Giovanni's Light Read online

  “My Christmas List.” That was as far as she got.

  “Miranda,” called her mother from downstairs. “Come bring your grandmother her breakfast tray.”

  “I’m busy,” yelled Miranda from behind her bedroom door.

  “And I’m waiting,” said her mother, who was expecting another baby and expected Miranda to help.

  She stuffed her diary back in the drawer and stomped down the stairs. Do this, do that! Ever since her grandmother had moved in, she had twice as much work to do. She wished her grandmother lived on another planet.

  Miranda Bridgeman was eleven years old and full of wishes—to have long, straight hair instead of short, curly hair, to be a championship figure skater, to live someplace other than Ryland Falls where she would have a chance to start over with a new, improved personality. Miranda’s life was layered with wishes, the way her bedroom floor was layered with clothes, and somewhere beneath the tangle was the small brass key that came with the diary.

  “If you’d hang your clothes up,” sighed Miranda’s mother, “you’d probably find all kinds of things you’re looking for.”

  But the one thing Miranda knew she would not find on the bedroom floor was the thing she wanted most—an interesting life. Where things happened! Things that she could write about. The diary had been a big disappointment in this regard.

  Miranda had thought that if she had a special place to record interesting experiences, then the odds of having interesting experiences would increase. But that’s not the way it had turned out. “Cleaned the parakeet cage,” read one entry. “Got my braces off at the dentist” was another. “My grandmother broke her hip and is moving in with us.”

  Miranda’s life was not diary material, so she rarely recorded it. It didn’t matter that the key was lost. Miranda had nothing to hide except her fear of the dark, and that wasn’t something she would ever write about. At eleven years old, she knew she was supposed to be over it. Fact: witches do not hide under the bed waiting to snatch your ankles. Fact: there are no robbers hiding in the closet. Still, she needed a night-light to fall asleep. That was another fact.

  Miranda carried the tray into her grandmother’s room. Morning sun streaked through the blinds, across the faded photographs on the wall and the corner cabinet full of antique Chinese fans above a wing chair by the window. Everything in the room was old, including Pasha, a great big puffball of a Persian cat her grandmother doted upon. In human years, Pasha was about the same age as Miranda, but her grandmother liked Pasha better. Miranda set the tray down, none too quietly, and left the room.

  Miranda’s grandmother kept her eyes closed so she wouldn’t have to talk to her granddaughter. She didn’t know what to say. For three months she had been trying to figure out what to say, but Miranda was a tough case to crack, not that she had much opportunity to study her. Most of the time Miranda was just a blur running past her bedroom door, on her way to school or a friend’s house. And when she was home, she was usually in her room, talking on the phone, or sulking.

  When Miranda sulked, it was an awful thing. Gloom poured out of her eyes, gathered in a puddle around her feet, left tracks around the house, and seeped out from beneath her bedroom door when she was on the silent, sulking side of it.

  Mrs. Bridgeman slid her foot back and forth beneath the covers until she found Pasha, curled up in a warm lump at the bottom of the bed. She sat up and poured herself a cup of tea. Outside, the school bus braked to a stop in front of the house. Pulling aside the curtain, she watched Miranda trudge down the walk and climb on board.

  Miranda was a pretty little girl, but in Mrs. Bridgeman’s opinion, spoiled. Her dolls slept in better beds than most real babies. Her mother never made her clean up her room, which looked like a Turkish rag market. Not that she’d ever been to a Turkish rag market, but she could imagine it.

  Pasha picked his way delicately up the blanket and settled in at her side. Poor Pasha. It had been a shock for him to come into a strange house where the dog spent most of the time trying to chase him outside. “Sweet thing,” she murmured, idly stroking his fur. The tea was making her feel less cranky.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Miranda, her grandmother thought. After all, she was only eleven years old, and looking back, which is what she spent most of the time doing these days, Mrs. Bridgeman remembered that she hadn’t been such a sweet little girl when she was Miranda’s age either. In fact, she was quite a handful, always tugging at the leash wanting to get out from under the rest of the family so she could explore the world without a chaperon. Perhaps Miranda and she were cut from the same cloth.

