was a tall, thin, gentle-looking man with Lou's eyebrows and none of her sharpness, and Naru could see he had another sentence and wasn't sure if it was allowed.
"Do you want to see something?" he said finally. "It's not about you. It's about Lou."
He took her through the kitchen, where Lou's mother watched them go with narrowed eyes, and out a back door, and across a small cold yard where the snow had been trodden flat, into a garage.
It was freezing in there and smelled of oil and old cardboard. Paolo found a switch, and a bare bulb came on over a workbench and a lawnmower and a stack of plastic crates marked XMAS in marker. In the far corner something stood under a dust sheet. Paolo pulled the sheet off.
It was a drum kit. It was small and old and red, a bright cheap red that glittered under the bulb, with a dent in the bass drum and one cymbal stand bent at the top. Somebody had written LOURDES across the front head in silver marker, in letters that went uphill.
"Dad got it off a guy at the plant," Paolo said. "Christmas. She was seventeen. She played it out here every night until she moved out. The neighbours called the police twice." He touched the dented drum, gently. "When she moved out she left it. Ma wouldn't let anyone throw it away."
Naru looked at it a long time. The letters going uphill. The dent.
"Paolo," said Lou, from the door.
She stood in the doorway in the cold with her arms folded, and her face was doing several things at once.
"I didn't ask her to sing," Paolo said.
"I know you didn't." Lou came in. She looked at the kit as if it were a dog that had followed her home. "God. Look at that."
"You should play it," said Naru.
"It's not tuned. It's freezing. The heads are thirty years old."
"Play it anyway."
Lou looked at her. Then at Paolo, who held up both hands and backed out of the garage and shut the door behind him.
Lou sat down on the old stool. It creaked. She found a pair of sticks in a coffee can on the workbench, so old the tips had worn to points, and turned them over in her hands. Then she started to play.
It was nothing. A plain beat, quiet, the kind you'd play to warm up. The snare buzzed. The bass drum went thud like a cardboard box. The bent cymbal sounded like a dropped pan lid. Lou played it anyway, with her eyes half shut and her chin down, and after a few bars something happened to her shoulders, a loosening, the way a person's shoulders change when they walk into a house they grew up in.
Her left hand was slower than her right. Naru saw it. The stick in it came down a hair behind, every time, the fingers too stiff in the cold to hold it properly. Lou knew. She played through it. She didn't look at the hand, and she didn't look at Naru, and Naru didn't say a word.
After a minute Lou stopped. She sat with the sticks across her knees.
"Seventeen," she said. "Thirty-one years."
"It sounds terrible," said Naru.
"It always did." Lou put the sticks back in the coffee can. "Come on. Mass is at half eleven and my mother will kill us both."
Back in the living room the big man with the beer was waiting for her.
Naru had seen him coming since the hall. She didn't need to listen to see it. He had stood at the edge of every room she was in, watching her with the same look she'd seen on a hundred faces at a hundred barriers, the look of someone trying to match the woman in front of him to the one on the screen. He was not a bad man. He had a laugh that filled rooms and he'd carried a sleeping toddler up the stairs earlier with great tenderness. He was simply someone who had seen the video, like everybody had, and had been carrying it around all evening like a stone in his shoe.
"Can I just ask one thing," he said.
"Ray," said Joy, from across the room, in a voice like a door closing.
"It's not about the... it's not the hotel. It's not." Ray turned his beer in his hand. "It's just. Everybody saw it. You know? Everybody in the world saw it. On their phones. I just wondered what that's like. Knowing that."
The room had gone quiet around them. Not all of it. The karaoke was still going in the far corner, a cousin singing a power ballad with his eyes closed. But the near part of the room had stopped. Joy had put down her plate. On the stairs Bea had her hand over her mouth.
Naru felt the old face come up, ready. It had an answer for this. It had several, rehearsed and lit and perfect. I don't think about it. I'm just grateful to be here. It would have smiled.
She let it go by.
"I don't watch it," she said.
Ray looked at her.
"Someone I knew is on that floor," Naru said. "I let her have it. It's the last thing she's got that's hers."
