Zanna's Gift- a Life in Christmases Read online

  Well, of course, they wouldn’t have come empty-handed to visit her, so when they had to stay over on Christmas Eve, they decided to slip it into her stocking. It felt like a book, and that would be nice, a book was like food, you could consume it and pass it along. She’d open it tomorrow. She was a big girl now. She could wait to find out what Santa had brought.

  Then she got out an old crayon picture in a frame and set it on the mantel. “Not long now, Ernie,” she said. “If you still remember who I am.”

  In the morning, she was awakened by their whispering and pan-banging in the kitchen. Just like we used to wake Mom and Dad by our noisy efforts to be quiet, she thought.

  Sure enough, Diana had been bold enough to try to make flapjacks in Granny Zan’s kitchen—and to Zanna’s pleasant surprise, they were very good. They had a wonderful time over breakfast, chatting about Jake’s family and his memories of Christmas and how all three of them had grown up in families with completely different Christmas traditions.

  “But everybody has stockings,” said Zanna, and they agreed. Which was the cue to go into the living room.

  They were delighted to see that their stockings were stuffed so full they had had to be removed from the mantel and laid on the couch, and of course Jake thanked her and Diana teasingly cursed her for supplying them with enough calories to relieve a famine. Only when they got to the bottom of the stockings and found their real presents did they get serious.

  “This is a family heirloom,” said Jake, but Zanna answered him with the speech she had prepared, which made him laugh and Diana growl until she laughed, and Jake said, “I’ll keep this, then, to remember what it’s like to love a proud woman.”

  When Diana read the inscription inside The Bobbsey Twins, though, a couple of tears spilled down her cheeks. “Uncle Bug told me once that he used to read this to you when you were little. He didn’t think this copy still existed.”

  “Still does,” said Zanna. “I hope it always will—but that it will be used, too.”

  “It will,” said Diana, saying it like the most solemn of covenants.

  Then Jake reached down under the tree and picked up a brightly wrapped box and handed it to her. “Diana didn’t know what we could bring you,” he said, “because you have everything and besides, you can’t buy art for Picasso, so we couldn’t get you anything edible or decorative.”

  Zanna took the wrapping paper off meticulously, a habit she had begun in order to annoy her brothers during the present-opening ceremony, but which now she did because it simply felt like the right way to open a gift.

  Inside it was a CD, but one with no cover and nothing written on it. “We recorded it ourselves,” explained Jake. “On the computer. You do have a CD player, don’t you?”

  “I know all about CDs, and about ripping songs off the internet,” said Granny Zan. “You aren’t going to go to federal prison for making this for me, are you?”

  “We didn’t rip it,” said Diana. “It’s us. Singing. We sang every Christmas carol we know. We’re not very good, but then if you picture us standing out in the snow shivering while we sing it, your standards will get lower and you’ll like it better.”

  She hugged them both. “I will listen to it a dozen times today.”

  “No you won’t,” said Jake.

  “We have a bet that you can’t even get through it once,” said Diana. “We’re not professionals. We shouldn’t have tried this at home.”

  “I am a musician,” said Jake, “but not a singer.”

  “And I’m not a musician of any kind,” said Diana.

  By this point, Zanna was at her stocking, feeling where there had been a present in it last night. There was nothing there.

  “Sorry,” said Jake. “We didn’t think of filling your stocking. The CD might have fit, if I’d thought about it.”

  Zanna looked at Diana, who blushed.

  “Second thoughts?” asked Zanna.

  Diana nodded.

  “Any chance of third thoughts?”

  Diana reached into her purse and took out a slim book and handed it to Zanna.

  Jake was impressed. “Man, you put that in her stocking?”

  “What I am,” said Diana, “is a very bad poet with delusions of grandeur.”

  “What she is,” said Jake, “is the greatest living American poet, and she still won’t let me set any of her poems to music. My goal is to someday be good enough that she’ll let me.”

  “But if this is the book where you keep your poems,” said Zanna.

  “No,” said Diana. “It’s a copy. I copied them out for you, so you could read it.”

  “And I bet you left out the really sexy ones.”

  Diana gasped and Jake laughed and Zanna was delighted that she had struck home. Meanwhile, she had the book open and was thumbing through, looking at the titles.

  “I like to think I write poems the way you paint,” said Diana. “Clearly. So people can understand what I’m talking about.”

  And then Zanna came to a certain page and stopped. The title of the poem was, “Zanna’s Gift for Ernie.”

  “Father told me about the drawing that you always had out for every Christmas,” said Diana. “He always said that you told him it was a drawing that a little girl once made for her brother as a Christmas present. I got Uncle Bug to tell me the whole story last summer.”

