Zanna's Gift: A Life in Christmases by Card Orson Scott & Richards Scott

Author:Card, Orson Scott & Richards, Scott [Card, Orson Scott & Richards, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Inspirational, Fantasy, Adult
ISBN: 9780765312372
Amazon: 0765312379
Goodreads: 2158376
Publisher: Forge Books
Published: 2004-11-01T08:00:00+00:00

10

Zanna had taken a polaroid, once, of Betty walking along the top of a picket fence—an incredible balancing act, actually, but she was so good at it that she was still going even after Zanna rushed into the house to get the camera. And then, just as Zanna was about to snap the picture, a neighbor boy taunted Betty from what he thought was a safe refuge in his yard, two doors down.

Incredibly, Betty reached into her pocket, pulled out a stone—and not a small one—and from the top of the fence, with the best pitching form, hurled that rock at a speed only slightly less than David’s must have had when it killed Goliath.

Oh, the wailing from that boy, hit square in the chest with a stone by a nine-year-old girl.

And Betty’s fury at herself—as she lay sprawled in the petunias—for having missed. “I was aiming at his big fat mouth!” she insisted as her mother dragged her inside amid a flurry of Come with me young lady I will not have you throwing rocks and trying to kill other children even if they deserve it.

Zanna didn’t bother following her inside. She was busy with the Polaroid, waiting all a-tremble to see the exact moment that the camera—which wasn’t all that good at action shots—might have captured.

It could not have been better. The photo had caught her at the exact moment when the stone released from her hand. And Zanna had been in exactly the right place to get Betty’s profile—the curl of her lip, the fire in her eyes. Of course, the fire, now, that wasn’t exactly in the picture. But it would be in the painting!

Zanna had worked on that painting, whenever she could, what with the morning sickness—much worse than with the first two—and then, after Colleen was born, the endless feedings and the perpetual exhaustion.

She had already captured Betty’s face on the canvas, along with the yard and the street and Betty’s mother and grandmother—Zanna always roughed in the background first, painting inward toward the heart of the piece—when she got the call from Mother, telling her that little Betty had polio, and could Bug bring the older children to her, since she lived closest of all the family right then?

Zanna put the painting away almost that moment, faced it to the wall, stacked other canvases in front of it. She had a vague idea that if Betty died, then she would finish the painting, so that Bug and Sylvia would have it to remember their marvelous daughter.

Then, when it was clear that Betty would live, but might never walk again, Zanna realized that this painting would be the cruelest thing she could give them. A constant reminder of what they had lost inside that iron lung. Better for them to love and rejoice in the child who eventually escaped that dire machine, and let the other be a distant memory.

What she hadn’t understood was Betty herself. The child whose face Zanna had put onto the canvas was still there.

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