Part 28 (1/2)

It was nice all the next week. Allison called to tell me Dakota was back home. ”The doctors don't know what it was, some kind of bug or something, but whatever it was, it's completely gone. She's back taking ice skating and tap-dancing lessons, and next week I'm signing both girls up for Junior Band.”

”You did the right thing,” Gary said grudgingly. ”Marcie told me her knee was really hurting. When she was still talking to me, that is.”

”The reconciliation's off, huh?”

”Yeah,” he said, ”but I haven't given up. The way she acted proves to me that her love for me is still there, if I can only reach it.”

All it proved to me was that it took an invasion from outer s.p.a.ce to make her seem even marginally human, but I didn't say so.

”I've talked her into going into marriage counseling with me,” he said. ”You were right not to trust me either. That's the mistake they always make in those body-s.n.a.t.c.her movies, trusting people.”

Well, yes and no. If I'd trusted Jim Bridgeman, I wouldn't have had to do all those thermostats alone.

”You were the one who turned the heat up at the pizza place where Sueann and her fiance were having dinner,” I said after he told me he'd figured out what the aliens' weakness was after seeing me turn up the thermostat on fifth. ”You were the one who'd checked out Attack of the Soul Killers.”

”I tried to talk to you,” he said. ”I don't blame you for not trusting me. I should have taken my hat off, but I didn't want you to see my bald spot.”

”You can't go by appearances,” I said.

By December fifteenth, hat sales were down, the mall was jammed with ill-tempered shoppers, at City Hall an animal-rights group was protesting Santa Claus's wearing fur, and Gary's wife had skipped their first marriage-counseling session and then blamed it on him. It's now four days till Christmas, and things are completely back to normal. n.o.body at work's wearing a hat except Jim, Sol-veig's naming her baby Durango, Hunziger's suing management for firing him, antidepressant sales are up, and my mother called just now to tell me Sueann has a new boyfriend who's a terrorist, and to ask me if I'd sent out my Christmas newsletters yet.

And had I met anyone lately at work.

”Yes,” I said. ”I'm bringing him to Christmas dinner.”

Yesterday Betty Holland filed a s.e.xual hara.s.sment suit against Nathan Steinberg for kissing her under themistletoe, and I was nearly run over on my way home from work. But the world has been made safe from cankers, leaf wilt, and galls.

And it makes an interesting Christmas Newsletter.

Whether it's true or not.

Wis.h.i.+ng you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Nan Johnson.

EPIPHANY.

by Connie Willis.

”But pray ye that your flight he not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day.”

- MATTHEW 24:20.

A little after three, it began to snow. It had looked like it was going to all the way through Pennsylvania, and had even spit a few flakes just before Youngstown, Ohio, but now it was snowing in earnest, thick flakes that were already covering the stiff dead gra.s.s on the median and getting thicker as he drove west.

And this is what you get for setting out in the middle of January, he thought, without checking the Weather Channel first. He hadn't checked anything. He had taken off his robe, packed a bag, gotten into his car, and taken off. Like a man fleeing a crime.

The congregation will think I've absconded with the money in the collection plate, he thought. Or worse.

Hadn't there been a minister in the paper last month who'd run off to the Bahamas with the building fund and a blonde? They'll say, ”I thought he acted strange in church this morning.”

But they wouldn't know yet that he was gone. The Sunday night Mariners' Meeting had been cancelled, the elders' meeting wasn't till next week, and the interchurch ec.u.menical meeting wasn't till Thursday.

He was supposed to play chess with B.T. on Wednesday, but he could call him and move it. He would have to call when B.T. was at work and leave him a message on his voice mail. He couldn't risk talking to him-they had been friends too many years. B.T. would instantly know something was up. And he would be the last person to understand.

I'll call his voice mail and move our chess game to Thursday night after the ec.u.menical meeting, Mel thought. That will give me till Thursday.

He was kidding himself. The church secretary, Mrs. Bilder-beck, would miss him Monday morning when he didn't show up in the church office.

I'll call her and tell her I've got the flu, he thought. No, she would insist on bringing him over chicken soup and zinc lozenges. I'll tell her I've been called out of town for a few days on personal business.

She will immediately think the worst, he thought. She'll think I have cancer, or that I'm looking at another church. And anything they conclude, he thought, even embezzlement, would be easier for them to accept than the truth.

The snow was starting to stick on the highway, and the winds.h.i.+eld was beginning to fog up. Mel turned on the defroster. A truck pa.s.sed him, throwing up snow. It was full of gold-and-white Ferris wheel baskets. He had been seeing trucks like it all afternoon, carrying black Octopus cars and concession stands and lengths of roller-coaster track. He wondered what a carnival was doing in Ohio in the middle of January. And in this weather.

Maybe they were lost. Or maybe they suddenly had a vision telling them to head west, he thought grimly.

Maybe they suddenly had a nervous breakdown in the middle of church. In the middle of their sermon.

He had scared the choir half to death. They had been sitting there, midway through the sermon, and thinking they had plenty of time before they had to find the recessional hymn, when he'd stopped cold, his hand still raised, in the middle of a sentence.

There had been silence for a full minute before the organist thought to play the intro, and then a franticscramble for their bulletins and their hymnals, a frantic flipping of pages. They had straggled unevenly to their feet all the way through the first verse, singing and looking at him like he was crazy.

And were they right? Had he really had a vision or was it some kind of midlife crisis? Or psychotic episode?

He was a Presbyterian, not a Pentecostal. He did not have visions. The only time he had experienced anything remotely like this was when he was nineteen, and that hadn't been a vision. It had been a call to the ministry, and it had only sent him to seminary, not baring off to who knows where.

And this wasn't a vision either. He hadn't seen a burning bush or an angel. He hadn't seen anything. He had simply had an overwhelming conviction that what he was saying was true.

He wished he still had it, that he wasn't beginning to doubt it now that he was three hundred miles from home and in the middle of a snowstorm, that he wasn't beginning to think it had been some kind of self-induced hysteria, born out of his own wishful thinking and the fact that it was January.

He hated January. The church always looked cheerless and abandoned, with all the Christmas decorations taken down, the sanctuary dim and chilly in the gray winter light, Epiphany over and nothing to look forward to but Lent and taxes. And Good Friday. Attendance and the collection down, half the congregation out with the flu and the other half away on a winter cruise, those who were there looking abandoned, too, and like they wished they had somewhere to go.

That was why he had decided against his sermon on Christian duty and pulled an old one out of the files, a sermon on Jesus' promise that He would return. To get that abandoned look off their faces.

”This is the hardest time,” he had said, ”when Christmas is over, and the bills have all come due, and it seems like winter is never going to end and summer is never going to come. But Christ tells us that we 'know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the c.o.c.kcrowing, or in the morning,'

and when he comes, we must be ready for him. He may come tomorrow or next year or a thousand years from now. He may already be here, right now. At this moment. . .”

And as he said it, he had had an overwhelming feeling that it was true, that He had already come, and he must go find Him.

But now he wondered if it was just the desire to be somewhere else, too, somewhere besides the cold, poinsettialess sanctuary.

If so, you came the wrong way, he thought. It was freezing, and the winds.h.i.+eld was starting to fog up. Mel kicked the defrost all the way up to high and swiped at the winds.h.i.+eld with his gloved hand.

The snow was coming down much harder, and the wind was picking up. Mel twitched on the radio to hear a weather report.

”. . . and in the last days, the Book of Revelation tells us,” a voice said, ” 'there will be hail and fire mingled with blood.' ”