On a dark day near the end of the year, Eppie diverged from her normal after-school routine. Leaving the school building after her last class had ended, she did not walk directly home, nor did she go to the mission. Instead she headed in the opposite direction, walking alone toward the center of town. The afternoon sky was overcast with low clouds, gray and threatening, but the air was dry and still. Eppie's feet moved unconsciously beneath her, as if they acted of their own free will, carrying her along the mostly empty sidewalks and across several wide intersections heavy with late day traffic. Her route took her a good distance out of her way, but she took no notice of how far she walked. She proceeded steadily but with an unresolved trace of reluctance, as one does when called forward by an obligation that one dreads to fulfill. She studied the tops of her sneakers more than anything else as she went.
Eventually she reached the center of town. She walked along one side of the park where the great banyan tree stood. She saw its large canopy rising high and majestically above the smaller surrounding trees, but she did not pause to admire it. Through its thick foliage, ever resilient to the changing of the seasons, the tree may have seemed to whisper unintelligible prophecies to careful listeners, but none were now present to hear them. The chill of winter had settled into the air and the park was nearly deserted. A pair of small birds of similar plumage glided over Eppie's head and alighted on neighboring branches of the banyan tree near the place where she passed. One of the birds called out a short, cheerful twitter to its mate, and a few seconds later the other responded in kind. The two birds then flew off together, bearing slightly to the left as they went, tracing the outer edge of the tree's crown and disappearing around the curve of the canopy at the end of the block. A man walking his dog passed near her on one of the park's walking paths. The dog spotted her and leaned hard against his leash, his tail wagging ardently and his tongue hanging out in greeting. The dog's impatient owner admonished the animal sternly as he pulled up on the leash, forcing the dog back onto the path.
Eppie took little notice of these happenings. She moved quietly onward, her head bowed toward the sidewalk before her. At the end of the block she paused momentarily, waiting for the traffic light to change, then she crossed the last intersection and walked toward the front of the medical clinic. Small groups of demonstrators loitered in their usual places at both ends of the block, but neither group seemed to be much in motion. It was near the end of their day too, and both groups were sufficiently tired that they allowed the quiet, inconspicuous girl to walk into the clinic unharassed. She did not look in their direction as she entered.
Eppie walked up to the receptionist's desk and asked to see Doctor Wheelan. No, she did not have an appointment, she told the receptionist politely, but she was a former patient and she only needed to speak to the doctor briefly. She could wait as long as was necessary, she said. She was in no hurry. The receptionist told her to have a seat; she would see if the doctor could spare a few minutes for her.
A short time later, Doctor Wheelan came into the waiting area. She sat with Eppie in a corner of the room so as to afford her patient a bit of privacy, and the girl explained in heartfelt words the reason for her visit. The two spoke in hushed tones for several minutes, then they rose in unison. The doctor put an arm around her young patient and led her toward the hallway. "I'll just be a minute," she said to the receptionist as they passed the desk.
They went first to a small room immediately behind the reception area, the walls of which were covered from floor to ceiling with row upon row of neatly arranged files. Wheelan pulled an accordion-shaped folder from one of the shelves and retrieved from it a videotape cassette. She then escorted Eppie down the hall a short distance and into an examination room.
In one corner of the room sat a video monitor atop a wheeled cart, and on the shelf below was a machine which resembled a VCR. Eppie sat on the examination table while the doctor turned on both machines and inserted the cassette into its slot.
"You're welcome to take this tape with you if you like, Eppie," Wheelan said as she handed the girl a remote control device. "Your examination is the only recording on it, and we have another copy for our records. If you'd rather leave it here, you can drop it off at the front desk on your way out."
Eppie nodded her understanding.
"And if you have any questions, I'll be in my office upstairs. Just ask the receptionist to call me. I'm only finishing up some paperwork."
Eppie nodded her head again, sadly, and thanked the doctor for her indulgence.
