Zanna took the picture with her when she married Hal and moved to the coast. Why shouldn’t she? It was her picture.
But as their first Christmas together approached, she was shy about bringing out the picture. He had seen her recent artwork, of course—they had met in a figure drawing class, where he sometimes modeled to pay his way through college. She knew that he’d be delighted to see that she had kept a drawing from her childhood.
But he was bound to wonder why it was so cheaply framed and why it had to come out and sit on the top of a bookshelf on Christmas Day, as if it presided over the gift-giving. She would have to explain.
What if he didn’t get it? What if he thought it was something cute, and teased her about it? She fell in love with him partly because he was such a tease—but what if he didn’t understand that this wasn’t something she could bear to be teased about?
Without meaning to, she was setting him up to be tested. That wouldn’t be fair to him, and if he failed the test it would create a barrier between them.
She began to wish she had left the picture home. Mother and Father would have brought the picture out for her, and even though she wouldn’t be there, it was the house, the very room where Ernie had celebrated all his Christmases. It belonged there, not here in this city of strangers.
And from there it was a short step to realizing that she belonged there—at home for Christmas, with her parents. What was she doing here in an apartment, a building, a city where she was the only one who knew that Ernie had even existed?
Hal came into the bedroom and found her crying and at first he quietly kept his distance. Then he sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulder and said, “Miss your folks?”
She nodded.
“I miss mine too,” he said. Then he gently squeezed her shoulder. “You’re my folks now, Zanna.”
She gave one big sob and threw her arms around him. “You’re my folks, too, Hal. Really! I was only missing them because . . .”
When she didn’t finish her sentence, he made a stab at it himself. “Because it’s Christmas and it doesn’t feel right without being home with all the—”
“No, no, it feels absolutely right to be here with you.”
He accepted that for a few silent moments. Then: “But you were crying, and I may be crazy, but they didn’t seem like tears of joy to me.”
“It wasn’t my folks I was missing, really. I mean, not my parents. Or Davy or Bug—Davy and Lucy and their kids are the only ones going to be there with Mom and Dad anyway, Bug’s away, too and . . .” And again, she couldn’t think how to even begin.
“So you were missing somebody else.”
She was stunned. “How did you know?”
“Because you said it wasn’t your folks you were missing. So it had to be somebody else.”
“Oh, of course.” Her laugh was only the tiniest bit hysterical. “I thought maybe Mom or Dad had told you. Or Bug—he’s the big talker, he—”
“Zanna, baby, you never left me alone with any of them long enough to have a private conversation.”
“Didn’t I?”
“I was never quite sure if you were afraid I’d say something wrong, or they would, but both times we visited them before the wedding and all through the whole wedding weekend itself, you were right there making sure somebody didn’t make an idiot of themselves. I just assumed it was me. But now it appears there’s something you haven’t told me. So let’s have it. I know you don’t have a wooden leg and both your eyes are real, so—”
“Please don’t tease me about this,” she said.
“I don’t even know what it is I’m not teasing you about,” said Hal.
She pulled the picture out of the box she kept under the bed and gave it to him.
“Is this a new style you’re working with, or an old one?”
“I was four years old when I made it. It was a Christmas gift. In 1938. It’s a picture of my brother Ernie reading to me.”
He studied the picture. She waited for him to make some comment about how he couldn’t see any such thing. Instead he said, very softly, “I didn’t know you had a brother who died.”
“I was halfway through drawing this when he died, and I was so young and understood so little about death that I went ahead and finished it because I thought I could still give it to him somehow, but when I found out I couldn’t, I kept it, and Davy bought the frame for me, and that Christmas Bug even finished reading me the book that Ernie was reading, so in a way they’re both here in this picture, so it’s all my brothers. And in a way, it’s my sister, too.”
He looked at her with tears in his eyes. “Of course you were afraid to show it to me,” he said. “What if I teased you about it?”
“No, I know you’d never do that!”
“Are you kidding?” said Hal. “If you’d just shown me this picture and said it was something you did as a kid, I’d have teased you up one side and down the other, and then when you told me what it meant I’d have felt like the lousiest husband they ever invented.”
“But you didn’t tease me, Hal.”
He grazed his fingers across the glass. “This isn’t art anymore, Zanna. It’s magic. Your family has saved up all kinds of love in here. But what I can’t figure out is, how could they bear to let you take it away?”
She shook her head. “That’s what I was crying about, really. Because the picture belongs in my parents’ house at Christmas. But it also belongs with me. I couldn’t stand it if I let it go. It would be like telling Ernie I don’t love him anymore. And I do still love him. He was the best person in my life. Till you, of course.”
Hal kissed the top of her head. “I hope someday to earn that. But remember that Ernie had a whole four years, and I’ve only known you for just over one year, so it’ll take me a while to catch up. It helps a lot that you told me this. And now I know why I got you the gift I got you for Christmas.”
He got up and went into the front room. She almost got up to follow him, but before she could decide, he was back, holding the red-wrapped gift he had set there proudly two nights before.
“Open it,” he said.
“But Christmas is day after tomorrow.”
“Has to be right now. Has to be before the post office closes this evening.”
She tore open the wrapping paper and opened the box and there was a complicated looking camera. “I don’t know how to use these things.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I do. The camera isn’t so much for you to use it yourself, though I hope you learn how, because it isn’t hard. It’s because so many times you’ve said how you wish you could paint something but you just don’t have the time even to sketch it. Well, this is a Polaroid Land camera. It doesn’t just take the picture, it develops it, too. In about a minute, there it is.”
“That must have been expensive.”
“Very,” said Hal. “I’m sorry, but I had to pawn our firstborn child. It was a fellow named Rumpelstiltskin, I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“But this is wonderful. Of course it means you have to go with me when I look for scenes to paint.”
“Whenever you ask, if I can get away from work, you know I’ll be there. But that’s not why I had you open it early.”
In a few minutes, they had Zanna’s picture of her and Ernie propped up atop a bookshelf, and Hal took three photographs of it. He had obviously studied the instructions in advance, because he knew every step of what seemed to Zanna to be a pretty complicated procedure. All three pictures turned out—a good sepia-toned rendition of the picture, frame and all.
Then they put the photographs into envelopes and sent them by Airmail Special Delivery to Bug in Kansas City and to her parents and Davy back home.
“They might not make it to everybody before Christmas,” said Hal. “But they’ll know we tried. And next year they’ll have them for sure.”
At the post office, as she watched Hal slide the two envelopes through the slot, she felt herself almost overwhelmed by relief and love and happiness. “I think I married the most wonderful man who ever lived,” said Zanna.
“You just keep thinking that,” he said as he hugged her. “Do you know who I married?”
“Just me, I hope,” she said.
“I married the kind of girl who can love somebody forever.” He kissed her. “I’m that same kind of man.”