I stop by Walmart to buy some food and notice a floor model of a small tabletop Christmas tree that’s marked half off. It’s already decorated with white lights and some red, shiny balls. I buy it and carry it out, and lay it carefully on my back seat. I hope it will put a smile on Callie’s face if she’s awake when I go back.
Back at the hospital, I trek up the hall with it to Callie’s room, knock lightly, and push the door open. She’s sound asleep on the bed, an oxygen tube clipped under her nose. I look around for a place to put the tree, but the bedside table is cluttered, and there’s a plastic pitcher and a Styrofoam glass of water on the rolling tray table. Across the room is a cheap, hospital-grade chifforobe. I set the tree next to it on the floor, then realize she won’t even be able to see it unless she sits up.
I go out to the hall to look for a box or something to put it on. As I pass the nurses’ station, I lean over and get a nurse’s attention. “Could you tell me if Callie Beecher is alone, or is her granddaughter still here?”
“She’s still here,” the nurse says. “I think she’s in the prayer room. She asked me where it was. It’s down the hall to the left. There’s a cross beside the door.”
“The prayer room?” I say. “Okay.” I don’t really want to go to the prayer room, but I do want to know how Callie is. And since I’m not family, no one but Sydney can tell me. “Listen, do you have a big box lying around somewhere back there?”
“A box?” she asks.
“Yeah. For a little Christmas tree. Just to get it high enough that Miss Callie can see it.”
“No, I’m sorry. There isn’t anything.”
“Don’t all those sheets come in boxes? Or the drugs? Or those cheap little off-brand tissue boxes that cost twenty times what they cost in stores?”
“Excuse me?”
I don’t know whether she can’t understand me or if she’s being deliberately obtuse. I give up on her and head down to the prayer room. I’ll peek in, and if Sydney isn’t in the throes of prayer, I’ll ask her about Callie’s condition. But when I crack the door open, I see Sydney sitting on the second row, leaning forward with her head bowed. She may be crying.
I step back into the hall and slip into a tiny waiting room where I can watch the prayer room door. I pick up a People magazine and flip through without reading until Sydney comes out, wiping her eyes.
It’s probably not the best time to approach her, so I wait, wondering whether she got more bad news about Callie. My heart sinks. What should I do? I’m suddenly drawn to that room. It won’t kill me to go in and pray. I cross the hall and step back into the quiet. There’s no one else here.
Something about the warm silence in the room draws me inside. I slip into the last pew and look at the front, where a life-sized nativity scene is displayed.
My mom used to take me to church before I got too smart to believe in Jesus. I quit going long before I should have. Actually, I liked sitting next to her and smelling her faint perfume and the smell of Spray Net in her hair. And I still have questions that were never answered. Like why would the creator of a vast universe make his newborn son sleep in a sheep’s feeding trough? Animals around him—did he even notice them? Or did Joseph spend all night shooing them away from the manger?
And what is a stable anyway? Probably like a horse’s stall, just a few feet wide, and Mary had to sleep in smelly hay.
When I raised questions like that as a seven-year-old kid, my mom got impatient and told me I was being disrespectful. But I really wanted to know. Eventually I stopped caring, but now I find that awestruck curiosity returning.
The young parents who barely knew each other, the tiny, naked newborn whose first look at the earth was the same one the goats had when they were born. And then there was the whole cross thing, which baffles me when I give it enough thought.
As I think about that scene today, I feel a little homesick.
A man slips in and sits a couple of rows in front of me. I stay there until he finishes his brief business with God and slips quietly out, leaving me alone and reminding me that I have business here, too.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and rest my face in my palms. “If you could just answer one prayer,” I whisper. “It’s not about me. Well, maybe it is a little.” I clear my throat. “If you could just help Miss Callie. She’s a funny old lady, and she deserves a nice Christmas.” I rub my eyes, surprised at the moisture there. “Guess you know even better than I do what a person deserves. Didn’t mean to suggest you didn’t. Just . . . feeling a little awkward.”
I stay in that hunched posture, lingering under the authority of quiet. Thoughts of my mother ambush me again. I look up at that scene at the front, the scene of a family who probably had no grasp of what they were getting into. I wonder if the baby had some deep knowledge even in that manger, or if he just had the normal thoughts of a newborn . . . cold, hunger, touch . . .