Nobody said anything. Ray stood there with his beer. Then he nodded slowly, as if she'd told him something he already half knew, and his face changed, and Naru saw the stone come out of his shoe.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Okay. Sorry."
"It's all right."
"Ray," said Lou's mother, from the kitchen door. "Ice."
Ray went to get ice. The room started up again. On the far side of it, by the window with the turning star in it, Lou was standing with a paper plate she wasn't eating from, looking at Naru with an expression Naru couldn't read and didn't try to.
They walked to Saint Agnes, all of them, because it was three blocks and there was nowhere to park. It took a long time. The children ran ahead and were called back and ran ahead again. Lou's mother walked in the middle of everything with her arm through Naru's, not for help, and talked the whole way about the parish and Father Arsenio and the new boiler, which had cost a fortune and still didn't work.
The last time Naru had come up these steps, it had been one in the morning and Lou had been standing at the top of them alone, under the light by the side door, with her hands in her pockets and her face not moving.
Tonight the main doors stood wide open and the light came pouring down the steps onto the snow, and people were going up them in their good coats, in families, calling to each other. Naru felt Lou's mother's arm tighten on hers at the bottom step. She looked down. Lou's mother was looking up at the doors with an expression of plain, uncomplicated joy.
They went in.
The church was full. Every pew was full and people were standing at the back and along the side aisles under the stations of the cross. It smelled of pine and hot wax and wet wool and the incense from the evening Mass, still hanging high up under the roof. There were red flowers banked along the altar steps, hundreds of them. To one side, under a little wooden roof, there was a stable with plaster animals and plaster shepherds and a plaster Mary kneeling by an empty manger.
Lou's family took up a whole pew and half of the one behind it. Naru ended up on the aisle, between Lou and her mother. Lou sat very upright beside her and looked straight ahead.
Naru looked up.
She had sat here before, in the dark, under the one light, waiting to find out what would happen. Nothing had happened. Nothing happened now. The church was warm and loud and full of people. Up past the lights the roof went into shadow, and under it the old painted ceiling showed blue and gold and faded, with figures in it she couldn't make out. They had wings.
The procession came in with the first hymn.
It was children. There were about a dozen of them, from four years old to perhaps nine, in white robes made of sheets, with wings made of cardboard and coat-hangers and a great deal of glitter. They had halos of gold tinsel wound round headbands. Some of the halos had slipped. One of them, at the very back, a little crooked, his reindeer shirt showing at the neck of his sheet, was Miguel.
They came up the aisle two by two, very slowly and very seriously, behind a girl of about nine who was carrying a plaster baby in both arms like a loaf of bread. The congregation sang. Lou's mother sang, loudly and slightly flat, with her hand pressed to her heart. Beside Naru, Lou wasn't singing. When Miguel came past the end of their pew he looked up, saw Naru, and gave her a small, furious wave, as if to say don't.
Naru put her hand over her mouth.
She hadn't expected it to be funny. She didn't know what she had expected. She stood in the pew with her hand over her mouth, shaking, and watched a dozen small children in coat-hanger wings carry the plaster baby up to the altar and lay it in the plaster manger, and she thought about the host.
She didn't remember much. Most of it had been crushed out of her a long time ago, under all that weight. But some of it was still there, the way bones are still there. She remembered what they had been. They had not been children in sheets. They had been vast. They had been made of fire and eyes, with voices that could crack stone, and when one of them came down to speak to a mortal the first thing it ever had to say was don't be afraid, because the mortal always was. They had been terrible to look at, and beautiful at once. None of them had looked anything like this.
And here they were. Miguel, with his tinsel halo slipping over one eye. A girl carrying a doll. Coat hangers and glitter.
She didn't know what she felt. It was very funny. It was something else as well, underneath the funny, colder. These people had kept the story for two thousand years, and they had kept it wrong in every particular, and they had kept it so lovingly. The wings were wrong. The faces were wrong. They had made the host into something small enough to hold, so they could bear to look at it. Naru stood in the pew and looked at their small, glittering, ridiculous angels and found that her eyes had filled, and she couldn't have said whether it was laughter or the other thing.
Lou glanced at her sideways. Naru shook her head slightly. Lou looked away.
