Christmas was coming in Connecticut.
An evil virus was sweeping the world and the nation. No one knew what to do—oh,
there were rules: wear a mask, wash your hands, keep social distance. That much
was obvious. Safety above all. Don’t infect or be infected. Everyone (except
some idiots—too many to mention) was aware of that.
But the Bradley girls and Eleanor
wanted to be with their grandparents for Christmas. What a dilemma. How to get
to Connecticut from Baltimore and North Bend, New York to Cheshire?
It would all depend on their special
powers and on the special power of Brigit, their grandparents’ rescue dog.
No one knew about their powers but
their Grandmother, but she was hesitant to call on them to do such things in
such a pandemic time. It would be insane. But insanity was not an excuse for a
Christmas they all wanted.
The Bradley girls were bored in
Baltimore.
Their parents—Lawyer Josh and Judge
Cathy—were out shopping and there was no one to annoy except each other. But
they were past masters of annoying each other.
Tegan was playing the television too
loud and both Morgan and Emma were complaining. So, Tegan, whose power was to
make things fly, made the TV fly close to her two sisters.
“Cut that out!” Emma shouted and then
sung a creature that looked like the Incredible Hulk into being (singing things
into being was her special power) and had him grab the TV and take it back to
its spot in the corner of the den.
Morgan, whose power was to turn into
any animal, turned into a rabbit and started hopping on Tegan. So, Tegan made
the rabbit fly up to the ceiling and made it stay there. Then the Hulk lost his
balance and crashed into the Christmas tree beside the TV, sending ornaments
everywhere.
Emma stopped singing and the Hulk disappeared.
But the tree was on its side.
“Look what you’ve done!” rabbit
Morgan yelled from the ceiling, but it came out as a series of squeaks instead
of a voice.
Tegan, yelled at Emma too, “Emma, you
klutz!” When she yelled she forgot about keeping the rabbit on the ceiling and
Morgan fell, turning back into herself half-way down. She hit the floor and
cried out, “look what you’ve done now, Tegan!”
Lots of “look what you’ve done” yells
accompanied lots of anger and pain (for Morgan) and dismay for Emma.
Just then they heard their parents
pull into the garage.
“DO SOMETHING—NOW!!!” all three girls
said together.
So, they did.
Tegan made the tree fly up and land
sitting up, if a little crooked.
Morgan turned into a robin and
started flying the ornaments back on the tree, though not in the right places.
Emma sang the tree into proper,
straight-up position and sang the lights and ornaments into the right places on
the tree.
By the time Josh and Cathy came in
the back door with bags of groceries and some presents, the TV was on normal
volume, with Tegan laying on the floor, the right distance away, and Morgan and
Emma were e-mailing friends on their cell phones.
“Hey, girls,” Josh yelled --he always
talked too loud--“how have things been?”
“Just fine,” Morgan said, not looking
up from her phone.
“Hunky Dorie,” Emma replied.
“Nothing happening at all,” Tegan
said.
Cathy was taking potatoes and onions
out of her bag. “Tell me why I don’t believe them?” she said to Josh.
“Because we never do?” he replied and
Cathy laughed.
“The tree looks great,” Josh said,
coming into the den. “Did you girls do anything to it?”
They all looked away, shaking their
heads but giggling to themselves. “If only you knew…” they all wanted to say
but certainly did not.
It was hard keeping their powers from
their parents—especially since they loved using them so much. They used to
believe they had magic glasses that gave them their powers, but Emma and
Morgan, the twins, had contact lenses by then and still had powers.
Maybe the contacts were magic too.
Who knew?
The next day was December 21. The
girls had on line classes all morning. Their dad was practicing law on line in
his room. Cathy, being a judge, had to go to court since crime doesn’t stop for
the holidays or Covid.
After their classes, they let the
dogs out and had snacks. Their dad came down to get some lunch and talked with
them about school on-line for a while. Then he went back to his computer and
the girls were bored again. But with their dad upstairs they didn’t dare use
their powers, lest he discover them.
“I wonder how Eleanor is?” Emma said,
into the boredom.
“I wish she’d drop in,” Morgan
replied.
Eleanor’s secret power was being able
to bi-locate. She could be in two places at once. That power was shared with
their Bradley grand-parents’ rescue dog, Brigit. Funny how powers can be.
“Wonder if we could call Mimi and Tim
and talk to Eleanor?” Tegan asked into the silence after Morgan’s statement.
“Do you think Dad would let us?”
“He wouldn’t,” Morgan said, smiling
slyly, “but I have a phone….”