"You've suffered a great loss, Eppie," Wheelan said. "Anything I can do to help you bear up under it is part of my job. Take as much time as you need." She turned and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Eppie sat on the examination table and turned the remote control over slowly in her hand, looking down gravely at the device as she did. For a final time she thought about what she was about to do. She wanted to give herself one last chance to change her mind, to allow herself one final opportunity to conclude that nothing positive could come from this and that she would only be causing herself more anguish, or to decide once and for all that what she was doing was proper and that she was doing it for the right reasons. She forced herself, as a means of insurance against future regrets, to consider her options. She would have a long time to wrestle with the consequences of this action, she reminded herself. The rest of her life to think about what she would see and to contemplate what it might mean to her. There was no rush, really. The tape would always be there. It would not decay or suffer any loss of content with time, forever available in its unfading constancy at whatever future moment she might feel herself truly prepared to experience it. The tape was not forcing itself upon her, resting unobtrusively as it did in its hiding place on a back shelf in a building that she no longer had reason to visit. But she would always know that it was there, that it would never go away, and that it held a certain truth that would remain supremely difficult to ignore. Above all else, it was that unchanging, ever forbearing truth that challenged her. And whether the longevity of that recorded image was simply a measure of the patience that the world was willing to afford her, or whether its undiminishing presence was more a looming specter given to haunt her for the rest of her days, that was the question that most troubled her now. She might, she thought, prove herself every bit as patient and resolute in the living of her life as the thing which she chose to avoid, carrying on comfortably in the knowledge that it was there but that its existence did not bother her because she knew that that image was not the thing itself but only a synthetic and hollow impression. Or, she feared, she might be broken by the burden of that very same knowledge, turned bitter and angry by the taint of that unexperienced affinity to wondrous things which rode incessantly upon her encumbered spirit.
She had, she knew, this one other option—this one way of resolving the dilemma which roiled inside of her. One way to act which did not require binding down that greater part of her being which longed to reach out and embrace all things, real or imagined, which touched her heart. One way which defied and defeated all prior pain and which opened her life bravely to all future possibilities, good and bad, which might come her way as a result. It was in this seeking out, this grasping gesture toward the unknown and the unknowable, that she could be most true to that unfathomable element inside of her which wanted most desperately to know it—to know what sublime and confusing and comforting and frightening thing it was.
She turned the remote control over in her hand again, wishing once more that the need that she felt within her would just fade away, that the connection that she now sought, incomplete and unsatisfying as she knew it would be, had not grown to feel so necessary. But the void that loomed within her was, she ultimately allowed, too great, and she knew that she must try to fill it with whatever soft marrow of affection remained available to her, or be slowly consumed by it.
She ran her thumb lightly over the play button on the device, then she took it away. She looked up at the blank screen of the video monitor before her, and she saw her own reflection staring back at her from its dark glass. She thought she looked in this gray-painted depiction every bit as sad as she felt, her shoulders hunched forward with the weight of her sorrow, her empty face expressing the disillusionment she felt in her soul. It was a ghostly and achingly accurate rendering of the whole of her being, and she could not bear to look at it for very long, for it provided her with only cold, if sympathetic, company. She lifted the remote control from her lap and pointed it toward the machine. With deliberate resolve she pressed her thumb down on the play button.
From somewhere behind her transparent alter image the glass screen flickered to life, and a shadowy, pulsing black-and-white video presented itself. At first the moving areas of light and dark emitting from the box were an indecipherable chaos, a meaningless fluid of motion with no evident subject or point of focus. From the top of the screen, a single, concentrated source of light seemed to cast itself downward to illuminate a wedge-shaped space below, and that space grew progressively darker as it faded down into what seemed a bottomless chasm. The observable space was filled with only a dense clustering of unremarkable forms, and there appeared to be nothing of import among them. It all seemed a jumble to Eppie's untrained eye, but she watched the screen closely as the shadows rolled past. She did not squint or strain her vision to deduce definition from the kinetic display. If there was something understandable to be observed among the movements, she thought, it would reveal itself on its own.
And indeed, as she continued to watch, her vision gradually became attuned to certain shapes as they moved, and fixable patterns began to emerge from the background. They moved in and out of focus, the shadows at the edge of the screen repeatedly leaping inward toward the center, smothering portions of the image that had just come into view, then just as quickly retreating away. The picture constantly rolled and twisted, searching for something.
