Диана Дуэйн - How Lovely Are Thy Branches

The tremor in his trunk was unmistakable—all the tinsel rippled with it—as he stood there simply radiating joy. Nita stood there appreciating the view, the radiance and glitter and gleam of him, and the sight of those red, glowing eyes peering out from among the lights and the garlands. A spontaneous round of applause went up around the room.

Now, though, it was Nita’s turn to get nervous.

In her family, as Christmas approached everybody came up with a special ornament for the tree: either something they made, or something that they couldn’t make but that they saw and liked, or that had a specific meaning. Some of the ornaments on the tree at home were hilariously clumsy — kindergarten construction-paper cutouts plastered with glitter, or painted and varnished papier-mache shapes, or similar art-class stuff. Some were bought things, replicas of older glass ornaments, or keepsake ornaments in engraved metal or plastic. Some were toys, or expressions of temporary (or longstanding) media crushes—such as all of Dairine’s Star Wars collectible ornaments, including the no-longer-light-up Darth Vader TIE fighter with the busted left wing panel that had to be reglued every year because no adhesive seemed to exist that would hold the thing together, and using wizardry on it somehow seemed like cheating.

This year Nita had bought two ornaments, because she knew that the Party was coming and she wanted to leave something on Kit’s family’s tree. “To remember me by,” she’d said, not meaning anything in particular by it. And Kit had given her this completely shocked look. “What, are you going somewhere?” he’d said. Nita had been taken completely by surprise by the slightly panicked sound of it. “What? No! No, I just want to… I’m covering all my options, okay?” And he had wisely not pressed her to find out what she meant by that, because to tell the truth Nita wasn’t too sure herself.

In any case, there was an ornament ready to go on the home tree in a few days (her Dad steadfastly refused to get a tree any sooner than the 22nd: it was just the way things had always gone at their house). That one was a red and blue blown-glass hummingbird that Nita had simply liked the moment she saw it. But for Kit’s tree she’d gone privately back to the Crossings and had a word with Sker’ret about who in the shopping zone was good with custom glasswork, and had provided the craftsbeing (a many-legged Takapesh, one of an insectile species possessed of exquisitely detailed and accurate 3D perception) with images lifted from her manual. It had taken another visit or two to make sure everything was perfect, but by the end of November Nita had been completely satisfied.

“Now then,” she said. She reached into the empty air beside her, into her claudication, and pulled out the little white glazed-cardboard box she’d been peeking into at intervals for the last two weeks, and handed it to Kit.

“Early present?” Kit said.

“Early present for the tree. Go on!”

He carefully lifted the top off the box and peered inside, poked what he saw there. “Paper! Oh wow, thanks, we needed paper!”

Nita poked him, not too hard: having him fumble the box was the last thing she wanted. “I’ll give you paper somewhere else,” she said. “Don’t get cute.”

He threw her a sideways smile and carefully reached in to pull the paper out. Nita held her breath.

Suddenly Kit was holding his too. “Ohh…” he said, finally, letting it out, and reached down a little further into the box to slip a finger through the delicately braided bronze wire by which it would hang.

Carefully he pulled the ornament out. It could at first glance had been mistaken for a scorpion, if scorpions came in a deep metallic forest green. It had segmented legs, a thick body, big frontal claws, huge square heavy-mandibled jaws, and a lot of eyes. But the eyes had a goofy look in them that no scorpion could ever have managed, and the jaws were grinning, somehow.

“It’s a sathak,” Kit whispered, “from Mars, it’s absolutely Takaf, Khretef’s guy, his dog, and Ponch was in him, and—!” He swallowed. “Neets, where’d you get this?”

“Had it made,” Nita said. “Do you like it?”

“Oh wow,” Kit said, and all of a sudden he had one arm around Nita’s neck and his face sort of buried between her neck and shoulder. “Wow,” he said into her shoulder, and then laughed and straightened up again.

His Mama was looking at him a little curiously from the passthrough-window into the kitchen. “You okay, son?”

“Mama, look at this! This is so great!”

He broke away from Nita and went off to show his Mama the ornament. Nita had broken out in a brief sweat of nervousness, but she was cooling down a bit now, and turned away toward Filif, who was standing there watching all this.

“That was a good gift, then,” he said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Yeah. Don’t drop it when he hangs it up, okay?”

“Outlier forbid!” Filif said. “I’ll take good care of it for you, never fear.”

A few minutes later Kit was back in the living room looking for the perfect place to hang it. “Fil, can you move that branch up? Yeah, a little more… No. Wait. Never mind, this one works better.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah, it’ll catch the light there. Don’t want the light right on it, it looks green enough as it is… Yeah, here. This white light looks good by it. Picks up the eyes.”

“Should I move this frond?”

“No, you’re okay. Then again… I don’t know… You’re not going to get a cramp holding that branch up out of the way?’

“No, not at all.”

Finally the sathak ornament was placed the way Kit liked it, and he stood back to admire it. Nita came up next to him and let out a breath, finally having relaxed enough to enjoy it too.

“That is so super. Thanks,” Kit said. His voice actually sounded a little wavery.

Nita just nodded.

Nita’s dad turned away from where he’d been standing near Tom and Carl. “And one more thing—” he said, more or less in Juan’s direction.

A few people turned to look at him, alerted by something in his tone.

“Well, it’s kind of an event, isn’t it?” Nita’s dad said. “So I thought I might as well bring this over to visit.”

He reached down into a small box that had been sitting unremarked on a nearby table, and started carefully unwrapping something from the tissue paper in which it nestled.

Nita’s breath caught. What her dad brought out a moment later was one of the last things her Mom had bought before she got too sick to go out any more: a beautifully photorealistically-painted Christmas ornament that looked like the Earth—but not like a globe with grid lines and single-color countries painted on its continents. It was the Earth the way one saw it as a planet, blue, shining, swirling with weather. Her Mom had seen it that way when she and Kit had first taken her and her Dad to the Moon. The experience had apparently struck some profoundly deep chord for her; she had been muttering about it when she came out of surgery the first time (to the confusion of the critical care nurses, who’d thought she was hallucinating) and the mere passing mention of it, afterwards, had always made her eyes go soft.

Nita’s dad went over and found a spot for it amongst Filif’s decorations: not tucked in too deeply to be seen, but safely positioned toward his trunk. Then he stepped back. “Looks good,” Nita’s dad said, and then stopped, as if his voice had briefly failed him.

Kit’s pop turned to the tray sitting off to one side, handed Nita’s dad one of the glasses sitting there. “Absent friends,” he said softly.

Nita’s dad just nodded and clinked his glass to Kit’s pop’s. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both drank.