****
What the Bradley girls couldn’t know
as Morgan dialed Mimi’s cell phone, was that Eleanor was doing face-time with
her Grandmother Bradley, something they did several times a week. This day
Eleanor was singing a song she made up after playing with dolls with face masks
on with her grandmother.
When Mimi answered the phone, she
told Morgan she’d have to call back in a few minutes to speak to Eleanor.
When Eleanor and Grand-ma had
finished their face book time, Mimi told her that her cousins had called. That
was a mistake by Mimi because Eleanor thought of her cousins and bi-located to
their house in Baltimore.
Unfortunately, she appeared too close
to the Christmas tree and knocked it over again. Her cousins were so glad to
see her that they all hugged her and then used their powers to put the tree
back in place.
“Dad will think it looks even
better,” Tegan said, when they were through making the tree look even more
beautiful.
Their parents were going to be home
soon, so they had to think quickly.
“Grandma and Grandpa are coming to my
house on December 23,” Eleanor told them.
“That’s perfect,” Emma said, “we’ll
find a way to meet you in North Branch that night so we can have a Christmas
hug from Grandma.”
So, they made plans, including how to
get Brigit to North Branch, until they heard their mom coming home.
“Think of Home, Eleanor,” Morgan
said.
But Cathy was in the door and coming
toward them before Eleanor could bi-locate back home. But she disappeared a
moment after Cathy came in the room.
Cathy was stunned. “I thought I saw
your cousin in here with you,” she said, about to be hysterical.
Morgan held up her phone. “We were
just talking to her,” she told her mom.
Josh came in the room at that moment
to welcome Cathy home.
“You can’t make phone calls without
asking us first,” he said. Cathy just looked blankly around the room.
****
Back in North Branch, Mimi found
Eleanor in her bedroom.
“Your cousins didn’t call back,” she
told her.
“That’s o.k.,” Eleanor answered, “I
just talked to them.”
Mimi found Tim in the kitchen working
on dinner. “Something is very odd about Eleanor and her cousins,” she said. “I
just don’t get it.”
“Carrots or potatoes with the pork
chops?” Tim asked.
****
So, the plan had been made. Eleanor
would bi-locate and find Brigit and then come to Baltimore with the dog, and
all of them would get to North Bend, NY, to meet up with their grandmother on
the day before Christmas Eve.
What could go wrong?
****
Here it was, the day before Christmas
Eve. Eleanor knew her grandparents were already on their way to her house. She
settled down for a nap, but bi-located just before she fell asleep, leaving her
‘at home’ Eleanor sleeping.
She had thought of Brigit and found
herself at a kennel in the cage with the dog. Brigit was excited to see her,
the problem was a cheerful young woman with red hair was opening the cage to
take Brigit for a walk just as Eleanor appeared.
“Who are you and where did you come
from?” the young woman said to Eleanor, clearly confused.
“I’m Eleanor,” Eleanor said, “and I
came for Brigit’s double.”
Just as she said that, she wrapped
her arms around Brigit’s neck and thought of her cousins.
Suddenly, Brigit’s double was the
only one in the cage.
The young woman fainted and fell to
the floor.
Her father, who owned the kennel,
heard her fall and raced to her side. He found her beside the cage door with
‘stay put’ Brigit licking her face.
After he revived her, he asked, “What
happened?”
“I must be hallucinating,” the girl
said, “I could have sworn a little girl was in the cage with Brigit. I need
some time off….”
Her father sent her to a room they
had with a cot in it. “Get some rest,” he said, “I’ll take Brigit on her walk.”
And he did.
****
The cousins were all in Tegan’s attic
room, pretending to have colds. Their parents were going to visit Cathy’s
parents and the girls didn’t want to go, much preferring the trip to North
Branch. They were fake sneezing and blowing their perfectly dry noses when
Eleanor and Brigit appeared in their midst.
“Something bad happened,” Eleanor
said. “A woman saw me when I went to get Brigit.”
All the girls were horrified. They
had kept their powers secret in the world—except for their Grandma and Santa
Claus in an earlier adventure.
They began to understand that ‘lots’
could go wrong with their plan.
Just then they heard their father
coming up the stairs—another ‘bad thing’ about to happen. Emma sang Eleanor and
Brigit into invisibility just as Josh came to the top of the stairs.
“So, you girls aren’t going with us?”
he asked. Then he said, “Emma, stop singing….”
“I can’t,” she said and started
singing again. But in the moment when she stopped, Eleanor and Brigit were back
in the room.
Josh’s jaw dropped open. He
remembered Cathy telling him about thinking she saw Eleanor. He had laughed at
her story, but he wasn’t laughing now.
“What the….Where did….How on….I’m
seeing things?” he stammered. Dumbfounded. Not very eloquent language from a
lawyer.