  Diana walked to the mantel. “Is this it? The original?”

  “Yes,” said Zanna. “Not much sign of talent in it, is there?” Then she looked back down at the poem and resumed reading while Diana and Jake studied the picture.

  When they turned to face each other again, both Zanna and Diana had tears in their eyes. “Oh, my darling,” said Zanna, “how could you understand this, when you’ve never had any children of your own?”

  “I was a child,” Diana answered. “And I have an imagination. And besides, I’ve known you my whole life. As Uncle Bug says, you haven’t changed a bit since you were little.”

  “Well, you have just given me the best present I can remember,” said Zanna. “I’m so proud of you.” She looked at her proudly. “Just think. You’re kin of mine!”

  “Well that’s how I feel about you,” said Diana, and they hugged and laughed. “I thought that maybe you’d like them. But I almost didn’t include that one poem, because it was so presumptuous of me.”

  Zanna assured her that it wasn’t a bit presumptuous, and then, to Diana’s embarrassment, she read the poem aloud. It was the story of the little girl who had a present for her brother but no way to give it to him. The language was simple, the rhyming subtle, the flow of it like music.

  “You see why I want to set it to music,” said Jake. “But then, music would be redundant, wouldn’t it?”

  “Diana, you really need to marry a man who knows how to flatter you like that. I married one who let me continue my very time-consuming hobby during all the years when nobody wanted to hear about the kind of painting that I did. But you, I don’t think you’ll have to wait so long for the world to see your talent. And then all kinds of rock stars and movie actors will want to marry you, and I can promise you, this Jake fellow is better than any of them.”

  It was nice to see that Jake could blush. By noon they were on their way, a phone call to the highway patrol having ascertained that the pass was indeed clear and traffic was unobstructed. They ate cookies and biscuits all the way to Jake’s mother’s house, where the family—including three teenage siblings—had waited Christmas for them.

  And as they drove that long road, Zanna, baking again in her kitchen, listened to their CD four times over, singing along on most of the songs.

  13

  Three years later, late in November, just a few days after Thanksgiving, Diana and Jake received a package at their apartment in Milwaukee. The return address said it was from Suzanna Pullman.

  “But that’s impossible,” said Diana.

  “She must have mailed it before she died,” said Jake.

&
nbsp; Granny Zan had passed away only a few days before. They would have gone to the funeral, but they couldn’t afford the flight, and Diana was too pregnant to risk flying anyway.

  Even as Diana was opening the package, she knew what it was. “It’s Zanny’s gift to Ernie,” she whispered, and so it was, once the paper was off: a simple frame holding a meticulously drawn and completely unintelligible child’s drawing.

  There was a note. “I have it memorized,” Granny Zan had written in her spidery hand. “And I have a feeling I’m only a day or two away from being able to give Ernie the version in my memory. So I have no more use for the physical version of it. There’d be no shortage of art collectors who’d fight over Suzanna Pullman’s earliest surviving work. But I wanted it to go to someone who loved what it meant, without thinking about what it would go for. You showed me that you understood a child’s heart, even if you couldn’t understand a child’s painting. So this is for you from little Zanna Pullman. It was you I was saving it for all these years, after all.

  Love, Granny Zan.”

  Jake leaned over Diana’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. “Such a reunion they’re having.”

  “Oh, I hope so,” said Diana. “After they waited so long, God wouldn’t disappoint them now.”

  “She had twice the life most people have,” said Jake.

  “Well, of course,” said Diana. “She was living for two.”

  Later, sitting on the couch, looking up at Zanna’s gift sitting on the mantel, Jake put his hand on Diana’s abdomen and said, “I don’t think he’d appreciate it if we named him Zanna.”

  “There’ll be girls later,” said Diana, “and the name Suzanna will certainly belong to one of them.”

  “But this boy?”

  “Ernest isn’t a regular name anymore,” said Diana. “But maybe as a middle name?”

  And that’s the name they gave him, meaning to call him Jacob, his first name. But long before he was old enough to learn his own name, they had fallen into the habit of calling him Ernie all the time. By the time he was three, there was indeed a little Zanna ready to grow up just behind him.

  And every Christmas, their parents brought out a child’s drawing in a cheap little frame, waiting eagerly to tell their children what it meant, and whom they were named for, and how grief is just another name for love.

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  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ZANNA’S GIFT: A LIFE IN CHRISTMASES

  Copyright © 2004 by Scott Richards

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by Beth Meacham

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  ISBN: 978-1-4299-9098-1

  First Edition: November 2004

  First Mass Market Edition: November 2008

  Printed in the United States of America

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