The organ was so beautiful, the trumpets so splendid, that Matt’s chest hurt. He wished he knew these words by heart, like everybody else. It was sounding joy.
When the song was over and people were shifting their bodies into the pews, Matt huddled inside his jacket, keeping the words up against himself. Holding them with his body heat.
The service went on and on.
It had a beauty with which Matt was not familiar: the words and the songs and the people and the church itself; both light and shadowed, both simple and mysterious.
He spotted Jamie in the choir, music held high, eyes fastened on the organist, and it was a relief to know that Jamie had something he loved doing. Matt recognized Jed, from math team, with his family. Tack, with his family. Church was that kind of place, a place for people who already belonged.
But although Matt did not feel he belonged, he also did not feel wrong sitting here. So this was peace: your insides lying quietly, not angry with you or the world.
You can have problems, then, thought Matt, and still be at peace.
The congregation sang “Silent Night,” and he knew some of the words and was even willing to try the ones he didn’t. He climbed into the carol: “Silent night … holy night … all is calm … all is bright”—
Where’s Katie?
He’d been so careful to stay clear of her pain that he had not even looked to see if she was okay. She wasn’t even here! How long had she been gone?
Matt opened the program, mentally timing all that had happened, the many verses of carols, the many verses of the book called Luke.
She’d been gone fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.
Matt picked up her jacket. It was as limp and flimsy as a dishcloth. It couldn’t keep a child warm.
He slid over her vacant spot, head down, not looking at any of these strangers, tried to leave invisibly. No way. The place was packed beyond standing room. People were jammed against the walls. He had to look into their faces and motion them to step aside, smiling the apologetic smile that regular people used to get their way. Finally he was through the huge doors and alone in the empty hall.
A sign pointed to bathrooms downstairs. He ran down and knocked on the door to the women’s room and called, “Katie?” He even went in to check. Empty.
A drink of water had been a lie, a way to run.
He, Matt—who could run without moving, who could take his mind and vanish while social workers or teachers or especially his own mother talked to him—knew all the ways to run.
He ran back up the stairs, finding the steps strangely high, as if he had lost the strength to lift his feet.
Where has Katie gone?
The only other doors led outside.
He went out into the snow, and the size of the world horrified him.
Where would Katie fit in, in such a huge world?
But that was the problem. She did not fit in.
It was snowing harder.
The wind bit his cheeks, and it hurt to breathe in.
He could make out nearly filled prints of small feet, the only ones going away from the church. Matt ran after the little snow prints, telling himself he would find her, she wouldn’t go far.
The prints went into the street, where snowplows and sand had destroyed them. It would be guesswork, trying to follow Katie.
Okay, she went home, he said to himself.
But it was not home, not when the Rowens had said: Out, kid.
Not when Katie knew for sure that no family was going to arrive beneath the tree.
So where would she go? What was her aim?
Matt knew that Katie would not have an aim.
She was just leaving the worst behind.
Without her jacket.
The city was a stranger to him. Snow deadened sound, and the engines of distant plows mumbled like drunks. Even with a coating of yellow sand, the surface was slippery and tried to yank him down. There was no visibility; he was slogging pointlessly from one blurry yard to the next.
He went around the block and was back at the church.
Maybe Katie got cold, went in again, maybe she’d be there waiting for him.
But he knew she would not be.
Church was not their club. He’d been wrong to encourage going there, as if they would actually find something.
His sneakers creaked like old doors as they flattened the plow’s fat treads. When he churned uphill, the cold wind burned his lungs.
He could not face the Rowens.
He had added to their burdens: he had set Katie up. And somehow, because life was like that, the Rowens would be blamed, and things would be immensely worse.
Okay, he had not tried all the blocks around the church. He had to try all those streets. He ran down the hill and then shifted over one block to cover new territory on his way back to the church, yelling, “Katie!” and slipping twice, but running again during the fall, yanking himself out of gravity when he could not yank Katie out of her catastrophe.
His pulse hurt. It was not a throb but a knife stabbing him in the temple.
He mapped the streets in his head and ran down another parallel block. How far to go? When to turn? How much to shout?
The third time he circled, he was badly startled to find a whole bunch of people playing in the yard behind the church. People in bright winter jackets and scarves, lit by a streetlight, had made a snow fort and were tossing snowballs.
He wanted them to have cannons, not snowballs, and then he’d shoot them for being happy and being a family.
What am I going to do? I have to ask for help. I’ll have to go back in the church and get Mr. Knight. I don’t know anybody else!
—and a voice said, “Matt?”
He nearly fell on a patch of ice beneath the snow, and he thought, My whole life is ice beneath snow, and he thought, Jesus, Katie, where are you? and he thought, How ridiculous that I could think for one second that Jesus knows, or cares, where Katie is.
For the family was Liz’s.
That family. Whose father had torn Katie’s bell, torn it again, and thrown it away.
“Matt, what’s the matter?” asked Liz Kitchell.
I hate everybody, thought Matt, that’s the matter.
But he could not waste time on that, not with this wind, not with this cold. “Katie, my foster sister,” he said. He heard his voice, but it wasn’t his: it was raw and cut. “She thought she would have a family on Christmas morning. The thing is, you put your wish on a bell, and they hang it on the restaurant tree. The social worker wouldn’t let her write that she wanted a family, because Christmas is just about small things, and a family is too much to ask for, but I thought—well, I don’t know what I thought. I was wrong. I filled one out for her, it said, ‘Katie, age eight, wants a family,’ and I hung it on the restaurant tree. She believed. She believed she would get a family.”
These people of Liz’s had gathered, had arranged themselves by height or color or maybe just by being a family. Matt had no group. He did not know how it was done.
“Oh, no!” said Liz, shocked. She grabbed his arm. “Oh, Matt, no! There really was a Katie?”
“What Katie?” demanded a woman standing behind Liz. She shoved Liz out of the way; she took both Matt’s shoulders. “What Katie are we talking about?”
Matt had no idea how to line up his thoughts, and produce them for these strangers, and end up finding Katie. “My foster sister. She’s eight. We went to church because she wanted to know what a pageant is, and because I needed—I don’t know—something—so we went—and then I had to tell Katie that she isn’t getting a family. Nobody wanted her bell. Nobody wanted her.”
Liz’s father was not in the snow fight, but up on a wide snow-free porch, silhouetted by the yellow ceiling light. He lived in a house two or three times the size of the Rowens’. The garage was actually a barn. They had more than one car. They probably had more than one of everything. “You tore it up,” Matt said to Liz’s father. “You didn’t think Katie should dare to ask for something important. You tore Katie’s bell twice. Once up and down. Once from left to right.”
For a moment there were just people and snow.
Silence and shock.
Then Matt said, “She ran away. Half an hour ago. She’s out here in the snow someplace. She’s not wearing her coat.”