They sang the Gloria. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace. The whole church sang it at once, and Naru, who had not meant to, felt it go.
It wasn't want. It wasn't any of the things she knew how to feel in people, the hungers and the small private aches. It was the other thing, the thing she'd come up out of the Pit starving for and lived on now from one tired man's sunrise. Three hundred people standing in a warm room in the middle of the night had all turned the same way at once. Every one of them reached up, and it went out of them, the whole room together, a great slow current going up past the lights into the dark under the roof, toward Him.
None of it came near her. It went past her the way a river goes past a stone, on its way somewhere else.
She stood in the current and let it go by. She didn't reach for it. She didn't want to. She thought she might have, once. Now she stood between Lou and her mother and felt three hundred people give everything they had to the one who had thrown her down, and she didn't want a single thread of it. It wasn't hers. It had never been hers. She only stood there and felt it go, enormous and quiet, like weather passing overhead.
Lou's mother, beside her, sang the whole thing with her eyes shut.
Then they read the gospel. A man in a suit read it from the lectern, too fast, in a flat voice, and it was the one about the shepherds.
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
Naru listened.
She hadn't been there. She knew that. When it happened she'd been at the bottom of the world, under the weight, with the others, a long time already and a long time still to go. The ones who sang that night to men on a hillside had been the ones who stayed. She had no memory of it, because there was no memory to have. She knew it the way Morgana had known it, from a children's book with a torn cover and a hundred Christmas specials playing in hotel rooms with the sound off.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God.
She thought of them up there over the hillside in the dark, her old kind. They would have been vast and burning, singing to a few frightened men with their sheep. And all of them would have been on the other side of the window.
She had chosen. She would choose it again. She had never once been sorry for the question she'd answered, only for what came after.
But she sat there in the warm and the pine smell and listened to a man in a suit read it too fast, and for a moment she was sorry she hadn't heard them sing.
At communion the whole pew got up.
Lou's mother went first, with her hands folded. Joy went, and Ray, and Paolo and his wife and all the children old enough. The pew emptied in a long shuffling line toward the aisle, and Naru drew her knees in to let them past, and stayed where she was.
Lou stayed too.
She didn't say anything. She sat beside Naru in the empty pew with her hands in her lap and watched her family go up the aisle in the line, and didn't move. Naru didn't know why. She didn't turn toward it to find out. It wasn't hers.
At the front of the line Lou's mother received, and crossed herself, and turned to come back. Halfway down the side aisle she looked over and saw them, the two of them alone in the long empty pew. She looked at Lou for a long moment, the way Naru had seen her look at a lumpia she wasn't sure about.
Then she came back and slid into the pew on Lou's other side and knelt down, and put her hand on Lou's knee, and left it there.
They ate at a quarter to two.
There wasn't a table big enough, so there were three: the dining table with both leaves in, a folding table butted up against the end of it with a different cloth, and a card table in the living room for the children, who had refused to sit at it and were sitting under it instead. Every inch of all three was covered. Lou had seen this table every year of her life, and she still stood in the doorway for a second when she came in out of the cold and looked at it.
Her mother put Morgana at her right hand. Nobody argued.
Lou ended up two seats down, across from them, between Paolo and the wall, which was where she always ended up and where she could see. She hadn't decided to watch. She'd been doing it since six o'clock. She had watched in the hall, when the face had come up over Morgana like something from a magazine, and in the kitchen doorway, when it had come off. She'd watched on the landing, from the bottom of the stairs, and in the cold garage, and in the pew. She had watched Ray, and she had watched what Ray's face did afterwards. She was watching now. She didn't know any more what she was watching for.
Her mother stood up and held out her hands, and everybody took the hand on either side of them. Paolo's was warm and a little sticky. On the far side of the table Morgana looked at Lou's mother's hand held out toward her, palm up, and then took it, carefully, the way she'd taken the little girl's mitten on the ice.
"Bless us, O Lord," said Lou's mother, "and these thy gifts."
Lou closed her eyes and then opened them again, because she couldn't help it.
