The Nesting Dolls Read Online Free PDF Page A

selections from the Gospels were read in the first languages of students from Germany, Poland, China, France, Japan, Nigeria, and Korea, and the carols sung were those that had been sung for generations by celebrators of Christmas in those countries. When the bell-ringers moved into place on stage, Zack took my hand.
    Gracie rang with ebullient loose-limbed grace; Taylor was surprisingly focused; but Isobel, her mother’s daughter, shook her bell with furrowed brow and tight lips, bent on a perfect performance. As they finished, Zack whipped out his camera and snapped three forbidden photographs before I batted down his arm.
    “Against the rules,” I said.
    “I’ve only been a father for two years. I have to make up for lost time.” He snapped a couple more pictures, then returned the camera to his pocket.
    The service ended. Students began moving down the aisle with baskets of candles, which they asked the person at the end of each row to distribute. The students then lit the candles of the people with aisle seats and invited them to light the candle of the person next to them. Faces softened by candlelight, the audience joined the choirs in the recessional “Joy to the World.” It was a transcendent moment but, as Robert Frost knew, nothing golden can stay. The lastline of the carol was sung; the candles were extinguished; the gym lights were flicked back on, and we were, once again, fragmented into our separate selves.
    Despite the blizzard, no one seemed in a rush to leave. The adults were chatting; students were clinging to one another with the desperation of those who knew it might be five minutes before they could start texting again. Finally, I spotted Isobel, Taylor, and Gracie. They’d changed back into their street clothes and were standing near an exit, laughing and surrounded by friends. I pointed them out to Zack. “Now there’s the picture I want.”
    “Let me get a little closer,” he said. He pushed his wheelchair forward and began snapping. He was just in time to capture a disturbing tableau. The woman we’d seen that afternoon on the Wainbergs’ front path approached the girls. She had the baby seat with her; she appeared to say something to Isobel, then she handed her the baby seat and disappeared through the exit.
    We were with the girls in seconds. “What’s going on?” I said.
    Gracie was the first to speak. “That woman just gave her baby to Isobel.”
    Isobel shook her head. “She didn’t just ‘give’ the baby to me. She made sure she knew who I was first. She asked if my mother was Delia Margolis Wainberg, and when I said yes, she said, ‘Tell her I couldn’t do it. This child belongs with her.’ That’s when she handed me the baby seat.”
    I looked down at the child. He was dressed in a Thomas the Tank Engine snowsuit, and his toque was pulled down over his ears. He was perhaps six months old with the kind of intelligent gaze people tag as “alert.” I squatted down beside him. “How are you doing, big guy?”
    He raised his arms and kept his dark eyes focused on mine. I unbuckled him and picked him up.
    Taylor came close. Her adolescent cool had deserted her.“His mother
is
coming back, isn’t she?” she said, and her voice was small and scared.
    As Zack wheeled in for a closer look, he squeezed Taylor’s arm, but he didn’t answer her question. My husband was more charmed by children than many men I knew, but when he gazed at the baby, he wasn’t smiling. His eyes moved to me. “Let me hold him, would you?” Zack took the child, removed his toque, and ran his hand over the baby’s springy black curls. He held the child out in front of him and examined him closely. “Did you girls get a good look at the baby’s mother?” he asked.
    “Not me,” Gracie said. “I was too busy watching Declan Hunter embrace Taylor with his eyes. Sooooo romantic.”
    Taylor shot Gracie a look that would have curdled milk, then turned back to us. “I saw the mother,” she