Zanna's Gift- a Life in Christmases Read online

  But her tears ended as quickly as they began. She stood up and dried her eyes on her sleeve and said, “I have to get ready for bed now so I can say my prayers.”

  Father wanted to explain to her that she didn’t have to wait till she was in her nightgown to say a prayer, but she was out of the room too quickly for him to form the words.

  So instead he got up to warn his wife that Zanna knew, and that her prayers would be hard to listen to tonight. Father and Mother held hands as they listened to Zanna’s message for her brother. It was simple enough. She loved him. She missed him. She wished he wasn’t dead. She hoped he wouldn’t miss her too much in heaven.

  Zanna didn’t cry again until she was in bed. Her mother offered to stay by her bed, but Zanna shook her head, and her parents left the room as she cried herself to sleep.

  Children are resilient, and their emotions come and go quickly, as their minds turn from thought to thought. Zanna was as cheerful as ever the next day, and the day after, and when she talked about Ernie sometimes it sounded as though she had forgotten he was dead, and sometimes it sounded as if he had died many years ago, and she was completely used to the idea. Her parents were grateful that Zanna was taking it so well—better than her brothers—and also admitted to each other that they envied her the peace in her heart.

  4

  Christmas would come to the Pullmans with the cold logic of the calendar, and the parents decided that the best consolation for the children was to make the season as normal as possible.

  So only a week after the funeral, Father came home with a Christmas tree tall enough to brush the ceiling before he cut down the top sprig to make room for the star. He strung the lights, and he and Mother and the children spent the whole evening hanging up all their decorations.

  By sheer force of will, the parents did not succumb to memories of how Ernie had strung the lights and hung the star for the past three years. In fact, they acted their part so well that the evening was full of laughter; even Davy, who had been so solemn since his brother died, laughed and teased Bug. And Bug, for his part, was sweet with his little sister and helped her hang ornaments on low branches, and this year did not try to rehang all the ones that she had placed.

  After the children were in bed, the parents sat in front of the festive tree and held hands, and Mr. Pullman said, “We still have all these children, and they’re good ones, too.”

  Mrs. Pullman nodded. “I know.”

  “It’s right to make things normal for them,” said Mr. Pullman.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Then they wept and held each other, thinking of the boy who should have been there, and who had been taken from them so untimely.

  A few days later, Davy came home from school late. Mother began to scold him, but he stood up rather defiantly and said, “Don’t you want to know where I was first?”

  “Well, where were you?”

  “I was at Virgil’s Furnace,” he said. “Virg says I can start there as an assistant and learn the work by helping, the way Ernie did. And I promised that I’d work every bit as hard as Ernie did, even though I’m not as smart and probably won’t learn as quick.”

  “You’re a very smart boy,” said Mother.

  “Not as smart as Ernie,” Davy insisted. “Nobody is.”

  “Well I’m proud of you,” said Mother. “And I know Ernie will be. But you really do have to work hard, and stick to it.”

  Father was also proud when he got home from work, but he had another worry. He took Davy out onto the back porch and put his arm on his son’s shoulder and said, “Davy, you know that you don’t have to try to take Ernie’s place.”

  “If I don’t, who will?”

  “Nobody will,” said Father. “You have a place of your own, and it’s every bit as important and good as Ernie’s, and we love you every bit as much.”

  “So you don’t want me to work for Virg?”

  “I want you to do whatever you think you should, and I want you to do the best job you can,” said Father. “But do it because that’s what you want, and not because it’s what Ernie did.”

  “All right,” said Davy.

  But Father knew that he had made little headway, and it would be some time before Davy could find his way out of his brother’s shadow.

  Well, there was time, wasn’t there? Davy would have many years to work his way through his life.

  Or else he wouldn’t. He might die in his sleep one night, and then what did it matter whether he was in his brother’s shadow or not? What did anything matter?

  Father shuddered at the thought, and felt the slight shoulder of the boy under his hand, and said to himself firmly: This one is alive, and so something does matter. I did not die with Ernie, and neither did my duty to my family.

  There’s nothing in life that you can be sure of keeping—he had known that even before Ernie died. This was not the first loss or grief in the Pullmans’ lives, just the first one that the children shared in. You could spend your life missing what you had lost and fearing to lose what you had, or you could take such joy as God gave you and rejoice in the children who were still with you. Mr. Pullman already knew what choice he would make.

  A few days later, it was Bug who asked the most disturbing question of all. “What are we going to do with all the money Ernie saved up for college?”

  Because Father wasn’t home, and Mother was utterly unprepared for the question, she answered with a question of her own. “Why do you ask?”

  “I just thought maybe we could use some of it to buy presents for each other the way Ernie would have.”

  “Ernie would never have used that money to buy presents,” said Mother. “It was saved for a purpose.”

  “But he won’t be going to college now,” said Bug.

  That was too much for Mother. She didn’t cry, but she did press her lips together in the effort not to cry, and shook her head, and Bug knew the conversation was over and left the room with a murmur of “Sorry, Mom.”