  On the wall above Mrs. Bridgeman’s bed was a photograph of her own grandmother whom she had adored. She had spent every free minute sitting in her grandmother’s room, asking for stories. But maybe that was because there wasn’t any television. Maybe girls Miranda’s age have so many more ways to entertain themselves these days that grandmothers are deadwood. She had to admit she felt like deadwood much of the time.

  She reached for the newspaper on the tray. It was full of Christmas ads. Perhaps she should think about what to get Miranda, not that she approved of the way parents loaded it up around the tree every year for children.

  As she leafed through the paper, idly wishing her hot-water bottle wasn’t cold, her eye was caught by a sale on electric heating pads. She would ask her daughter in-law to pick up one for her this afternoon. The morning sun was beginning to warm up the room, and Mrs. Bridgeman felt tired again. Letting the newspaper slip to the floor, she drew Pasha up like a muff against her cheek and went back to sleep. She would think about Christmas tomorrow.

  Chapter Seven

  FRANCES NICKERSON had the sharpest eyes in town. Seeing beneath the surface was a skill she had developed when she had taught school and had to read children’s faces daily. Now that she was retired, she didn’t have the same need. But the habit of noticing things had stuck with her.

  On the morning of December 14, she was in Elwood’s Market waiting for her groceries to be rung up. “Haven’t you been gaining a little weight lately?” she asked Diane, behind the counter.

  Diane frowned. “I’m always gaining a little weight, except when I’m losing a little weight.”

  Frances Nickerson smiled sympathetically. “Yes, well, I guess you’re in a gaining phase.”

  Later she saw Tommy Elwood park in the three-minute zone in front of the post office.

  “You’re going to get a ticket,” she warned.

  “I’ll only be a minute,” said Tommy, who had some Christmas hams to mail.

  “It only takes a minute to get a ticket,” she replied. And sure enough, there it was, fluttering like a pink paper tongue beneath the windshield wiper, when he returned.

  If there was something to notice, Frances Nicker-son noticed it first and told you about it, even if you didn’t want to know. And for the past two weeks, her powers of observation had been on high alert. Something was wrong in Ryland Falls this Christmas, and she couldn’t finger the cause.

  The Christmas decorations in the stores were distinctly uninspired—a few colored lights, a little spray-on snow, but nothing extra. The library didn’t have its usual display of popular Christmas stories in the front window. And the columns on the front porch of the inn, always wrapped with festive swags of fir and gold ribbon for the holidays, were inexplicably bare.

  On her daily walks around town, Frances couldn’t help but notice that the residents weren’t holding up their end of Christmas either: not as many candles in front windows, fewer reindeer on the lawns. And from what little she could see through the Crimminses’ bay window, their Christmas tree wasn’t even up yet. And where was the other smaller tree they always set out on the second-floor balcony?

  “Have you noticed,” she asked the postman, when he handed her the mail, “that there aren’t as many Christmas cards in the delivery this year?”

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “you’re right. So far, I’ve only go
tten one from my insurance agent and my brother-in-law in Montana.”

  “Hmm,” she said, gazing across the street. The Bridgemans’ front door didn’t have a wreath on it. Then again, neither did her own.

  The holiday season in Ryland Falls was not progressing in its usual enthusiastic way. People dutifully untangled the Christmas lights, got out the ornaments, made the usual lists of which child wanted what toy, and so on. But the preparations felt tedious, like reading a boring book for a book report, or cleaning out the hall closet.

  Perhaps, thought Frances Nickerson, it’s the lack of snow. As far back as anybody could remember, there had always been a decent covering on the ground by December. But it was the middle of the month now, and every morning the children woke up and looked out the window, hoping snow had finally come during the night. They pressed their noses against the panes and dreamed of snowy things—snowball fights, and snowmen, and slapping their sleds down upon snow-covered hills and racing to the bottom. But all they saw were the same old leftover autumn leaves and empty acorn shells skittering with the wind across the ground. One gray and snowless day followed the next, and even the grown-ups trudged behind, as if they were in the grip of a low-grade spell that made them do things they didn’t want to, and not do things they did.

