history.
“Ah yes, fourth, Pan.” He put a hand to his lips, dreading that having uttered the name might once more summon that side of him, might awaken that voice of savagery and disrespect for all civilized norms. “I fear him, a dark rumbling terror that never quite leaves me.” Hmm, could that be it? He didn’t think so, but it would reward revisiting. Though God had tucked his Pan self deep inside his psyche, Santa sensed the goat god lurking.
He shuddered and went on.
“Fifth, my own intolerance.”
Ooh, warm indeed. He glanced at the thick book resting on its special podium in one corner of the office. Bound in black leather, it shifted and changed during his weekly survey of the globe, editing or deleting entries when naughtiness, adulthood, or death claimed a child. The niceness section of the book had grown noticeably slimmer, in number of pages yes, but also in commentary. “And the annotations on my naughty list have become more acerbic these past many years. Used to be simply a name and a phrase.” Talks back to her mom. Cheats on tests. Thinks mean thoughts about his little sister. Torments the cat.
“Now I go on for paragraphs, berating them for falling away from the innocence of toddlerdom.” Maybe that’s why he had been overdoing the jolly old elf, to counterbalance his increased outrage at the sorry state of modern children. Still, that wasn’t based on misperception. The world had indeed grown grimmer. Grown-ups and wicked kids hurtling tail-over-teakettle toward adulthood deserved his scorn. “Hmm,” he said, stopping himself from getting worked up. “Perhaps Pan isn’t so dead in me, after all.”
Another issue to revisit.
He turned down his fifth finger and raised his other thumb.
“Sixth and last, there's Wendy.” A high soft chime sounded in his brain. “My dear, darling girl. All seems to be well with her. But oh, that...hesitation as we flew in.” In his mind’s eye, he sat in his sleigh, looking over at her, asking about her visits.
Surely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, that momentary pause. But he saw now, eight months after the fact, that it was anything but inconsequential. “There was a certain tonal shift when she mentioned—what was the boy’s name?—Jamie Stratton.”
He hunched forward in his chair. “That’s it. I minimized the signs. Wendy hesitates to speak of uncomfortable things, not wanting to deflate my buoyancy. But if I can’t—”
He choked up. If he couldn’t get right with his own little girl, how could he hope to get right with all the world’s children? That was the most pressing problem. The others would wait.
“Tomorrow, when I tuck the covers about her, I’ll assure her I’m okay with whatever discomfort she throws at me. Like the caring dad I am. Not some silly jokester who holds off sorrows with a jest.”
That was it.
He replayed the moments in the sleigh and kicked himself for not seeing it sooner. “But I see it now.” And he would address it, give comfort to his child who looked nine but was seventeen inside. It was time to grow up, take the reins of parental responsibility firmly in hand, and offer his counsel or condolence for whatever was troubling her. For he saw now, replaying the months since Christmas, how many other signs there had been, looks, sighs, shrugs. How could he have missed them all?
“No need to berate or browbeat.” He took a deep swig of Coke, the bittersweet bubbles gassy in his belly. “I recognize them now. Must lay my cards on the table and ask her to do the same. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”
* * *
Eight years had elapsed since Wendy’s mom had passed horrendously through the guts of the Tooth Fairy into the likeness of a huge coin and, by God’s grace, become Santa and Anya’s immortal mate; eight years since Wendy herself had been blessed with immortality. She took delight in helping Anya cook and sew, in learning elfin crafts, in being read bedtime stories as her