"Come with us," she says.
Riding in the van, squashed between all the kids, I sit there, and for the first time with this family, everyone's quiet. This, as you can imagine, makes me considerably uneasy. The streetlamps flick past, like pages of light, each coming toward me and then turning away. Closing. When I look forward, I catch Lua looking at me in the rearview mirror.
We arrive at the house within five or ten minutes.
Marie takes charge.
"Right, inside, kids."
She goes with them, and this leaves Lua and me in the van together.
Again he looks in the mirror and lets his eyes reflect back ward to mine.
"Ready?" he asks.
"For what?"
He only shakes his head. "Don't give me that, Ed." He gets out and rams the door shut. "Well, come on," he calls in through the window. "Get out, boy."
Boy.
I didn't like the way he said that. Kind of foreboding. My big fear is that I've insulted him with the new lights. He might be taking it as a sign that he can't provide properly for his own family. He might think I'm saying, This poor, inadequate fool can't even get a full set of lights to work properly. I don't dare to look at the house as I follow him to where he stands at the edge of the road, looking back. It's dark there. Very dark.
We stand.
Lua watches me.
I watch the ground.
The next thing I hear is the sound of the flyscreen door opening and slamming several times. The kids come sprinting toward us, followed by Marie at a fast walk.
When I count the kids, I realize one of them's missing.
Jessie.
I search all the faces before looking again at the ground. The loud call of Lua's voice almost makes me jump.
"Okay, Jess!" he shouts.
A few seconds collect and fall, and when I look up, the old fibro house is lit up. The lights are so beautiful that they appear almost to hold the house up by themselves. The faces of the kids, Lua, and Marie are splashed with red, blue, yellow, and green. I can feel a red light shining over my own face and my own relieved smile. The kids are cheering and clapping and saying this will be the best Christmas ever. The girls start dancing together, holding hands. That's when Jessie comes running from the house to have a look.
"He insisted on turning the power on," Lua tells me, and when I look at him, Jessie's smile is the biggest and the best. The most alive. This is his moment, I think, and Lua and Marie's. "When we got those new lights, Jessie said he wanted you to be here when we turned them on. So what else could we do?"
I shake my head, looking into the colors shining across the yard.
They swim through my eyes.
To myself I say, The power and the glory.
As the kids dance around the front yard under the night sky and the lights, I see something.
Lua and Marie are holding hands.
They look like they're so happy, just inside this moment, watching the kids and the lights on their old fibro house.
Lua kisses her.
Just softly on the lips.