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The snow came on Christmas Eve the way the radio had promised, beginning in the late afternoon in big slow flakes that you could follow all the way down, and thickening by suppertime into a soft steady curtain that took the far side of Wolf Street away and then the near side and then the porch rail. We went to the seven o'clock candlelight service at First Methodist anyway, the four of us in the Country Squire with the wipers going and my father driving twenty miles an hour and hunched over the wheel, and Sam singing "Jingle Bells, Batman smells" in the back until my mother turned around and gave him a look.
At the end of the service they turned off the lights in the sanctuary, and everybody lit their little white candles from the person beside them, passing the flame down the pews, and sang "Silent Night." My mother lit hers from my father's and then turned and lit mine. Her hand was shaking so badly I had to hold her wrist to keep the wicks together. The organ played very softly under all the voices. When we got to round yon virgin she stopped singing and just stood there holding her candle, and my father put his arm around her, and Sam, who was on her other side, looked up at her and then at me, worried, and I shook my head at him. It's okay. It's okay.
At home there was cocoa with the little dried marshmallows from the packet, and Sam was allowed to open one present, which was a Transformers tape dispenser from Aunt Ruth in Buffalo, and he went to bed at nine-thirty under protest, certain he would never sleep. He was asleep by nine-forty. My father and mother stayed up wrapping things in the dining room with the door shut, and I heard the scrape of the Scotch tape dispenser and their low voices and, once, my father laughing and saying, "Carol, it's a bike, you can't wrap a bike, just put a bow on it."
I went to bed at ten-thirty. I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark with the red numbers on my clock radio and listened to the snow, which was a sound, even though people tell you it isn't. A hush. A kind of breathing.
At 11:20 my parents came upstairs. I heard them in the bathroom, the water running, the toilet, my father's electric toothbrush, which he'd gotten last Christmas and was very proud of. I heard their door. I heard my father's voice, low, and my mother's, low. And then, at 11:41, I heard my mother come out into the hall and go down the stairs, slowly, and the third step from the bottom creaked.
I got up and went to the landing.
The living room was not dark. The snow outside threw the streetlight back up into the sky, and the sky threw it down again, so that everything was a pale, dim, glowing blue-gray, like being inside a seashell. The Christmas tree was unlit in the corner, a dark shape hung with dark ornaments. And my mother was sitting at the piano.
She'd folded down the music desk. On it, propped open, were the four soft pages of Carrie's Song. She was sitting very straight on the bench, in the middle, where a pianist sits, with her robe pulled tight and her feet in their slippers set flat on the floor beside the pedals, and her hands were in her lap.
I sat down on the landing step and held my knees.
Oliver came down the stairs past me at 11:49. He didn't look at me. He went across the living room with his tail up and its little question-mark hook, and he stopped beside the bench and looked up at my mother. She looked down at him. Something passed between them; I don't know what. Then he jumped, light as anything, up onto the far end of the keyboard, the high end, and settled himself the way he always did, careful, his weight spread so nothing sounded, his tail curled around his white feet. He looked at the wall above the piano, at the little brown baskets.