Tycho held one end of the long paper chain as Eleanor Queen walked the rest of it around the tree. Orla kept the flashlight angled toward the snow at the base of the giant pine. She held her breath when the trunk’s girth made a disappearing act of her daughter; it was frighteningly easy to imagine her being swallowed up in the dark: Tycho would stand there waiting for his sister to come around to attach her end to his, and grow impatient when she didn’t appear. And Orla, desperate, would follow her tracks behind the tree and find they stopped midway. The construction-paper chain would be a pool of ringlets left in the snow.
But Eleanor Queen came around and solemnly took the end her brother had squashed in his mitten. Orla took off her gloves to squeeze out a half-frozen glob of glue onto a final strip of paper, and Eleanor Queen made the final loop and joined the ends of the chain together.
“Perfect fit,” she said and looked up at the tree with a pleased expression. “Like we made it just for you.”
Orla let Tycho hold the flashlight while she and Eleanor Queen tamped down the snow with their boots, making a flat area at the base of the tree. He shone the light up the endless trunk and across the endless woods and in her face and anywhere that wasn’t helpful to the task at hand. But they didn’t complain. She and Eleanor Queen didn’t need much light to dig the thick candles out of the pack. They pressed them into the altar of flattened snow.
Eleanor Queen handed her mother the big box of wooden matches. As Orla struck one into life, the flare momentarily consumed her vision. The candlewicks caught easily and she imagined the tree as an eager child watching the bloom of light on a birthday cake. She registered a warmth, a do-gooder’s sense of accomplishment, certain the tree was happy for their company, happy for the effort they were making. She could almost feel its faraway branches bending over to get a closer look.
“Is It aware of us?” she asked her daughter.
“Yes, it’s listening, it’s…curious.”
The piece of plastic sheeting—something she’d found in the basement—wasn’t very wide, but Orla laid it on the snow so it faced the candles. As planned, Eleanor Queen unfolded a bath towel and placed it on top.
“I think we’re all set,” Orla said to Tycho, ready to take the flashlight from him. “Oh. Maybe one last…”
She outlined a circle in the snow with a gloved finger. And inside it she drew a star. A dying girl had found comfort in this symbol; maybe a dying entity within a tree would too. Nature. It was a symbol for nature, and as unnatural as everything felt, somehow it was still rooted in the living world around them.
“A pentagram?” Eleanor Queen asked.
“Might help. Can’t hurt.” Orla sat cross-legged on one side of the towel, and Eleanor Queen sat on the other. Tycho sat in his mother’s lap.
With the flashlight off, they sat there for a moment, gazing at the half a dozen flaming wicks. They each danced to their own music, and their movement, their teasing warmth, lulled them into an easy peace.
In unison, they took a sharp intake of breath as above them something like fireflies appeared, dancing in the frigid night air. Between the branches, gleaming droplets of fire flitted to and fro, on and off.
“Lighting bugs!” said Tycho.
Orla reached up. When a speck of light touched her glove, the glow extinguished.
“Magic.” Eleanor Queen was full of awe.
Orla thought she knew what was happening: The being recognized them and had finally communicated something she understood. Gratitude. They had brought light—love—and It thanked them, mirroring their display of candlelight with Its own form of enchantment. She sensed a surge of confidence within her daughter as she sat up a little straighter; they were doing it right this time. They’d learned enough to converse.
Eleanor Queen’s soprano voice rose like a wisp of smoke, sweet and organic. “Si-i-lent night. Ho-o-ly night…”
Orla held Tycho more tightly and began to sway slowly as she joined her daughter in song. “All is calm. All is bright…”
The brilliance of the candlelight narrowed her field of vision to only the broad base of the tree and the specks in the boughs above them. In her shadowy imagination, animal ears twitched and gleaming eyes popped out of the darkness.
“Slee-ee-p in heavenly peace.”
They fell into a natural cradle of silence after several repetitions of their song. Eleanor Queen got on her knees and retrieved their offering, safely stashed in a sandwich bag, from the outside pocket of her backpack. In the space between the candles and the pentagram, she laid out three of their precious crackers and three slightly stale dried apricots.
“We share what we have with You,” Orla said to the great tree. “It isn’t much, but it’s heartfelt. Maybe You know—we don’t have much left.”
Eleanor Queen snuggled up next to Orla, focused—in her listening way—on the ancient tree in front of her, and something more nebulous in the beyond.
“My daughter tells me You’re dying. We wanted to be here with You on this longest night, so You would know it isn’t the end. There is no true end—Your spirit will become part of the universe, where You were born.”
“It likes that, Mama,” Eleanor Queen whispered.
“Don’t be afraid. We’re honored we could be here with You in the final days of Your long life. We’re sorry there have been misunderstandings. We hope You’re sorry too…” Her voice cracked and she took a moment to recover.
“I feel something, Mama.” Eleanor Queen gripped Orla’s upper arm in both hands. Orla felt the tension in her muscles, her daughter ready to leap up.
“What?” Orla said. The girl started weeping. “Oh, love.”