Her mother went through the grace and kept going. She always kept going. She thanked God for the food and for the hands that made it, and for Joy's new job, and for Paolo's girls, and for the boiler, though it still didn't work. She asked Him to remember Lou's father, and Tito Ben, and Tita Nena's husband, and everyone who had ever sat at this table and didn't anymore. Then she squeezed the hand she was holding, and Lou saw her do it.
"And thank you," said her mother, "for bringing back Morgana. I asked You, and You heard me. Amen."
"Amen," said thirty people.
Lou looked at Morgana.
She was sitting very still with her hand still in Lou's mother's hand. Her head was bowed. Her face, under the dining room light, wasn't doing anything at all, and her eyes were shut, and for a moment Lou thought she wasn't going to open them.
That's what it would do, said the voice. Sit at her right hand. Hold her hand while she thanks God for it.
Yes, Lou thought. It would.
Morgana opened her eyes. They were wet. She let go of Lou's mother's hand, slowly, and picked up her fork, and looked down at the plate that had appeared in front of her while she wasn't looking, which held about four people's dinner, and Lou watched her look at it.
Lou held both of them. She sat at the end of the table between her brother and the wall and held both, the voice and the wet eyes, and put neither of them down, and reached for the lumpia.
They were very good lumpia. A few of them were fat.
At half past two Tita Nena sang My Way into the karaoke machine and got a 94.
The karaoke machine had been Ray's present to Lou's mother four Christmases ago, and it had a scoring system that nobody understood, which gave Tita Nena a 94 and Ray a 61 for the same song, and over the years it had become the most powerful object in the house. People argued with it. People had cried. Lou's mother had once sung Silent Night into it and got a 76 and had not spoken to it for a month.
The rule held. Lou watched it hold. Nobody asked. Paolo sang a Bon Jovi song badly with his eyes shut, and Bea and two of the cousins sang something from the radio with a dance they'd evidently rehearsed, and the whole time the microphone went round the room it went round Morgana in a wide careful circle, like water round a rock. Morgana sat on the end of the couch with a sleeping child against her side and a paper plate of leche flan and ube on her knee, both, and clapped for everybody.
Then Lou's mother stood up and took the microphone off Ray.
"Now me," she said. "And her."
The room went quiet.
Lou's mother was holding the second microphone out across the coffee table, toward the couch. Her face was perfectly serene. She hadn't been in the family chat. She had never been in the family chat. She was seventy-nine and it was Christmas and she had a famous singer on her couch, and it plainly hadn't occurred to her that there could be a single reason in the world not to ask.
Morgana didn't take it. She looked across the room at Lou.
Everybody looked at Lou.
Lou stood by the window with the paper star turning slowly behind her head. She thought about the rules. She thought about why she'd made them. She'd made them because Morgana Gray had spent ten years being asked to sing at weddings and birthdays and in the backs of cars, because everybody wanted a piece, and Lou had wanted, for one night, for her to sit in a house where nobody did. She'd made them so Morgana would be safe here.
She looked at her mother, holding out the microphone.
She thought about the other rules, too. The ones she'd made on the kitchen floor with the cat in her lap. You don't make anyone feel anything they weren't going to feel on their own.
She nodded.
Morgana got up off the couch very carefully, so as not to wake the child against her, and took the microphone.
"What are we singing?" she said.
Lou's mother told her. It was a Tagalog carol, old, the one she sang every year and that the machine always scored badly. Morgana didn't know it. She didn't have the language. She said so.
"Then just hum," said Lou's mother. "Follow me."
The music started, tinny and bright, with a cartoon of a snowy village scrolling behind the words on the television. Lou's mother began to sing. She sang the way she had always sung, in church and in the car, loud and sincere and a little flat on the high notes, with one hand pressed to her heart.
Morgana listened for a line. Then she came in under her.
It was very quiet. It was hardly anything. She didn't have the words, so she sang without them, a soft line a third below the melody, and it went in under Lou's mother's voice and held it up, the way a hand under an elbow holds someone on the ice. That was all. There was nothing else in it. Lou listened for something else in it with every part of her, and there was nothing, nothing at all, that wasn't just a woman with a good ear singing harmony for an old lady at Christmas.
The flat notes weren't flat anymore. Her mother heard it. Lou saw her hear it. She sang the second verse with her eyes shut and her chin up and her whole face lit, sure of every note, the way she'd sung when Lou was small, before her knees went, before Lou's father.