It doesn’t really matter what he knew then. What matters is what he knows now. I’m suddenly hit with the absurdity that I would be asking him for anything, a person like me.
“I know I’ve done things wrong,” I whisper. “If you could just help me not to get it wrong this time.”
I don’t know if he hears or cares, but somehow it feels like he does. “Thank you, sir,” I whisper after a few minutes pass.
I slip back out of the prayer room and dab at my nose. I must be allergic to something in there. Dust or hay or some chemical pew cleaner . . .
I take a deep breath, pull myself together, and drive to the closest store—a Home Depot around the corner from the hospital. I don’t find a table small enough to work in a crowded hospital room, so I grab two plastic bins with tops. I can stack them on top of each other. I go down the Christmas aisle until I find a festive tablecloth. I can toss this over the bins. Then when Callie goes home, she can use the bins for whatever stuff she’s collected during her stay—fifty-dollar Kleenex and hundred-dollar plastic bedpans, and the pitcher that ought to be made of gold for what she’ll be charged for it . . .
I hurry back to the hospital and find Sydney sitting beside Callie’s bed. I step inside. “Has she been awake?”
“Briefly,” she says. “Come in.”
I bring the bins in and stack them up next to where I left the tree. “I won’t be long. Just wanted to get this set up.”
“It was you who brought the tree?”
“Yeah, only there wasn’t any place to put it. I didn’t want to use her tray table.”
She watches as I stack the bins and cover them with the tablecloth. Then I put the small tree on it. It won’t reach a plug, so I move it a couple of feet and plug it in. The lights come on, reflecting off of the red balls.
Sydney smiles. “That’s beautiful. Thank you, Finn. She’ll love it.”
Callie opens her eyes now and looks around at us as if her mind is waking up.
“Grammy?” Sydney says. “Hi.”
Callie takes her hand. “Sweet girl,” she says.
I walk to her bed, hands in my pockets since I don’t know quite what to do with them. She turns and looks at me. She smiles and reaches for my hand. I give it to her, and she pats it, too. “Sweet boy.”
“Finn brought you a Christmas tree,” Sydney says.
Callie tries to sit up, her wizened face all smiles. “Oh, it’s beautiful! Look at that.” She looks around. “Is this the hospital?”
“Yes,” Sydney says. “Do you remember the ambulance coming?”
Callie lies back down. “I was fine. They could have just taken me home.”
“Miss Callie, why did you go out alone?” I ask.
She lifts her chin. “I wanted to go for a walk.”
I chuckle. “On your scooter?”
She doesn’t seem to see the humor in that. “Well, I’m fine now.” She tries to sit up, but Sydney makes her lie back down. “It’s not Christmas yet, is it?”
“No, Christmas Eve is tomorrow,” Sydney says.
“They’re going to let me go home, aren’t they? I’m fine. I have to be home for Christmas. I have big plans.”
“Grammy, I’m not sure if you’re going to be strong enough to go home. But don’t worry, we can celebrate here.”
“No,” she says, sitting up again. “I have to go home. I need to talk to my doctor. What’s his name?”
“Dr. Patrick,” Sydney says. “But, Grammy, you have pneumonia, and you need the IV antibiotics. It’s really important.”
Callie seems not to hear her. She turns to me now and squeezes my hand. “You have to come for Christmas. I won’t take no for an answer.”
I give her a smile, then meet Sydney’s eyes. She doesn’t want me to promise her she’ll be home, I can tell. “Miss Callie, if the doctor lets you go home for Christmas, I’ll be there. But if you’re still in the hospital, I’ll come here.”
“Wonderful!” she says, clapping her hands. She looks back at Sydney. “We’re going to have such a time, aren’t we, sweetie?”
Sydney doesn’t know what to say. “Grammy, we’ll have fun no matter what.”
“I have a big turkey and my famous sweet potato casserole and the best dressing you ever tasted . . .”
I wonder how in the world she has cooked those things in the condition she’s been in.
“And I got you a present that you’re really going to like. Not like those things I’ve bought you other years.”
“Grammy, you didn’t have to get me anything. Seriously, it doesn’t matter about gifts or food . . . as long as you’re feeling better.”
“Oh, I feel better,” Callie says. “I haven’t felt this good in years.”
In spite of my better judgment, I let myself believe that’s true.