"What should I say instead? Is 'butt' okay?"

"How does 'bottom' strike you?" Paige asked.

"I guess I can live with that."

Trying not to burst out laughing, not daring to glance at Marty, Paige said, "You say 'bottom' for a while, and then as you get older you can slowly work your way up to 'butt," and when you're really mature you can say 'ass."

"Fair enough," Charlotte agreed, settling back on her pillows.

Emily, who had been thoughtful and silent through all of this, changed the subject. "Ten pounds of unpopped corn wouldn't fit in the microwave."

"Of course it would," Marty assured her.

"I don't think so."

"I researched this before I started writing," he said firmly.

Emily's face was puckered with skepticism.

"You know how I research everything," he insisted.

"Maybe not this time," she said doubtfully.

Marty said, "Ten pounds."

"That's a lot of corn."

Turning to Charlotte, Marty said, "We have another critic in the house."

"Okay," Emily said, "go on, read some more."

Marty raised one eyebrow. "You really want to hear more of this poorly researched, unconvincing claptrap?"

"A little more, anyway," Emily acknowledged.

With an exaggerated, long-suffering sigh, Marty glanced slyly at Paige, raised the notebook again, and continued to read, "He prowls the downstairs-wicked, mean looking to cause yet one more bad scene.

When he spies the presents under the tree, he says, "I'll go on a gift-swapping spree!

I'll take out all of the really good stuff, then box up dead fish, cat poop, and fluff In the morning, the Stillwaters will find coffee grounds, peach pits, orange rinds.

Instead of nice sweaters, games, and toys, they'll get slimy, stinky stuff that annoys."

"He won't get away with this," Charlotte said.

Emily said, "He might."

"He won't."

"Who's gonna stop him?"

"Charlotte and Emmy are up in their beds, dreams of Christmas filling their heads.

Suddenly a sound startles these sleepers.

They sit up in bed and open their peepers.

Nothing should be stirring, not one mouse, but the girls sense a villain in the house.

You can call it psychic, a hunch, osmosisor maybe they smell the troll's halitosis.

They leap out of bed, forgetting slippers, two brave and foolhardy little nippers.

"Something's amiss, young Emily whispers.

But they can handle it-they're sisters!"

This development-Charlotte and Emily as the heroines of the story-delighted the girls. They turned their heads to face each other across the gap between beds, and grinned.

Charlotte repeated Emily's question, "Who's gonna stop him?"

"We are!" Emily said.

Marty said, "Well* maybe."

"Uh-oh," Charlotte said.

Emily was hip. "Don't worry. Daddy's just trying to keep us in suspense. We'll stop the old troll, all right."

"Down in the living room, under the tree Santa's evil twin is chortling with glee.

He's got a collection of gift replacements taken from dumps, sewers, and basements.

He replaces a nice watch meant for Lottie with a nasty gift for a girl who's naughty, which is one thing Lottie has never been.

Forgetting her vitamins is her biggest sin.

In place of the watch, he wraps up a clot of horrid, glistening, greenish toad snot.

From a package for Emily, he steals a doll and gives her a new gift sure to appall.

It's oozing, rancid, and starting to freezz.

Not even the villain knows what it is."

"What do you think it is, Mom?" Charlotte asked.

"Probably those dirty kneesocks you misplaced six months ago."

Emily giggled, and Charlotte said, "I'll find those socks sooner or later."

"If that's what's in the box, then for sure I ain't opening it," Emily said.

"I'm not opening it," Paige corrected.

"Nobody's opening it," Emily agreed, missing the point. "Phew!"

"In jammies, supperless, now on the prowl, the girls go looking for whatever's foul.

Right to the top of the stairs they zoom, making less noise than moths in a tomb.

They're both so delicate, slim, and petite, and both of them have such tiny pink feet.

How can these small girls hope to fight a Santa who's liable to kick and to bite?

Are they trained in karate or Tae Kwon Do?

No, no, I'm afraid that the answer is no.

Grenades tucked in their jammie pockets?

Lasers implanted inside their eye sockets?