  “What’s the matter with me?” sighed one woman as she sank into a tub full of gardenia-scented bubble bath she thought she had bought for her daughter’s Christmas stocking.

  “I shouldn’t do this,” said a man as he strapped a new alligator watchband around his wrist. When he had taken early leave from work, he had thought he was going downtown to buy presents for his wife and mother-in-law.

  The shops were full of people drifting around the aisles looking for gifts. But there was no real accounting for the fact that, day after day, they came home with presents they regretted buying, no presents at all, or—most shocking of all—presents for themselves.

  Frances Nickerson always made a pyramid of red apples and boxwood for a holiday centerpiece. Picking through the apple bin at Elwood’s for the best ones, she said to Diane, “I don’t know, but I have the nagging feeling that Christmas isn’t going to amount to much this year.”

  “It would be fine with me if it didn’t amount to anything,” grumped Diane. “With my daughter out of work and three grandchildren wanting every toy on the planet …”

  Frances Nickerson wished she hadn’t brought the subject up. “Well,” she soothed, “I’m sure it’s nice to have them all with you during the holidays.”

  “I guess … if my oil furnace hadn’t just broke on me. I’m tired!”

  Grumpy Diane was not an optimist and Frances Nickerson wasn’t listening anyway. But when Diane declared that she was tired, she was speaking for the entire town.

  There were very few holiday parties. With only two entries, the Parent-Teacher Association decided to cancel the gingerbread-house contest. And three of the five families who had said they would be part of the Christmas house tour canceled because they just didn’t have the energy. Even the pleasant events, where all anyone had to do was sit back and be inspired, felt like work.

  December 18 was the night of the annual Messiah sing-along at All Saints Church. But at the last minute, Miranda Bridgeman’s parents decided to order take-out Chinese and make an early night of it instead. What the Bridgemans didn’t know was that half the people who had planned to be there had decided, in the same last-minute way, to do the same thing.

  Reverend Williams always looked forward to the Messiah night as the high point of his year as rector. But this Christmas, there weren’t even enough people to sing the alto parts. Later, as he was locking the church doors, he said to his wife, “Well, I must say, I’ve certainly seen better attendance.”

  “Maybe there’s a flu bug going around,” she offered.

  “The Bridgemans always come. I wonder if they were sick.”

  “Not too sick to be ordering take-out Chinese,” said Mrs. Williams, who had been picking up the choir robes at the cleaner’s next door and seen Mr. Bridgeman getting into his car with some cartons of chow mein and egg rolls.

  Reverend Williams was beginning to feel professionally threatened and decided to change the subject. “Maybe it’s time to get the tree tomorrow.”

  “You mean,” said Mrs. Williams quietly, “maybe it’s time for you to get the tree tomorrow.”

  For twenty-three years, Mrs. Williams had been told by her husband she could get the tree without him, and suddenly she didn’t see it as such a privilege anymore.

  Who was going to get the tree was a question that seemed to preoccupy everyone. Remarks like “If it depends on me to get it, I will decorate a coatrack!” or “I’m tired of being blamed for every bare spot” flew around town. Meanwhile, December 25 was getting closer, and an unexpected surplus of Christmas trees was on Giovanni’s lot.

  On the night of December 21, Giovanni sat by his woodstove counting up the day’s disappointing receipts. Only three trees had been sold since early morning when he’d started waiting with growing anxiety for a last-minute influx of customers who never came.

  After feeding Max and adjusting the dampers on his woodstove, he closed the flaps of his tent, slipped beneath the pile of blankets on his cot, and turned on his portable radio.

  “Snow is forecast,” said the weatherman, though he didn’t sound as if he believed his own forecast. Giovanni raised himself on one elbow to check the level of wood in his stove. It was full. Turning off his radio, he lay in the dark and wondered whether next year he should take his trees to a better town.