And suddenly it was there, right before her eyes. There. She could see it. Right there, as if it had come out of nowhere. A small human form, displayed in profile, lying face up toward the light. Yes. Yes, she said, that's what it was. The shape was faint and watery, viewed from what seemed a fair distance, but it was there. A fuzzy figure. A wispy thing that on the one hand appeared to be little more than a passing, random notion, yet on the other hand was instantaneously the most important thing she had ever seen in her life. The video immediately ceased its haphazard movements and stayed focused on the form.
Eppie felt her heart begin to beat faster as she continued to watch the video. She wrapped her arms tightly across her body and held herself as she leaned forward and studied the image that her mind had now trained itself to behold. For a moment she was confused. The parts appeared to her to be improperly out of symmetry. The head seemed abnormally large, the most prominent feature of the whole, while the body seemed small and underdeveloped by comparison. The bulbously-shaped cranium sloped down gracefully to an undersized nose, and the mouth and jaw line seemed almost nonexistent in contrast. A dark, round smudge filled the socket where the eye would be. The arms were thin and fragile-looking, the legs mere fleshy appendages that had only just begun to develop into the weight-bearing limbs that they were trying to become. A twisted, worm-like thing—the umbilical cord, she assumed—floated off into space above the body. The entire figure was curled distinctly in upon itself, the fetal expression of a deep, embryonic slumber—of one not fully alive, and yet not unalive, but in some mysterious, formative phase somewhere in between. In all, the impression that Eppie took from the image was one of incompleteness, of possibility—a depiction of an immature being that had not yet become itself, that was still in the process of assuming the final form that it was intended to take, but a being in existence nonetheless. A part of her, a hope, now gone, whose presence, somewhere, remained undeniable.
Eppie stared in deep concentration at the screen for the duration of the video, then she rewound the tape and watched it again. She was captivated by the images she saw, but she did not feel that she was comprehending them entirely. She was not interested so much in the clinical details that a physician like Doctor Wheelan might see in the sonogram. She cared little for finding flaws, for she already knew what destiny held in store for this tiny being. Instead, she was searching for something greater—some tangible vision of her child onto which she could project her deepest feelings, some representation that would carry her onward whenever she might need it, but she was unsure if she was succeeding. There was a gulf between the dark, distant shapes she saw on the screen and the warm, close, maternal sensations that still spoke to her from her memory. It did not seem possible that the two phenomena could derive from the same source, that her mind should directly link the two whenever her thoughts might come to dwell on either of them, and yet she knew that they were in fact two alternate affirmations of the same thing. She knew that these imperfect visual images must now take up a place of equivalence in her conscience alongside the emotional memories of her child that she would carry with her forever. And as the recording played back for her the very same images that she had just seen, unchanged in any detail, every article of her faith frozen in time, she came in that moment to accept the inscrutable limitations that fate had placed on her life. She would never see or hold her baby in this lifetime, she knew—would never come to know the person that it would have been. Electronic images and unfulfilled longings would serve as poor surrogates. But perhaps, she thought, over time, and in the absence of anything closer to her dearest desire, she might learn to cherish them somehow, and to rely on them whenever her life might otherwise seem empty.
When the tape ended for the second time, Eppie lowered herself from the table, ejected the cassette from the machine and placed it back in its cardboard sleeve. On her way out of the building she paused in front of the receptionist's desk.
"May I help you?" the receptionist asked.
Eppie hesitated momentarily, then simply shook her head. She slipped the cassette into an inside pocket of her jacket and left the building without a word.
* * *
On her way home from the clinic, Eppie happened to pass by the city courthouse, which was one of the oldest buildings in town, having been built in its earliest days. The wide, white structure sat royally atop a small hill at the top of Main Street, a prominent parcel of land with a commanding view of the most vibrant part of the downtown area. A broad lawn separated the building from the sidewalk which passed before it. Slightly narrower walkways ran from the sidewalk to the building, cutting directly between the stately oaks and maples which dotted the lawn. Each evening at dusk the front of the building was softly illuminated by an array of floodlights hidden among the hedgerows at its foundation, and from the sidewalk the building cast an attractive glow at night.
