"I cried on my kitchen floor for forty-five minutes," I said. "And then I ate an entire loaf of my landlady's banana bread. And then I couldn't sleep, so I tuned my own piano, which didn't need it."
"That's a pretty normal night," he said. "I had a guy come in at three this morning who'd tried to clear his chimney with a leaf blower."
"How is he?"
"Sooty. He'll live." He stood up, and his knees cracked, and he winced. "Okay. Where do we start?"
The North Pole Village was dark when we got to it. The throne had a velvet rope across it and a sign on an easel that said SANTA IS FEEDING HIS REINDEER AND WILL RETURN AT 11:00, and there was nobody around but a man running a floor polisher in slow loops past the Cinnabon. I stood at the rope and looked at the snowdrifts, which in daylight, or at least in the flat fluorescent light of a mall at ten in the morning, were clearly made of quilt batting stapled over hay bales, and I thought about how many other small things had fallen into them over the years, mittens and pacifiers and earrings and teeth.
"We can't go in," I said. "That's Bryn's whole thing. The rope."
"Bryn doesn't start till eleven either," Oren said, and he stepped over the rope.
I stood there with my mocha. He looked back at me.
"You lied to an elf yesterday," I said. "And now you're trespassing at the North Pole. You're a very bad influence."
"I'm a respiratory therapist," he said. "We're the rebels of the hospital. Come on."
We searched for forty-five minutes. We searched on our hands and knees. We went through the left snowdrift, where I had been standing, a handful of batting at a time, and we found a green plastic soldier, a hair elastic, eleven cents, a wallet-sized photo of a baby in a pumpkin costume that had clearly been there since October of some previous year, and a great deal of glitter that would be on my knees until March. We went through the right snowdrift, in case it had bounced. We looked under the throne, which was bolted to a plywood platform painted to look like ice, and Oren lay flat on his stomach and shone his phone flashlight into the gap under the platform and said, "Oh, God," in a voice of real horror, and I said, "What? Is it there?" and he said, "No, there's a half a corn dog under here. I think it's from the Clinton administration."
We did not find the knight.
At five to eleven, Bryn, Head Elf, came around the corner from the employee corridor with her headset around her neck and a Monster energy drink in one hand, and stopped dead and looked at us, Oren on his back half-under the throne, me sitting in the left snowdrift surrounded by little piles of batting.