No, no, I'm afraid that the answer is no.

Yet down, down the shadowy stairs they go.

The danger below, they can't comprehend This Santa has gone far 'round the bend.

He's meaner than flu, toothaches, blisters.

But they're tough too they're sisters!"

Charlotte defiantly thrust one small fist into the air and said, "Sisters!"

"Sisters!" Emily said, thrusting her fist into the air as well.

When they discovered that they had reached the stopping point for the night, they insisted Marty read the new verses again, and Paige found that she, too, wanted to hear the lines a second time.

Though he pretended to be tired and needed some coaxing to oblige them, Marty would have been disappointed if he hadn't been importuned to do another reading.

By the time her father reached the end of the last verse, Emily was only able to murmur sleepily, "Sisters." Charlotte was already snoring softly.

Marty quietly returned the reading chair to the corner from which he had gotten it. He checked the locks on the door and the windows, then made sure there were no gaps in the drapes through which someone could look into the room from outside.

As Paige tucked the blankets around Emily's shoulders, then around Charlotte's, she kissed each of them goodnight. The love she felt for them was so intense, like a weight on her chest, that she could not draw a deep breath.

When she and Marty retired to the adjoining room, taking the guns with them, they didn't turn off the nightstand lamp, and they left the connecting door wide open. Nevertheless, her daughters seemed dangerously far from her.

By unspoken agreement, she and Marty stretched out side by side on the same queen-size bed. The thought of being separated by even a few feet was intolerable.

One bedside lamp was lit, but he switched it off. Enough light came through the door from the adjoining unit to reveal the larger part of their own room. Shadows attended every corner, but deeper darkness was kept at bay.

They held hands and stared at the ceiling as if their fate could be read in the curiously portentous patterns of light and shadow on the plaster.

It wasn't only the ceiling, during the past few hours, virtually everything Paige looked at seemed to be filled with omens, menacingly significant.

Neither she nor Marty undressed for the night. Although it was difficult to believe they could have been followed without being aware of it, they wanted to be able to move fast.

The rain had stopped a couple of hours ago, but aqueous rhythms still lulled them. The motel was on a bluff above the Pacific, and the cadenced crashing of the surf was, in its metronomic certainty, a soothing and peaceful sound.

"Tell me something," she said, speaking softly to prevent her voice from carrying into the other room.

He sounded tired. "Whatever the question is, I probably don't have the answer."

"What happened over there?"

"Just now? In the other room?"

"Yeah."

"Magic."

"I'm serious."

"So am I," Marty said. "You can't analyze the deeper effects that storytelling has on us, can't figure out the why and how, any more than King Arthur could understand how Merlin could do and know the things he did."

"We came here shattered, frightened. The kids were so silent, half numb with fear. You and I were snapping at each other-"

"Not snapping."

"Yes, we were."

"Okay," he admitted, "we were, just a little."

"Which, for us, is a lot. All of us were* uneasy with one another. In knots."

"I don't think it was that bad."

She said, "Listen to a family counselor with some experience it was that bad. Then you tell a story, a lovely nonsense poem but nonsense nonetheless* and everyone's more relaxed. It helps us knit together somehow. We have fun, we laugh. The girls wind down, and before you know it, they're able to sleep."

For a while neither of them spoke.

The metrical susurration of the night surf was like the slow and steady beating of a great heart.

When Paige closed her eyes, she imagined she was a little girl again, curled in her mother's lap as she had so seldom been allowed to do, her head against her mother's breast, one ear attuned to the woman's hidden heart, listening intently for some small sound that was not solely biological, a special whisper that she might recognize as the precious sound of love. She'd never heard anything but the lub-dub of atrium and ventricle, hollow, mechanical.

Yet she'd been soothed. Perhaps on a deep subconscious level, listening to her mother's heart, she had recalled her nine months in the womb, during which that same iambic beat had surrounded her twenty-four hours a day. In the womb there is a perfect peace never to be found again, as long as we remain unborn, we know nothing of love and cannot know the misery that arises from being deprived of it.