Sometimes, when their parents were so tired they couldn't hear him, Faith or Clare would go to their little brother's room when he cried out in the night. He'd sit up in his small bed in the big house in Buffalo and point into the darkness, seeing something his sisters could not. He'd make noises he meant for words they couldn't understand.
Then one of the girls would snuggle him back down into bed, sitting next to him and cuddling him until he fell back asleep.
Mikey was the third and last child in the family, born on Christmas Day. No one was ever quite sure what had happened to the beautiful boy who was happily received into the family in the mid 1950s. By the time he was about a year old, it was clear that something was wrong.
He had not managed any of the signposts of infancy - rolling over, sitting up and first steps, smiling, cooing and waving “bye-bye." He engaged, and was affectionate. But his big blue, almost violet eyes registered no awareness, and his movements were awkward and never seemed to develop and become more directed.
He was finally diagnosed with cerebral palsy and severe brain damage, and it was not known what had happened. Or why.
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"Come on," cried the little red-haired girl of about 5. She was standing in the garden outside a simple white shingled Cape Cod. It sat on a road that ran by Lake Ontario. Across the way was a big old farmhouse, bustling with activity - laundry to be hung, hens to be butchered, meals to prepare, fields to be plowed and fruit to be harvested.
The toddler, a chubby blonde girl, frowned down from the window, which seemed to her tiny self like a mile above the ground. "I'm scared!"
"Don't worry, I'll catch you!" her sister yelled back up at her.
Their mother was out shopping, while their maternal grandmother, who was supposed to be babysitting, was calmly watching the little six-month-old boy - assuming that the girls were taking an afternoon nap. Little did Gramma know that the older sister had dispensed with naps by fiat. It was time to play!
Faith held her slender, freckled arms out in a reassuring circle, encouraging her little sister to jump. Which, knowing her big sister to be true-blue, she did. And she twisted her ankle, immediately resorting to what would be her lifelong avocation: drama. She howled and forced tears, insisting with her limited vocabulary that her injury was life-threatening.
It hadn't been all that long since the two girls had had another big-sister-inspired adventure: The Bees. Faith was sure that if they penetrated the bee-hives deep in the vegetable garden behind their house, they would, like Pooh-Bear, find honey! So they ran away and broke into one of the small wooden structures, and weren't prepared for the fury that ensued.
Running down the lane, past the draped apple trees, the wood pile, the pickers' sheds and the garden, Faith was shouting "A bee's in my hair! A bee's in my hair!"
Their mother, this time busy hanging her laundry out to dry, heard the girls shouts, and wondered why her elder daughter was clamoring about a piece of her hair.
When she discovered the little girls' misery, she patiently began to pull bee bodies from the curly locks of her red-headed daughter, and to soothe the tears of her indignant little blonde.
But the girls didn't learn that time, so they once again tried their hands at escape. And little Clare made sure that nobody forgot the adventure. When Daddy played into the game with a tiny crutch designed just for her horribly wounded ankle, Clare was off to the hospital of her imagination. She limped and grimaced and carried on the ploy for as long as it would last and beyond.
And meanwhile, the family was adjusting the presence of the greatest Christmas gift they had ever, and likely would ever, receive: little Mike.
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By the time the family relocated from the bucolic beauties of the lakeside to a solid old neighborhood in the parish of St. Marks, Mike's likely problems were just starting to make their parents fearful.
Daddy had a job as a salesman, and Mommy was busy doing as Mom's did then: cook, clean, read stories, bake pies, mix martinis, take walks and teach little girls their manners. She hung clothes, changed diapers, took her family to church, and visited with the neighbors. Their parents were landlords, as the house was a side-by-side duplex on a leafy city street, not far from the "gentry" of the neighborhood. Within a few blocks walk, you could see huge old Victorian mansions, many boasting so many children they spilled out of the windows, happily running from floor to floor and in and out the multiple doors. They were usually named something like Ryan, or Drury, or Cochrane, though as you moved closer to the girls' house, the names change to Belliotti, and Campofelice. The block which they now called home was the dividing line between the mostly-Irish parish of St. Marks, and the mostly-Italian neighborhood of St. Rose.
And with the move to the new house, Faith was due to start kindergarten.
By her mother's account, little Faith already had a large and growing vocabulary, and by everyone else's she was a friendly, clever, and outgoing little girl. Her dimples mimicked her mother's, and her little sister was constantly a little miffed that "all the big kids" preferred her sister's outgoing charm to her own stubborn willfulness.
On the first afternoon, Clare entered the wrong side of the duplex house, confused about the left versus right of the mirror-image home. She found herself in a first floor that looked nothing like the family's new home - the furniture was modern and organized differently. She had a sudden moment of panic, imagining she had been magically moved to a place she didn't know - and when one of the daughters in the Chamberlain home asked her "what are you doing here?" she instinctively ran for the door, and found herself back on safe territory. But not too long after that, she visited the Campofelice up-and-down flat, and entered a mystic living room of plastic slip covers, and enticing bowls of fancy chocolates in ornate glass dishes on a spotless coffee table. She popped one in her mouth, just as the small woman of the house entered the room and said, sharply, "Did-a you eata chocolate?" Clare shook her head no, and once again, ran for the door.
