Summary
Clara is looking out the window at the island restaurant, where she sees a family eating. Her Daddy asks her to come away and says that she won’t get presents if she does not listen to him. She knows Santa Claus isn’t real because people at school told her, but she plays along because she wants to get presents.
Daddy turns on the TV and they watch the sleigh moving across the map. It goes slowly over Europe but quickly over Africa and Daddy says it is because kids there are fine with sticks.
It is dinnertime and Clara has to wake Uncle Olly. Uncle Olly is confused and asks where Jason (Clara’s older brother) is as they all sit down, and Mom grimaces. They do not know when he will be back, but he will return someday. Daddy pours drinks and Mom serves everything. She holds out Christmas crackers to everyone and Daddy says they are not religious. Mom protests and begins saying her thanks regardless. Clara knows her mother wishes Jason would come home. Uncle Olly starts telling stories and they start eating quickly to avoid having to listen to him for too long.
That night after everyone goes to bed, Clara sits at the top of the stairs and listens to her parents listening to a voicemail from Jason. They play it again and again, and Mom cries. They get Santa’s cookies ready and Mom scrawls a note. Daddy goes outside to smoke his funny cigarette.
Clara is happy and excited, less so about Santa and more so about her parents coming together to make her believe.
Bing
Bing is at midnight mass with the Scarborough Filipino population but he wishes he were like the cool kids—home and asleep. It smells like pork, except for the three women who own Happy Chicken on Morningside Avenue.
The ladies, Bing’s Ates, pinch his cheeks and Bing wishes he could tell them that the most handsome boy in school kissed him. The congregation sings and Father Joseph holds up the Eucharist. Bing is starving and looks forward to Communion, excited to show off his outfit when he is up in the front.
When he and his Ma are in line, Bing feels someone move past him. He looks and thinks he sees Laura, and she is only wearing a summer dress even though it is so cold. Bing is concerned, but Laura vanishes and his mother shushes him.
After church, Bing and Ma head out into the night back to their apartment building on Lawrence. Each sheet of ice is a challenge and they hold to each other as they walk. Suddenly they hear a fire engine wail and Ma makes the sign of the cross. They see the truck coming closer and it drives up to their own apartment building. Ma and Bing, now not caring if they slip, move quickly towards their home.
Victor does not even remember the first time someone told him to be careful around the cops; it is just a part of his knowledge. He was told and trained by so many to protect himself, to stiffen and grow silent. He always heard white people discuss the police and they never had the fear he did, and they seemed to think it was funny how they could weasel their way out of tickets.
That night when the police came and looked through his paint, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end even before they approached. He felt their presence. He told himself to stay calm, to breathe, to think of how he was going to respond.
The cops came over and started poking through his things and asking him questions, such as why he was painting “graffiti” and if he bought the paint himself. At one point when he asked them politely not to open the paint because he did not want the tubes to dry out, they became angry and told him to step back even though he did not move, and not to raise his voice even though he did not. He was brought into the holding station and had a virtual time-out for five hours. He was not officially arrested, but the pain of everyone in the housing complex looking at him like he “was yet just another Black boy doing no good” (171) was frustrating; it was like even though he had drawn all their portraits, they thought they knew all along he was bad. Now Victor avoids most white people whether they are rich or poor. Maybe this is racist but he does not care.
On Christmas Eve when Victor sees the dirty white guy near Mr. Park’s on Christmas Eve, he feels that same feeling of dread and keeps his head down when he is inside the convenience store and the man comes in.
The man stumbles. He looks maybe like a skinhead. He clumsily tries to steal something; Mr. Park rolls his eyes, calls him on it, and tells him to leave. The guy becomes angry and sloppy, calling Mr. Park an Asian slur.
The man sweeps some products onto the floor and yells at Victor for looking at him. Victor quickly moves to the counter, pays, and walks out. The white man yells at him, calls him the n-word, and stumbles after him, but Victor walks quickly. The man yells for him to wait but Victor does not.
He looks back every now and again to see if he is being followed.
Lady is working the Christmas Eve at Scarborough General’s ER. She is a new nurse and wishes she could stay home with her kids. A single mother, she is exhausted but has to go to work after all the kids and her mother opened presents.
In the elevator she has an odd feeling telling her to go back; maybe she forgot something. She returns to the apartment, quiet and dark. She sees the wall glowing red like a burner on the stove, and she begins to smell smoke. Hurriedly, she starts yelling for her mom to get up and to get the kids. In a frenzy, the two women grab the children and run out.