In years past the courthouse lawn was decorated during the holiday season with a large and elaborate Nativity scene, which was easily seen from the street and which remained on display until the arrival of the new year. This year, however, as Eppie paused for some indeterminate reason to admire the courthouse in its nightly splendor, she noticed that the Nativity display was not present. Perplexed, she thought that perhaps it had been placed on the far side of the building, but when she made her way along the walking paths she saw that the display was not to be found on any part of the property.
The absence of the traditional display at Christmastime struck her in a depressing way and only served to deepen the sense of sadness that she carried within her. So much had changed so quickly for her, so many bases of stability pulled out from under her, she began to feel that nothing in her life was permanent, nothing guaranteed, nothing existed on which she dare depend.
As she turned despondently away from the courthouse, a noise from behind the building caught her attention. Drawn inexplicably to investigate the source of the sound, she walked around to the back of the building. Peeking around the corner, she spotted an older man dressed in denim coveralls as he emerged from a large concrete storage shed. She watched discreetly as the man lifted what appeared to be a wooden box from the ground and carried it into the shed. Moments later the man reemerged from the shed, letting the door creek slowly closed behind him as he crossed the narrow yard and disappeared into the main building.
Acting on impulse, Eppie stepped away from the side of the courthouse and quietly approached the smaller building. Just outside the door, she paused momentarily and listened for any sound of movement from inside. Hearing nothing, she went up to the door and grabbed the handle. Carefully she pulled the door open and peered inside.
A weak, uncovered lightbulb hung crookedly down from a cord in the ceiling in the center of the room. The fact that the light was still on told her that the man in the denim overalls was likely to return shortly, but she stepped inside the doorway nevertheless. She looked briefly around the room. It was dusty and cluttered, and it gave off a dank odor that reminded her of an old, leaky basement. A set of shelves along one wall was filled with an assortment of old cardboard boxes of various sizes and shapes. On the other side of the room, a heavy wooden workbench was piled high with cut pieces of two-by-four of various lengths and other assorted scraps of wood. A large metal vise was bolted onto one end of the bench, a short piece of thick steel pipe clenched firmly in its jaws. A collection of hammers, screwdrivers and wrenches hung from several rows of nails that were driven halfway into a plywood facing on the wall above the bench. A riding lawn mower was parked next to the bench, along with a pair of grass rakes and an electric hedge trimmer.
Eppie only glanced at all of these objects as she surveyed the room. They were the kind of things that one might find in any handyman's garage, and at that moment they did not interest her in the least. She moved further into the room, toward the back of the building, looking for something else.
Then she saw them. In the far corner, packed tightly together on the floor beneath a clear plastic covering, were the objects that she sought. Tentatively she approached the pieces of the archived crèche. Despite their cramped and austere placement in these dingy surroundings, the inanimate figures still held for her a mystic quality which commanded her respect. She stood silently over the figures for a short time. In their present state, she felt a kinship with the statuettes which surpassed any feelings that they had previously engendered in her, even in their most salient and hallowed arrangement on the courthouse lawn. Somehow, their banishment to this lonely, forsaken place brought them closer to her.
She knelt down on one knee, placing herself at eye level with them. In the faint, musty light that glowed from that single bulb hanging down from the ceiling, she looked into their placid faces, mourning their fate, sharing their sorrow. Slowly she reached a hand into the inside pocket of her jacket and withdrew the videotape cassette. From another pocket she retrieved a neatly folded sheet of lined notebook paper, one side bearing words written in her own hand, and slid the paper into the cardboard sleeve next to the tape. With one hand she lifted the edge of the plastic covering, and with her other hand she slipped her item underneath. She leaned forward as far as she could, reaching her arm out past several figures, toward the object at the center of the collection. And it was there, amid the mute kings and the plastic lambs, and within the pale shadow of a darkened guiding star, that Eppie placed in the dusty manger the only earthly remnant she still possessed of a faith that she had once dared to dream.