Eleanor Queen shook her head. “It isn’t me, it’s the…not the tree…it’s crying.”
Orla wanted to know more but was afraid to push her. Was the thing within the tree crying for Itself? Or did It regret the suffering It had caused? She still wanted to understand Its intentions, and the breadth or limits of Its power. Had It made mistakes? There was little comfort in that, but it remained better than the other possibilities.
“I don’t think it’s trying to hurt us,” Eleanor Queen said. And Orla wondered, not for the first time, if her daughter had some perception of her thoughts and feelings as well. “Or…no…”
“Is it too much? Being so close to It?”
Eleanor Queen nodded, burying her crumpled face into Orla’s scarf. “It’s very, very needy, Mama.”
“Okay, shh.” She held her children, one in each arm, and cleared her mind to be the warrior-mother ready for spiritual battle.
“Ancient one…” She had no idea what to call It, how to picture It, but they’d come for this; she pocketed her misgivings, wanting to sound earnest. “We have tried for You—we are trying. But You’re causing my daughter pain, and my son. They didn’t deserve to lose their father, and he didn’t want to leave them. But we want to reach an understanding, and ease You through this time—Your transition to the next life…”
Though she’d called It ancient, It had become, in her mind, an out-of-control toddler. It threw tantrums and acted on whims. She remembered Mamère—that’s what her father always called his mother, in the French he’d learned from his father, so Orla did too—so frail in her final years after her stroke, the opposite of a toddler. Her skin became translucent, revealing the tributaries of veins throughout her arms and hands. Had she looked at her grandmother’s abdomen, she might have seen all of her inner workings, like one of those plastic anatomy models: The liver tucked under a rib cage. The gray and wormy expanse of intestines. Her ninety-two-year-old grandmother, with skeletal arms more delicate than a baby’s, fingers stiffened by arthritis, could never have summoned the strength for a final fight, or even a display of frustration, or anger, or fear of death. She’d slipped silently into her eternal sleep, mute for the last months of her life.
No, Orla expected wisdom and acceptance from old age, not dangerous fits that threatened to starve her children. She pushed the thoughts away, afraid It would hear her. The thing within the tree needed to be soothed into slumber, placated into accepting Its inevitable end.
“Is this what It wanted?” she whispered to Eleanor Queen. “Our company? Does It feel less afraid?”
The girl concentrated, her eyes traveling up the wizened trunk. “Yes…” But she sounded hesitant. “But…I think there’s more.”
Orla thought of ghosts who needed to have their spirits avenged before they could rest. What could this spirit possibly need? “Do You need us to do something?” she asked the tree.
“We can’t help if we don’t understand,” Eleanor Queen implored. “We want to help; you have to believe us!”
As Orla watched, her daughter concentrated as if tuning into something fuzzy. “Is It talking to you?”
“Yes…I only understand…I just hear one word. Home. Home. Home.”
Something soured inside Orla. Her sympathy. In a matter of seconds it shriveled and turned to rot, and the thing it left behind was rage. She scooped Tycho off her lap and on to the towel and stood up to confront the tree. Home. What a thing to throw in their faces. Did It want them to go back to the house, hunker down there forever? She didn’t think It wanted them to leave, go back from whence they’d come.
“Old things die, it’s the cycle of life!” She kicked at the bark. “You can’t keep us prisoners here, destroy my family, and then tease us—”
“It’s listening, Mama—you don’t have to yell.”
“I have to yell because I’m angry—tell It to speak clearly. We can’t do this forever!”
Eleanor Queen squeezed her eyes shut. Orla’s anger evaporated and she almost begged her to stop. She hated the role her daughter was playing, of interpreter—no, worse. Conduit. And hated that she took it so deadly seriously. Their survival—and the thing’s survival—shouldn’t be the responsibility of a young girl.
“It’s not used to this either,” Eleanor Queen said, her eyes clenched tight. “Being…outside of itself. It had never been so far outside of itself before we came. It felt something, something it recognized, in Papa. And then me. But it had never needed to…communicate. It tried…first showing us its power. But we were scared.”
The specks of flame swooped out of the branches and swarmed toward the ground. They hovered over the indented pentagram Orla had drawn in the snow, then settled in the shape of the circle, the star, leaving them aglow.
Orla knelt near the children, unsure what it meant and ready to protect them, but Eleanor Queen laughed, unafraid.
“See how it’s trying? It keeps trying to figure out a way to make us see and understand. It wants to know us, but…it doesn’t understand everything yet—”
Eleanor Queen suddenly gasped for air and slumped. Tycho looked to his mother with frightened eyes. Orla extended a comforting hand toward each of them.
“Oh, Bean!” It was the most her daughter had gleaned from It, but the information had come at a cost. Eleanor Queen huddled beside her brother, looking as small and frightened as he did. “You did an amazing job—you did so well!” And Orla wouldn’t let her do more. “Why don’t I take a turn now? See if I can explain to It what—and who—we are. Is It still listening?”
Her daughter gave a weak nod and wrapped her arms around Tycho.