  Still, the question of Ernie’s savings was an important one. Mr. Pullman, being an accountant, had helped several families deal with the taxes and expenses involved with a death and inheritance. As he explained to his wife when she told him about Bug’s question, “Ernie died without a will, and so by law all his possessions belong to his next of kin, which would be his parents.”

  “But it’s still his savings,” said Mrs. Pullman. “How would he want us to use it, that’s the question.”

  “He never touched his savings for Christmas presents.”

  “But he won’t be going to college now,” said Mrs. Pullman, firmly. “So what would he do with the money now that that purpose is gone?”

  In the end, they decided to divide his savings into three parts. As they explained to the children at a family council around the kitchen table, “This money was meant to pay for college, and that’s what it will do—it’s the start of your college savings, all three of you.”

  “What’s college?” asked Zanna.

  “It’s a school for big people,” said Bug.

  “And after you go to college, they have to pay you more money,” said Davy.

  “Ernie never touched his college savings,” said Father, “and neither will you. You can add to it by what you earn as you get older. And it will gather interest.”

  Whereupon Bug asked what “interest” was, and the meeting quickly degenerated as Father tried to explain the entire banking system to children who soon grew desperate to get away.

  How much of this Zanna understood was impossible to guess, but a few days later it became clear that she had understood at least this much: They had to decide what to do about things that had belonged to Ernie.

  It was only a week before Christmas, and Mother was in the kitchen baking date bread to take to the neighbors for Christmas.

  Zanna came in carrying a paper with lots of coloring on it.

  “Mommy,” she said. “What about my present for Ernie?”

  “W
ell, darling, I’m afraid you’ll need to give it to someone else who might use it.”

  It was only after Zanna had trotted back out of the kitchen that Mrs. Pullman realized that Zanna hadn’t bought a gift for Ernie. He had died before any Christmas shopping had taken place. So what did she mean? Did she think they could give Ernie Christmas gifts after all? What was going through that little four-year-old mind?

  It became clearer that night when she found Zanna crying in her bed.

  “What’s wrong, darling?” asked Mother.

  “I can’t give Ernie’s present to anybody else.”

  “Why not, darling?”

  “Because nobody else likes my drawings.”

  So it was a gift she had made for him. Of course. But then . . . when had she made it? Was it possible that she was already thinking of a Christmas gift for him before he died? That she had already drawn him a picture?

  “Ernie saw all your pictures, darling, and he loved them all. It’s not your fault that he left us before he got to see this one.”

  “But this one is the best one ever.”

  “May I see it?”

  Zanna slid out from under the blankets and opened her bottom drawer and took out a piece of paper.

  Now that Mother looked at it, she could see that it really had been a labor of love. Instead of consisting of a lot of tiny drawings in the corners of the paper, there was only a single picture in the middle, bigger than anything Mother had seen Zanna draw.

  “It really is special,” said Mother. “What is it?”

  Zanna started to cry. “Nobody ever knows what my pictures are, except Ernie.”

  And in that moment Mrs. Pullman realized that in Zanna’s world, the loss of Ernie had been just as devastating as in her own. She pulled her daughter into her arms.

  “Oh, my little darling, my sweet girl, I’m so sorry. Ernie loved your drawings, and I bet Heavenly Father will let him see what you drew.”

  “But Ernie won’t ever be able to tell me that he loves it.”

  “No, he won’t,” said Mother. “Not until you get very old and Heavenly Father takes you home.”

  Zanna raised her red and tear-soaked face to look at her mother. “I can never make a drawing for him again!” she wailed.

  “Darling,” soothed her mother. “Darling, that’s not true. It’s just not true. You can make all your drawings for him. Your whole life, every drawing, can be for him. Don’t you think he’ll be watching you from heaven? Don’t you think that he can see?”

  Again Zanna’s face, so full of misery, looked up into Mother’s. “Can he?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mother honestly. “But Heavenly Father loves you, and loves him, and don’t you think that he would let him see your pictures?”

  Zanna thought about that and shook her head. “I want to give him the picture.”

  “I know, darling.”

  “He really wants this picture! He asked me for it!”

  “I know, but you can’t.”

  “He asked me for it special. He said for me to do it for him for Christmas. And then he died before I was finished! It’s not fair. I was working on it every day. I couldn’t do it any faster.”

  There was nothing more that Mother could say. She just held her daughter close and shed her own tears into Zanna’s hair until her daughter finally fell asleep and Mother lifted her into bed.

  5

  Zanna’s grief over the gift she couldn’t give did not fade, as Mother had thought it would. Instead, the child moped all day. Even as she helped with the baking and laundry-folding and other tasks that usually were times of chatter and play between mother and daughter, she wore a face of sorrow. It hurt her mother’s heart to see how Zanna suffered, but what could she do?

  As Christmas grew closer and Zanna did not forget, Mrs. Pullman talked about it several times with her husband. There was talk of getting a dog; then they remembered that any puppy they brought home now might well die while Zanna was in her early teens, and even if it lived till she went to college, the last thing she needed was to be set up to lose another loved one.