In the hallway, Lady can see smoke coming from the apartment next door. She starts yelling “FIRE!” and banging on doors. Looking back, she wishes she had banged on more. The firemen later said there was a fire alarm but she knows she there was not one.
More and more tenants bottleneck in the stairwell, frightened and hurried. They move outside and watch as the outside of the building is doused with water.
Ivana
Between giving happy endings at the Oasis Spa, Ivana steps outside for her smoke and looks at her own balcony, which she can see from the back of the building. One snowy night, she noticed the little girl, and it became a regular thing for them to wave to each other.
On Christmas Eve, Ivana had the night off and went to get cigarettes at the convenience store, and kept looking to see if the girl was there. She smoked and gave herself more time. Not exactly knowing why, she waited and waited. No girl. She guesses she did know the girl was in there but not at the window.
She only learns the girl’s name—Laura Mitkowski—after she sees her name in the newspaper as one of the people who died in the fire.
Bing
On the first day back from the Christmas holidays, the anthem plays as it does every day. People are wearing new clothes and shoes and normally would be happy to be back, but now they have black ribbons pinned to their lapels.
Mrs. Rhodes comes on the loudspeaker and her voice wavers in the way white people do when they sound sad. She speaks of how Laura and her father perished, but that she is glad no one else who lived in the building did.
Another woman comes on the speaker. She introduces herself as Elder Fay and tells the school she will be their aunties and moms and grandmothers today because she knows they are all sad. In the library, Elder Fay has a pipe ceremony set up. The space smells sweet. The kids shuffle in and the teachers help them sit in concentric circles around Elder Fay. Bing and Sylvie hold hands.
Elder Fay begins by saying Laura saw a lot of lovely things in life but the Creator said it was time to go. She takes out an eagle feather and places it next to the burning sage and other pipe implements. She gestures to Levy, a sixth-grader, to light her pipe. The indigenous kids look on in familiarity.
Elder Fay says that while she is smoking they should think good thoughts about Laura. Bing closes his eyes and remembers Laura in her fairy costume, at the snack table, playing parachute with the blanket, and her waving at him as she headed off to Christmas break.
When Bing comes home that day, he takes the foot tracings of his father out and lays them on the floor, placing his own feet on them. So much further to go, he thinks.
Ms. Hina’s Daily Report
Ms. Hina writes of what a sad day it was and how she was close to Laura though the girl rarely said much. The funeral is on Saturday and she and Laura’s teacher, Mrs. Landau, plan to go. As she has not used any sick or mental-health days, she will do so next Monday and will fill out an official request.
Jane Fulton’s Email
Jane responds that she wants to remind Hina, per her performance review, that the “Notes” section of the Daily Report should not be about personal matters, and if she wishes to discuss this they can do so over coffee sometime.
She then reminds Hina that her job is “family literacy, not social work” (187) and that even though she knows there are grey areas, if one doesn’t draw the lines their hearts break too much and they start doing things like requesting mental-health days. If Hina needs skill-building to support her, Jane will gladly chat with her.
Jane concludes by saying that she proposes they discuss strategies for Hina rather than her taking the day off.
Hina’s Email
Hina says bluntly that she was shocked by Jane’s email: a child died and it is a tragic loss. She is entitled to feel this loss deeply. She adds that in the future she will keep her notes “for logistical, statistical, cold-hearted information for your funding and development officer” (189). Laura was not a news item to her, and they all failed her; Hina will not fail her again by feeling nothing.
Ryan Hoffman’s Email
Ryan, the union representative, tells Hina he appreciates her call and has reviewed the messages between her and Jane. He sees a pretty strong case for Islamophobic comments and is concerned about Jane’s messages on her mental-health day and her request to have her do work outside her normal work hours.
He asks for Hina to give him a call and make a timeline of their interactions. He says firmly it is not crossing a line to attend the funeral of one of her students, and he believes that “management did not follow protocol re: trauma to its staff” (190).
Analysis
In this section, Hernandez takes us through the climax of the text, which is the fire in the apartment building on Christmas Eve that kills Laura and Cory. She refrains from anything prurient, so we do not have to endure the characters’ suffering or let our eyes linger over passages about their dead bodies. Rather, Hernandez explores the impact of the deaths of these people, particularly Laura, on the community of Scarborough. Laura, whom those in power might deem inconsequential—after all, in their minds, she is just a poor, neglected child from the “bad” part of town whose future, no doubt, will be a struggle—is deeply mourned and missed by her peers and Ms. Hina (and the sweet Ivana, who had become used to exchanging waves with the girl). Her life mattered, Hernandez suggests, and her death is a tragedy.
