Something wings past my head, almost brushing my cheek, and I snap around to see what it is, but it's gone. Sometimes pigeons get inside the mall and circle round and round the skylights in the atrium, flapping and pooping and looking for a way out, but I think this was bigger than a pigeon, and it got away too fast. I still haven't found Grandpa's gift, the gift that will wake him up again, turn him back into old Grandpa. Socks that light up? Fast shoes? A pet bird to whiz around his head? I think about being asleep and being awake and the eerie half-place in between, where Grandpa seems to be stuck. I think again of gods and angels, zipping back and forth between their world and ours, which reminds me of Dexter's Christmas cards, which reminds me of Dexter and Mom. I'd better make another effort to find them before I fall asleep standing up and wake up in the wrong world myself.
Even though I'm not hungry, I decide to try the food court. I know how to get there because it's right in the middle of the mall, and all the different starfish arms and legs of the mall eventually lead back to it. Also, you can simply follow the smell of French fries. Mom and Dex like to stop everything, right in the middle of shopping, and sit down in the food court and have a drink, just when you're finally starting to get things accomplished and know that within another half hour you will be done and be able to get back home to your room and your books. This is enormously aggravating, but it's also where Mom and Dexter start to resemble each other very much. Inevitably I go along with them, after only a token protest, just so I can watch this strange phenomenon. Mom will buy a coffee from the gourmet coffee place, and she'll let Dexter buy a special kind of coffee that's mostly milk. I'll get a strawberry Julius from Orange Julius, which is the juice-place-with-hotdogs. I suspect that when Mom and Dexter are alone, they sit in the uncomfortable fancy iron garden chairs at a little round marble table, like a dinner plate on a stick, right inside the gourmet coffee shop itself. But when we're all together we aren't allowed, Mom explained, because my Julius was an Outside Drink. That means we have to sit on the molded plastic seating in the middle of the food court at a table where someone has always left the remains of a greasy, salty, ketchuppy lunch. Mom and Dexter will fuss away at the table, cleaning it with dinky paper napkins. Then we'll all sit down together and they'll load their shopping bags on the table and pull out their purchases and exclaim over them, reassuring each other that they've picked the perfect color or type or size.
“Perfect,” Mom will say.
“Totally, like, perfect,” Dex will say.
“I love it,” Mom will say.
“Totally,” Dex will say. “Love it, totally. Shut up, Edie.”
“Edie, be nice,” Mom will say. “Aren't these socks perfect?”
“Totally, like, perfect,” Dex will say. It's like when the
CD
player gets stuck and you listen to the same little blip over and over again, trapped forever, so annoying it's kind of fascinating.
Finally they'll put the things away again and sip their drinks and noodle on about other things they want to buy when they've saved enough money. With Dexter it's usually clothes; with Mom it's usually something for the house: a toaster or a new coffee table. These conversations are incredibly endless and boring, and the two of them listen to each other with such rapt attention that I'm always mesmerized. I can picture them now, chatting away, having completely forgotten about me since they're so wrapped up in their coffees and their talk. This makes me feel pretty sorry for myselfâa little weepy, almostâeven though at the back of my mind I know they're doing no such thing because they'll be looking for me too.
I find myself following a man walking a dog. The dog walks a little in front of the man and has a fancy harness, and the man walks very tall and straight, without seeming to look around him very much. I can see the dog has a long snout and pointy ears and is very clean. Pets aren't allowed in the mall; that's a rule. I wonder if the dog is not really a dog at all but something more like the Egyptian god Anubis, a being that's only part dog and can get up and walk around on its hind legs and think and talk like a person if he chooses to. Again, in the part of my mind that has stayed cool despite my fever, where I can see my worried mother and sister scouring the mall for me, I also know the dog is a seeing-eye dog and the man holding the harness is blind. Maybe a dog for Grandpa, to help guide him around when he gets mixed up? An extra-powerful god-dog? Everything is getting swirly and mixed up in my mind. It's easy to imagine that there are ancient gods walking through the mall just like they walk across the pages of my social studies book at school. It doesn't help when the stores suddenly all swoon sideways and I abruptly lose my balance and stagger to my left. I bump into someone who says angrily, “Watch where you're going!” and stomps away before my eyes can focus and I can explain that I'm really not feeling very well. I'm only trying to find my Mom, for Pete's sake, already. Give me a break.
