A Christmas Sonata Read Free Page B

beautiful.
    “Merry Christmas,” Ben said, even though it wouldn’t be Christmas for two more fingers on one hand, which is how Mother had me count the days until Christmas.
    “I’ve never seen a tree like this,” I said.
    “It’s a special Christmas,” Ben said, but his voice was breaking. When I looked at him I could see a tear, just one, come out of the corner of his left eye and run down along his nose into his beard. I couldn’t see how anything as pretty as the tree could make him cry, and I was going to say that to him, but Marilyn and Mother came out of the back room.
    “Come and see Matthew,” Marilyn said. “He’s awake and wants to see you.”
    They took me to Matthew’s room, which was all made up like the hospital room I stayed in when I was sick and Mother thought I was going to die in a tent you could see through, except that Matthew didn’t have a clear tent over his bed.
    The room was all flowers and pictures of dogs and cats and pretty places on the walls, with the bed against one wall surrounded by tables and tubes and bottles and hoses.
    Matthew was on the bed.
    I had only seen Matthew once before, in the summer when I came up, and he didn’t look different now except for his color. He was more yellow, almost as yellow as some of the lights on the tree, and so puffy-looking that it seemed if you poked him it wouldn’t come back out. His eyes looked more red, and as soon as Motherand Marilyn left he waved me closer to the bed.
    “I’m dying.”
    “I know,” I said, because I did. “Except that I haven’t been able to figure it out yet.”
    “Oh, hell, I thought it was my secret.” He smiled and I saw that even his teeth seemed yellow.
    “I heard Mother say it to Marilyn.” I had forgotten about Matthew’s swearing. He was two years older than me and had learned lots of swear words and used them all the time and was really good with them. Or bad, if you were thinking of Santa Claus. “I wasn’t supposed to, but I did.”
    “Did they say when?”
    I tried to remember and then shook my head. “No. I don’t think so.”
    “Not too long after Christmas,” he said, raising up. “Maybe in January or the next month, I can’t remember the name ofit.” He was proud that he knew something I didn’t, but it didn’t make any difference, because I didn’t know about months yet and was still trying to figure out how he would get to Europe so he could die and not get home.
    “Now you have to tell me something,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I told you something you didn’t know—now you have to tell me something.”
    “We rode on the train all day yesterday to get here and I ate liver and onions that didn’t taste like liver and onions—”
    He shook his head. “Not like that. Not just stuff. It has to be something important—something only you know.”
    And of course I thought of Mr. Henderson.
    “There isn’t any Santa Claus,” I said. “I saw Mr. Henderson in a Santa suit, onlywithout a beard, and he was drinking red wine with his wife.”
    Matthew waited.
    “So. That’s it. I saw him, so there can’t be a Santa Claus.”
    Matthew shook his head. “Is that all? I knew that last year and maybe even the year before—I can’t be sure because the medicine they give me makes me remember things funny. But I knew it. It’s just something they make up.”
    So I didn’t have any secrets to tell Matthew like he had to tell me, especially not one where I was dying like him. But it didn’t matter so much because we started to play then and we forgot secrets.
    Matthew had me scout for him.
    He couldn’t leave the bed unless somebody was carrying him a certain way, so he would send me out in the store to see things and come back to report to him.
    “Like soldiers,” he said. “You report to me like a soldier.”
    I felt bad because I didn’t have a uniform or gun or helmet like I’d seen the soldiers wearing in the newsreel when Mother took me to a Roy