When it ended nobody said anything for a second. Then everybody did. Bea was crying again. Paolo had his hand over his eyes.
The machine thought about it, flashing. Then it gave them an 87.
"Eighty-seven," said Lou's mother, in a voice of absolute betrayal.
The room fell apart. Lou laughed so hard she had to sit down on the arm of the couch. Across the room, still holding the microphone, Morgana was laughing too, helplessly, her free hand over her mouth, and Lou's mother was glaring at the television with her arms folded as if it had insulted the parish.
Lou sat on the arm of the couch and wiped her eyes and looked at them both.
That's what it would do, said the voice, very faintly now. Sing to her.
I know, Lou said back. I know. Let me have this.
At three, the kitchen was a ruin.
Naru stood at the sink with her sleeves pushed up and her hands in the hot water. The plates came out of the suds one at a time and went into the rack, and the rack filled, and someone emptied it, and it filled again. Most of the women had gone. Joy had taken the children up to bed in the coat room. Lou was asleep on the couch in the living room with Miguel asleep on top of her, his tinsel halo still on, both of them breathing in the light from the star.
Lou's mother dried. She stood beside Naru at the counter with a dish towel and dried every plate that came out of the water, slowly and thoroughly, and put each one away in its place in the cupboard, because she didn't trust anyone else to know where things went.
They didn't talk for a long time. The tap ran. A pipe knocked somewhere in the wall.
"I'll tell you something," Lou's mother said finally.
Naru waited, her hands in the water.
"When it was on the news," Lou's mother said. "The hotel. They kept saying you were dead. Then they said you weren't, and then they said maybe. And I sat in my chair, that one, by the window, and I thought, that poor girl. That poor girl. Nobody is praying for her. She has all those people, all that money, and nobody is praying for her." She dried a glass and held it up to the light and dried it again. "So I called Lourdes, at two in the morning. I said go to Saint Agnes and light a candle. She hadn't been inside a church for fifteen years. She went." She put the glass away. "And I prayed. I said, give her back. Let her have another chance. She's young. Just give her back."
She took the next plate out of Naru's hands.
"And He did," she said.
Naru looked down at the water.
She could have said something. There was a great deal she could have said, standing at this sink at three in the morning with her hands in the suds. It wasn't Him. He didn't send me. He threw me down, and I came up through a crack in the floor of the world all on my own, and the girl you prayed for is gone. All of it was true. Every word.
She didn't say any of it.
It wasn't that she would be lying. She was very careful about that. It was that this old woman had sat in a chair by a window and given away everything she had, every night, for a stranger she had never met. Naru had felt three hundred people do the same thing tonight, up past the lights, and none of it had been for her. This had been. It had gone up to Him, and He had done whatever He did with it, and some of it, somehow, had come down to a hotel bathroom floor anyway, because here she was.
She didn't know what had opened the crack. She'd never known. She stood at the sink and thought, for the first time, that she might never know, and that it might not matter as much as she'd thought.
"Thank you," she said. "For praying."
"Of course." Lou's mother dried the plate. "Every night. I still do. Every night, my candle singer." She put the plate away and looked at Naru sideways, sharply, with Lou's eyes. "You're being good now?"
"I'm trying."
"That's all He asks," said Lou's mother, satisfied, and reached for the next plate.
Naru gave it to her.
Far down, at the bottom, the light went out.
She felt it go. She didn't need to go down and look. It had been on since the Aldine, small and pale and steady, a pinprick a long way down in all that black, the way you leave a lamp burning in a window for someone you expect home. Now it was gone, and the dark down there was only dark. The silt lay still in its long hollows. Whatever rested beside it went on resting, and didn't stir, and didn't need to.
Nobody had turned it off. It had just stopped being needed.
Naru stood at the sink with her hands in the cooling water and let it be dark. Through the doorway the star turned slowly in the front window, and threw its light across the living room floor, and over the couch where Lou slept with a child in a tinsel halo on her chest. Lou's mother hummed the carol from the karaoke under her breath, flat on the high note, and dried the plates, and put each one away where it belonged.