He rushed over to where he thought he
had seen the illusion. When he looked on the floor he saw a few of what he
thought were Brigit’s fur.
He looked at his daughters in total
confusion and turned to go back down the stairs to the attic.
“We’ll be back before nine,” he said,
still shaking his head. “There’s a pizza in the kitchen for you.”
In the car on the way to Cathy’s
parents house, he looked at her and she was driving and said, “something weird
happened to me….”
Cathy said, “tell me about it.”
And he did.
The girls woofed down the pizza and
prepared to leave for North Branch. The next thing was about to go wrong.
When Eleanor thought of her parents,
she thought about them in their apartment in Manhattan. So, when everyone held
hands with Eleanor in the middle and Tegan holding on to Brigit’s collar, they
ended up in an apartment in New York City—an empty apartment, no people there.
“What went wrong?” Morgan said as
they all looked around in surprise and Brigit whined a bit.
“You thought about the wrong thing,”
Emma said.
Tegan was looking out the window.
“This is a big city,” she commented, “not somewhere in up-state New York.”
“My fault,” said Eleanor, “hold hands
again”, and she thought of Tim and Mimi in their country home.
The only problem was, Tegan didn’t
touch anyone though she was holding Brigit’s collar.
Three girls appeared in the middle of
the front room in North Branch—Emma, Morgan and Eleanor.
Mimi was looking out the window of
that room and turned around to see three girls, knowing Eleanor was upstairs in
bed.
Mimi literally gasped and heard Emma
say, “oops” just before the three girls disappeared again to be back in the
apartment in Manhattan.
Mimi’s parents were in the yard with
Tim, carrying in the doll house Bern had carefully assembled back in Cheshire.
Mimi felt light-headed as they came in the kitchen door with the house.
“You’re not going to believe me,” she
said, and then told them what she’d seen.
Tim ran upstairs and called down,
“she’s just waking up, she’s here!”
Mimi said, “I must be crazy!”
Bern was torn apart between keeping
her granddaughter’s secret a secret and comforting her daughter.
Tim came down, carrying ‘stay at
home’ Eleanor, half-awake, half-asleep.
Josh and Cathy had, by that time, gotten
to her parents’ house. Cathy had been processing what Josh had told her,
comparing it to her own experience and after giving her parents’ their
presents, she told them they would miss dinner because they had to go home to
deal with ‘a problem’.
Meanwhile, Tegan and Brigit in tow,
Eleanor brought them all back to the front yard of the house in North Branch,
not wanting to have anyone see them in the house.
It was very cold, so Morgan turned
into a small dragon and laid on the lawn. Emma and Tegan and Brigit leaned
against her warm side while Eleanor went in to get their grandmother. But when
she walked into the room, there was stay-at-home Eleanor with Tim and Mimi and
Jim and Bern
So, the worst thing that could go
wrong, went wrong.
Eleanor quickly joined with her
bi-location twin, but everyone in the room was panicking and yelling except
Eleanor and her grandmother. And if that was not enough, the phone was ringing
off the hook.
Josh and Cathy had arrived home to a
house empty of girls and were calling Tim and Mimi to share their terror.
Tim answered the phone and was
stammering into it when Bern came and took the receiver from him. Josh and
Cathy were both on the phone and Josh’s mother said, calmly, there are some
things you need to know….”
Mimi had looked out the window by
then and saw a small dragon with Emma, Tegan and Brigit. She screamed in fright
and incomprehension.
“Go to your kitchen and wait for
something unbelievable,” then she hung up and said, “Eleanor, go get Josh and
Cathy, now!”
Suddenly Eleanor was in a kitchen in
Baltimore. Josh and Cathy nearly fainted.
Cathy said, “What? What? What is
going on?”
Josh said, “I need a beer,” and took
a six pack from the refrigerator.
Eleanor said, calmly, “take my hands
and you’ll understand.”
In a flash, all of them were in North
Branch.
Everyone rushed out into the front
yard, where there was still some snow and all but Bern and Eleanor nearly lost
their minds at seeing a dragon.
Morgan turned back into herself. “I
was just keeping them warm,” she said, a girl again.
Everyone went inside. Josh and Tim
had two of the beers Josh had bought. Mimi, Jim and Cathy had wine. Bern and
the girls, talking over each other, explained to everyone about their powers.
After an hour or so, the adults
searched each other’s faces.
“Well,” Bern finally said, “we’re all
together for an early Covid Christmas.”
And they were and had a grand time in
ways they neither understood or could comprehend.
(They won’t be with us for Christmas,
except in this story and in our dreams.)
Love and merry, merry….