The food court is stuffed with moms and dads and teens and squirts of kids and shoppers of all stripes. They're either crowding all the tables with their lunches or clogging up the pathways between the tables and the fast-food kiosks with empty trays, circling like gulls, trying to decide what they want. On the rare occasions when Mom and Dexter and I have lunch here, we always get the same thing: California rolls for Dex, kappa maki for me and dynamite rolls for Mom, all from the sushi place, because Mom believes sushi is more nutritious than fried anything. Almost everything else the food court has to offer is fried something. I'm always powerfully interested in the bento boxes, with their little compartments of rice and salad and teriyaki and tempura and noodles and fruit, but Mom always says that's just Too Much Food.
Too much food. Everywhere I look there's food: food heaped high on trays and in paper boxes, food on tables, food that's fallen to the floor and is getting trampled underfoot. Everywhere people are chewing with bulging cheeks and laughing with their mouths open and licking their fingers and feeding their babies and picking what they don't want out of their lunches and dropping itâpickle slices, onions, tomatoes. The overpowering smells and hideousness of it all makes me feel queasy.
In desperation, I head for the one place in the entire food court where I think I might truly find my mother and sister: the gourmet coffee store. I can't see it clearly from where I'm standing, and I fight my way through the crowds until I can see into the entire shop. There's a long lineup at the counter of people buying bags of coffee beans and painted mugs and gift baskets. But farther back, where the tables are, the chaos gives way to calm. People sit at the little tables in quiet pairs, sipping their drinks, eating nothing, talking quietly, probably about how lucky they are to have found seats inside and how unpleasant it would be to have to sit anywhere else. I have to walk right into the store to see all the way to the back. This makes me feel a little shy since I don't intend to buy anything, but no one seems to be paying any attention to me, and it's such a relief to get away from all that chewing. Right at the back of the shop, at the very last tableâDex's favorite, as it happens, the most secluded, the one behind the palm plant, under the poster of the Eiffel Tower in Parisâsits the largest man I've ever seen. He's taken both chairs from the table and put them side by side so he'll be able to sit properly; that's how big he is. He's sipping from a tiny coffee cup that looks the size of a thimble in his huge hand, and he's laughing quietly to himself, his big face creased, his eyes almost vanished with amusement. In a vase on the table in front of him stands a single white flower, and I know I've found the Buddha.
“Excuse me,” I say, because surely he'll know what to get for Grandpa, something perfect and simple and beautiful and calming, to bring him gently back into the world.
My voice is too soft, or the noise from the lineup at the cash register combined with the shop's jazzy music is too loud, and he doesn't seem to notice me at all. He turns the page of the magazine lying flat on the table in front of him (I hadn't noticed it at first) and laughs again at something he reads there.
“Excuse me,” I say again.
At the table next to his sits a pair of Indian women in saris, with their hair in neat buns and their feet in sandals. Both of them have diamonds in their noses. They're surrounded by bags of shopping and seem to be going through a list together, crossing off what they've bought. When they hear my voice they look up at me and smile.
“Excuse me,” I say, very loudly this time, standing at the Buddha's elbow, and then I start to cough. He looks up at me. Then he gets up from his chairs and goes over to the sleek black table with the milk and cream and half-and-half and soy and white sugar and brown sugar and honey and clear glucose syrup and artificial sweetener and brings back a paper cup of water, which he gives to me. I sip it and the coughing goes away.
“Are you lost?” he asks.
“Is she lost?” one of the Indian women asks.
I start coughing again, and all the tables and chairs and people slip sideways in my vision. I'd fall over but the Buddha puts his hand on my shoulder to make me steady.
“Be still,” he says.
Which is exactly what the Buddha would say.
“Where is your mummy?” the Indian woman asks. She has an English accent, like the people who call the tennis matches on
TV
that Dad likes to watch. Twenty-love, second service. Nice shot, that. Lovely.