And both girls would stand dutifully by his bassinette as Mommy changed the little boy, marveling at his tiny fingers and toes, and wondering what he was going to be when he grew up.
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There were some strange things going on in their new home, the girls realized.
And one of them, of course, was Mikey.
Their parents were worried, tense, and distracted. The girls would sit on the steps of the back stairs, a steep, turning stairway that led from the kitchen to the second, and then third floor - where the maid's rooms had been. There, they could hear, with fretful glances at one another, the sounds of their parents bickering, arguing, sometimes fighting - loud, angry, frightening. They harbored that young child's terror that one of their parents might leave, that it was their fault, that something they didn't understand was wrong.
But though the fights did go on, their parents remained in place; sometimes happy, sometimes angry, most times stoic.
And eventually, it became clear that something was wrong with their brother. His beautiful violet eyes didn't quite register things. Yes, he knew his family's faces, and he smiled. But his eyes didn't track things with quite the growing understanding expected of a year, and then two years old. He didn't roll over, or grab at toys the way a bright baby would do. He drooled incessantly, and not just because a tooth had started to grow in his mouth.
And eventually, the doctor's made his diagnosis. Each parent was thrown into a personal kind of purgatory. Their father had dreamed of his boy: an athlete, a companion for his woodworking and to teach how to swim. His son, who shared his name, and would carry his own deceased dad's family name into the future. He drank a lot, dulling the pain, enduring the tedium of his disappointing job and a life he couldn't escape. But somehow, he could laugh.
Their mother felt at once broken-hearted and trapped. Her child would be an infant, in some ways, always. She would never be able to enjoy bridge parties, garden clubs, a decorated and spotless home. They would have to manage a child who, though his brain remained a baby, his body would grow to adult - but would never work quite properly. She worried, and the more she worried, the more precise everything else in her life became: ironing the sheets and towels; meals served at precise times on the stroke of the clock where portions were measured to the tablespoon; hems stitched as if with a microscope. And yet at the same time, she could laugh, and look at her little boy who agonized and wearied her with the kind of love that is almost saintly.
What was to become of them?
And the girls also began to suspect there other strange things going on in their big, high-ceilinged home with the stained-glass window stretching two stories beside the staircase, and the odd assortment of fixtures in the basement that indicated a time when people - probably the house staff - had cooked, bathed, and eaten down there.
They had both, separately, come to the conclusion, by the time Clare was in second grade and Faith in 4th, that their house was haunted.
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Clare had realized that not every child hear whispers.
For a few years, as a toddler and small child, she just assumed that hearing a faint, sibilant voice close to her ear was a normal thing. She tried to make sense of the words, but, not being able to, just continued to draw pictures on the walls with her crayons, or page through her books, and let the sounds continue. One day, it dawned on her that sounds like that weren't something every child experienced.
And by then, there were other strange things that happened in that house.
Once, when her mother and sister were out, and she and her little brother were in the care of her father's mother, her grandmother, Clare had been startled from playing in the room where her brother was caged. Their parents had converted the dining room of the house into a combination play area and TV room, where Mike could be corralled in a space created by bookcases that were ingeniously designed to roll into place, dividing the room into two, and secured by a gate that slid up and down the height of the bookcase. Mike would be safe, but have some room to rolls his balls and play with his stuffed animals; he could see his family, and even watch the TV when it was on. And if the family needed a dining room, the contraption could roll back against the walls and create that space.
Clare was sitting in one of the stuffed armchairs near her brother's pen, reading a book - her favorite pass time.
And she heard someone coming. A measured tread down the stairs. She had forgotten her grandmother was there - the old woman had a habit of "taking a nap" after lunch, at which time she professed to go to her room on the third floor, which she took over during her visits, and "say her beads." Really she was going up to have a small glass of something calming, and a short rest.
But perhaps Clare would not have reacted with fear had Mikey not have gone on the alert. He stopped rolling his big red ball, which would amuse him for hours at a time. He didn't really roll it so much as push it around the floor, watching the colored object, his broad mouth open in a happy expression. He stopped, looked up, and then fixed his eyes on a spot only he could see. He pointed, and a look of wonder washed over him.
Clare froze. She imagined King Kong, or The 50 Foot Woman, or some other creature from the horror movies she and her father watched with amusement, and a bit of fear on her part. She could see one of the frightful creatures walking slowly and purposefully down the stairway to paw and trash its way to her and her little brother, devouring everything in its path.
And then a few minutes later, her grandmother walked purposefully into the room, nodded her head to the children, took up her wooden board upon which she played endless hands of solitaire, and sat in the best of the two armchairs.
But Mike continued to stare at the mysterious spot, transfixed.