Though readers do not know why the fire started or what the final impact of it on residences was, there is the sense that this is yet another exhausting, frustrating moment in the lives of people who are already struggling to make ends meet. The fact that it comes on Christmas Eve, traditionally a celebratory time, adds insult to injury.
There are two other stories in this section that ring true to real-life experiences. The first is what Victor experiences with the police. Many contemporary readers will recognize, uncomfortably, that Black people often have deleterious encounters with police due to entrenched racism in law enforcement (and society at large). Victor is not doing anything wrong and is actually tasked with beautifying the community; nonetheless, the police treat him like he is a criminal. When they approach him he has a physical reaction, borne of his lived knowledge that the police can do anything they want to him: “If you were to ask me exactly where I feel things when a cop is around, I would tell you I feel it between my ears, on the flat of my chest, the centre of my palms, and on the back of my tongue” (169)—he feels ready to slap someone, struggles to breathe, and warns himself to stay calm.
The officers do not treat Victor like a citizen, nor like an innocent person, nor like a human being. They imply that Victor stole the paint that he is using and that he is painting “graffiti” (170) instead of art. They accuse him of raising his voice and moving towards them when he did not, and they bring him to the police station even though they do not charge him. when they drive him home in a police car, he observes that “Everyone in the housing complex looked at me like I was yet another Black boy doing no good” (171). Another set of experiences that ring too true for people in the workplace is the communication between Hina and Jane. Hina is qualified for her position, carries out all its tasks, demonstrates intuition and compassion, and is beloved by the children and parents alike. Yet, the emails from Jane imply that she is not quite understanding things, that she is letting her “political views” get in the way, that she is crossing boundaries by wanting to attend Laura’s funeral, and that she needs to do things beyond her job description and hours of employment. What makes all of this even more frustrating is Jane’s sugary, overly-friendly tone. She uses exclamation points and smiley faces and often suggests they talk over coffee, but this is passive-aggressive. She asks condescendingly if Hina needs “clarification” (55) and steamrolls her concerns about doing tasks after work by suggesting that it would be quick and easy to put flyers up.
In his article on the novel and interview with Hernandez, Hans Rollman devotes space to this very issue: “The structural challenges of Hina's job will be instantly recognizable to many who have worked in community agencies. She's full of energy and idealistic hope; empathetic and eager to care for the children and families she works with. Inevitably, she comes up against the community agency's management: university-lettered ‘experts’ who lead via email from swank offices elsewhere in the city. Management frowns on Hina's provision of food to the children—the focus should be on literacy, not on food—and leans on Hina to do unpaid promotional work beyond her regular hours. Her emotional involvement with the children and their families is admonished as potentially problematic; she is denied time off when she needs it for personal reasons. Despite Hina’s daily first-hand struggles at the heart of the community, the social workers who manage her think they always know better. The deteriorating relationship eventually requires intervention from her union.” Hernandez told Rollman, “For a lot of frontline workers that I’ve known in my lifetime, there were countless conversations that I’ve had with these people where they would say 'My manager did this, this, this and this, that was abusive. And I wish I would have said this.' So I really wanted to author into being the possibility of Hina actually being the kind of person who would clap back. I wanted that conversation—the conversation that could have been crafted by all of these people—happening in my book. I didn’t want it to be yet another person who is of colour, who is under the thumb of management. [Management] that is not racialized, that is privileged enough to have several letters after their name on a business card sitting in some clean office while they [the workers] are surrounded by people who might have bedbugs and might have lice and all this stuff, and the people at the offices saying ‘I want this particular report done in this particular standard.’ Something as simple as that—that’s a very typical thing that a lot of frontline workers say—'How in the hell am I going to have enough time to report in the way that you want me to report when I am working 60 plus hours a week trying to get this community on its feet?' And you know these are people that are having to change their clothes in the parking lot because they’ve dealt with people with bedbugs all day. You have to have compassion for that! So I wanted, out of compassion for them, for them to be able to say everything that they wanted to say, but [don't] have the privilege to do so, in my book. Because it’s my book."