“I don't know,” I say.
The Buddha closes his magazine. “Should we call security?” he asks the Indian women, as though they're all together and not strangers. This is nice of him, though I'm not sure why.
“Did you come with your mummy today?” the Indian woman asks me again.
“And my sister,” I say.
The Buddha nods thoughtfully and says he'll get security. He gets up from his two chairs and tells me I should sit down and wait with the ladies until he gets back. Gratefully I climb up onto one of the chairs, which is warm from his sitting on it. For a minute I close my eyes, and then I start coughing again. The Indian women cluck sympathetically, and one of them reaches over and touches my forehead and clucks some more. Then she starts pulling things out of her shopping bags to show me. I understand the woman is trying to make me smile. She pulls out a pair of socks and tears off the tags and the sticky paper holding them together and slips one over her hand to make it a puppet. She calls the puppet Freddy. Freddy pretends to eat my finger, and then he pretends to sip the woman's coffee. “Oh, oh, oh,” the woman says in a funny voice that's supposed to be Freddy's voice. “Tummy ache! Do you have a tummy ache too?”
I shake my head. I know the woman is being nice, and I don't want to risk being rude by telling her I'm too old for sock puppets named Freddy. The woman seems to take the hint, though, because she pops the sock off her hand and back into a bag. From another bag she starts pulling out stuffed animals and explaining these are for her nieces and nephews. “Now, I know you're a big girl,” she says. “But can you remember when you were little? Which one would you have liked best?”
Admittedly, this is more interesting. I try to focus on the mounds of plush. There's a bear and a raccoon and a hot pink hippo and a glittery fish. Then, to my horror, the woman pulls out the creepy-eyed gray elephant from the card shop.
“He's so cute,” the woman says, pretending to make him walk across the air toward me. “Look at him. Isn't he cute?”
I nod, then shake my head, then blink several times and slide off my chair to the floor, where I land with a thump just before everything goes black.
On Christmas morning, I lie on the sofa while Mom and Dad and Dexter bring my presents over to me. This is a change from the usual rip-roaring, hair-flying, tornado-raising creature that's me under the tree at six thirty in the morning while everyone else struggles to act awake, but I'm still not My Old Self, as Mom puts it. My new self sleeps in to nine o'clock and then nests on the sofa with a blanket and pillows, gazing sleepily at the blinking lights on the tree more than at the presents under it. Mom and Dad make tea and coffee, and Dexter peels us each a mandarin orange. Dad lights the fire he laid last night, with about as much mumbling under his breath as every year as match after match extinguishes itself with nothing to show for its efforts. Finally the fire catches, blue and then orange, and everyone has something hot in a mug (even I have tea), and Dexter asks me if I want to start and I say no, that's okay, Dexter can start. Then everyone gets concerned again and says they'll bring my presents over to me.
Still, I'm getting better. I'm not nearly as sick as I was in the days immediately after I fell off my chair in the coffee shop and woke up in a bright white room. Mom and Dexter and a man I didn't recognize were leaning over me with worried looks on their faces. “Mommy,” I said.
“Hi, sweetie,” Mom said. I could see the worry lines on her forehead and between her eyebrows.
“I saw Zeus and Mercury and Ganesh and the Buddha,” I said. “Grandpa's in the underworld. Next time I want to try coffee instead of a Julius, like Dex.”
“She's delirious,” the strange man said. Afterward, Mom told me he was in charge of the mall, and we were in the first-aid room, next to the cinemas, which most people never get to see.
“No she isn't,” Dexter said, looking at me closely, but not in a mean way.
After I fainted, the Indian women quickly arranged their coats for me to lie on and put something soft under my head. The big man returned with two security men and a stretcher, and they took me to the little room, where Mom and Dexter had been waiting. They had gone to security as soon as they realized I was missing. After we got home, I had a fever for a few days and got to drink lots of soup and ginger ale, which came out about as fast as it went in. For the first time in the history of the world as I knew it, I didn't help decorate the house but watched from the sofa until I couldn't keep my eyes open. I also fell asleep during my favorite videos, card games, stories and meals.