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One afternoon, Clare and her friend, Bonnie, decided that they would heal Mikey. They had the faith of two parochial-school educated children, both of whom were sure that they would join the convent one day, and devote themselves to prayer, or perhaps the missions. While many kids were out playing cowboys and Indians (in truth, so was Clare from time to time), these two girls had fashioned themselves nun's habits out of towels and scraps of cloth, would tie rosaries at their waists, and walk around acting nun-like, whatever that might mean to an eight-year-old.
Bonnie's older sister had returned from a trip to Lourdes, and broth back with her a vial of Lourdes water. The girls were convinced that all they had to do was put a little on his sweet head, and Mikey would wake up from his sleepy intellectual state, and speak, and walk normally rather than scoot around on his hands and knees, and become a "normal" boy.
They didn't really announce their plan to anyone, but donned their special clothing one day as they played after school, said some special prayers, and joined Mike in his pen in the dining room. With proper ceremony, and after getting sloppy hugs and happy noises from the boy, nervously put the holy water on the little boy's brow.
Nothing happened. Nothing changed.
But Mike did look up as if he heard something that pleased him.
There was no miracle.
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It was many years later. Clare was taking a class in philosophy, and the question was raised: what if a person like an Adolf Hitler wasn't really a bad guy, but an angel or soul who had agreed to come to the world to teach us a lesson?
It was at once a silly, and a daunting question.
The idea of "what would you do if" usually just required a person to consider whether they'd have the courage to fight if attacked, to rescue someone by risking his own life, or to stand up to a bad guy. Not to be the bad guy. The idea of Jesus Christ being willing to sacrifice his body in terrible pain to "save" the human beings of Earth who had fallen from grace - that idea made some sense. To sacrifice oneself for the good of others was a value certainly of her childhood religious upbringing, and one that had some merit just as a noble thing to do.
But the idea of perhaps doing something "bad" in order to do something good was another question altogether.
Clare never really could make out an answer for it. Wouldn't it be the ultimate sacrifice of one's own pride, dignity, honor, even ideas of sin to literally commit terrible sins in order to show people how easily we can be dragged into error? Would that mean that the Serpent in the Garden might have been a hero, too? That the test of the Apple was one that the newly made humans needed to endure, but that their Creator couldn't offer it, because they would want to please him, and therefore wouldn't disobey his order. But if someone, something, else brought it up...
But if one could imagine an ordinary soul agreeing to touch down on earth, sacrificing a lifetime to show people who not to be - what if an angel could visit Earth? Not to be a wondrous creature of light and power or even gentle wisdom. What if the angel was born not just humble, but broken, powerless, disabled?
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Clare and Faith were driving together, many years later. They were grown women, they had families and stories of their own. Their little brother was dead - he had contracted pneumonia in the institution which his parents had ultimately had to move him into, as they knew that they could not be there for him forever. He had died on nearly the same day as he had entered the world, making Christmas a bitter-sweet holiday for them.
Clare's daughter was listening to the sisters tell tales of the "haunted" house they had lived in for something more than a decade.
"There were noises up on the third floor," said Faith. "You could hear someone walking when nobody was there."
"And once, we climbed upon into the attic-above-the-attic, it was tall enough for you to stand in, and there was a suitcase. Inside the suitcase were some clothes and a bunch of letters from some maid's brother who had gone west to make his fortune, he said. And he was going to send for her when he could."
"I wonder what Mom and Dad did with those?"
"I don't know, huh. I'd love to see them."
"And the front attic room, off my bedroom," Faith said. She had moved into the large third-floor-room as she entered adolescence, no longer sharing a room with her younger sister, and needing more space for her friends to visit, and where they could sneak off and smoke their pilfered cigarettes in privacy.
"Oh, that was weird. I used to dream about that room," said Clare.
"Me too!" her sister said.
"And it was always the same - there was a rocking chair in a pool of light, and it was rocking on its own," Clare went on. Her sister's eyes widened.
"And," Faith picked up the thread. "And if you went into the room you'd vanish and be someplace else, somewhere else, and I never could get up the courage to walk into it."
Clare held still. Then both women started talking at once, not having known til that moment that they had both had the same dream, over and over, the story the same.
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It was Christmas, many years later.
The holidays weren't nearly as much fun when families were scattered about, travel being sometimes difficult, new generations setting the tone for where and how the season would be celebrated. Marriages, divorces, children, grandchildren - new homes, jobs, deaths. Things change.
Though it was Christmas, Clare filled a cup with corn to feed the pigeons and stepped out into the cold. Faith in her elegant living room, looking at the piles of gifts, emptied stockings, and listening to the sounds of her family laughing and talking.
Clare began to drop the corn to the sidewalk, and the birds dropped down in their dozens, flocking to her feet, even letting her reach out and touch them as they competed for bits of corn. Faith turned her gaze to the fire in the fireplace, flickering and dancing on the grate.
And all at once, the pigeons flew up into the air on wings that looked like angels flying, and Clare thought of little Mikey. At the same moment, Faith saw two eyes glowing in the midst of the flames, and knew it was Mike.
And he said it was him, that he could see them across the room, and Merry Christmas.