  “It’s out of our hands,” Mr. Pullman finally said, and that night when they prayed together, Mrs. Pullman asked the Lord to give comfort to their little girl this Christmas, since it wasn’t in their power, needing comfort so badly themselves.

  When Zanna came bounding into the kitchen the next morning with a big smile on her face, Mrs. Pullman’s first thought was, Since when does God answer prayers that fast? And her second thought was, Why is God so attentive all of a sudden, when he could have avoided all of this by just letting Ernie stay alive?

  “I’m glad to see you smiling today,” she said.

  Zanna nodded. “I saw Ernie last night.”

  Mother stiffened a little. Maybe God had gone a little far. “Was it a nice dream?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Zanna, and Mother relaxed. As long as Zanna knew it was a dream.

  “He didn’t say anything,” said Zanna. “In my dream I tried to tell him about the picture. But I couldn’t make my mouth work.”

  “You were asleep, darling,” said Mother.

  “No I wasn’t. I could see me right there, holding his hand, only I couldn’t make me do anything. I couldn’t even make me show him my picture.”

  “You saw yourself?”

  “I was standing right by him, and I was looking at me just like he was. And then he turned to the me that was standing by him and picked her up and I kept wishing that he had picked up the me that was really me instead of the me in the dream, because I couldn’t feel him pick me up and I bet she could.”

  What a strange dream, thought Mother. To have yourself in it twice.

  And then she thought of another explanation.

  She thought of the other grave, beside Ernie’s. The one that none of the children, not even Ernie, had known about, because there had been no reason to grieve them on an occasion so happy as the birth of their only sister.

  She almost burst out with the idea right then. But no, it might be too much for Zanna, at her age. So she kept it to herself. “I’m glad you had that dream, darling, and I’m glad it made you happy.”

  And in a part of her mind that she wasn’t proud of, she thought, While God is handing out comfort, wouldn’t it be nice if I could see my boy just one more time, even if it’s only in a dream, and even if it’s someone else’s hand he’s holding, and someone else he hugs?

  But she swallowed that thought, too, for Zanna’s sake, and kept on about the work of the morning.

  It wasn’t till afternoon, when Zanna was down for her nap, that she phoned her husband at work and told him about Zanna’s dream.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Either it was just a dream, or it was something more, but how can we tell?”

  “The little girl in the dream. Don’t you think it could have been Dianna?”

  There was a catch in her husband’s breath. “Well, then it would have to be something real, wouldn’t it? And that’s an answer to prayer, and we should be glad of it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What more can we do?”

  “I just wondered if we made a mistake not telling Zanna about her sister.”

  “We probably did,” said Mr. Pullman. “But is this the time?”

  “If God’s going to show her . . . I mean, maybe it was a message to us. That we should tell her about something that God has already shown her in a dream.”

  “Or maybe she was just dreaming about Ernie and her together, and she thought of the girl as someone separate from herself because Ernie’s out of reach now.”

  “So I shouldn’t do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mr. Pullman.

  They finished the conversation, but a few minutes later he called her back.

  “I’m coming home,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Because it’s Christmas Eve,” he said, “and it’s insane to stay here working w
hen nobody expects me to and work isn’t taking my mind off things anyway.”

  She waited a moment, because the tone in his voice sounded as though there was another item on the list of reasons why he was coming home.

  There was.

  “I want to take them out to see Dianna’s grave. I think it’s the right thing to do, whether it was God who sent us a message or just a dream.”

  “Whatever you think.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I was wishing we could do it. I was thinking of waking her up and taking her, and trying to get back before the boys got home from school.”

  “Then it really is the right thing to do, if both of us wanted to.”

  “Only I want to tell her first,” said Mrs. Pullman. “Just her.”

  Mr. Pullman thought for a few moments.

  “I’m coming home now. I’ll be there when the boys come home. You take her and explain it.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do it without you!”

  “You’re right. She should hear about it before her brothers. It was her dream, and Dianna was her twin.”

  6

  Zanna was sleepy, and dozed on the trolley. But it was only a nap, and the bell soon woke her up. She looked eagerly out the window until Mother told her where they were going. Then she became quite still and listened.

  Because Zanna hadn’t been there at the funeral, and they had avoided burdening her with too much knowledge for her four-year-old mind to absorb, she hadn’t understood about burials and why we treat the empty bodies of our loved ones with such care and put them in the earth, even though their souls were in heaven.

  “So Ernie isn’t really there,” Mother said. “But we go there to remember him.”

  “I can remember him at home, too.”

  For a moment Mother wondered if Zanna was saying that she didn’t want to go, but Zanna was kneeling on the seat looking out the window with such interest that Mother realized that she had simply been reminding Mother that she didn’t have to go to a cemetery to remember.

  They walked through the chilly air and over the browning grass to the freshly turfcovered grave that had no headstone yet.