  In his apartment above Elwood’s Market, Will Campbell lay in bed wondering where he was going to find a new job.

  Across town, Miranda Bridgeman gazed out her window at the streetlights below and wondered whether it was more poetic to call them a “string of pearls” or a “chain of diamonds.”

  And on the third floor of the Crimmins house, Neddie Crimmins wondered why he felt as if something big was about to happen.

  By midnight, every wondering man, woman, and child in Ryland Falls was fast asleep.

  Then the snow began to fall.

  Chapter Eight

  IT FELL SOFTLY, like talcum powder from a shaker. Slowly, carefully, it dusted every roof and road, sifting back and forth with the wind until every inch of Ryland Falls was as white as a baker’s apron. Then, once the town was covered, the snow began to fill it up.

  Window boxes, birdbaths, the spaces between fence pickets, flake by flake, the snow piled higher, sweeping against tree trunks, climbing up the branches. Front and back steps disappeared. Garbage cans turned into mushrooms. Cars, hedges, and fire hydrants were buried.

  All night long, the snow fell silently from the sky, until Ryland Falls groaned beneath the weight of it. And on the morning of December 22, when the sun pulled itself up over the top of Old Rag Mountain and tried, in vain, to shine upon the town, it was still coming down.

  Will Campbell woke up colder than he had ever before been in his entire life. He sat up and looked outside. The window ledge was piled high with snow, the panes crazed with frost. The heat pump must have gone off during the night. He pulled on his clothes, wrapped a muffler around his neck, and clambered down the stairs.

  The first floor of the market was just as cold. He unlocked the front door and pushed it open against the snowdrifts piled against it. A thin wisp of smoke curled from the stovepipe jutting through the roof of Giovanni’s tent. Will trudged toward it.

  Inside, Giovanni sat with Max by his woodstove listening to his portable radio. “Well, folks,” said the reporter, “this is a big one! And it took us so-called weather experts completely by surprise. Three feet of snow so far and no end in sight.”

  Giovanni heard somebody calling from outside. Opening the tent flap, he saw the tall young man who lived above the market.

  “My heat’s out,” said Will. “Any chance I could warm up by your stove while I figure out what to do next?”
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  Giovanni nodded and motioned him inside. The tent was as warm as toast, and Will’s eye took appreciative note of the neat and orderly way the woodsman had arranged everything in it.

  “I don’t have much of a seat to offer,” said Giovanni, rolling the stump end of a log next to the stove and putting a pillow on it, “but you’re welcome to it—and some coffee, too.”

  “Any port in a storm,” said Will, “and I’m grateful for it.” Giovanni handed him a steaming mug.

  “All government offices are closed,” the radio reported. “Stores will open two hours late … at least! And schools are canceled.”

  December 22 would have been the last day of school before Christmas vacation. Now, Will would not have to tell the children he wasn’t returning. As he sipped his coffee, he looked over the rim of the mug and saw an old brown book lying by Giovanni’s cot. He could just make out the title on the spine: World Famous Paintings. He knew the book well!

  “So,” he said, “are you an artist, too?”

  Giovanni shook his head. “No, no, I just like to look at the pictures.”

  Will nodded. “So did I. That book was what made me want to be a painter before I even knew how to read. But I lost it a long time ago. Where’d you get yours?”

  “It belonged to my wife.”

  “Mind if I have a look? I never thought I’d see another copy.”

  Giovanni nodded and handed him the book. Giovanni had stared at every painting in it so many times that he had made up stories about each one. It fell open on Will’s lap to The Virgin and Child and Donor by Jan van Eyck.

  “I remember this one,” said Will.

  Giovanni pulled his chair closer and looked down at the page. “That’s the picture I look at most. I’ve never seen anything like it. But it don’t look like Jesus and Mary to me. Not the way they’re dressed up like that.”

  “Well, the woman was probably one of the artist’s girlfriends or favorite models. And the man sitting across from them in the funny bowl haircut? He’s the man who paid to have himself painted into the picture.”