Christmas

Christmas is the setting for a family gathering that becomes a decisive rupture in the Solomon family’s life. Recalled by Katherine Solomon while fleeing Mal’akh, the holiday joins familiar domestic rituals to two layers of grief: the family’s earlier loss of Zachary and the attack in which Isabel is killed.

A Holiday Marked by Earlier Loss

By the time of the Christmas gathering in the flashback, the family is still living with Zachary’s death in a Turkish prison. His twenty-first birthday had been his last, and the events surrounding his imprisonment had left Peter Solomon grieving; Peter’s marriage ended six months after Zachary’s death. Christmas had consequently become a painful reminder, though Katherine observes that the family’s sorrow was gradually easing with each passing year.

The gathering also recalls the Solomon family’s holiday routine. Isabel, then seventy-five, prepared the traditional feast while Katherine and Peter spent time together in the conservatory. Their conversation about Katherine’s interest in Noetic Science offered a moment of shared attention amid the family’s continuing bereavement.

The Christmas Gathering and the Attack

Almost ten years before Katherine’s flight, the family was together at the Solomon home in Potomac on Christmas Day. The ordinary pattern of the occasion—Isabel cooking and her children talking nearby—was interrupted when an armed intruder entered. He said that he had known Zachary in prison and claimed that Zachary had told him where a key was hidden. He had come not for money but for a pyramid he believed Peter kept in a study vault.

When Peter denied knowing what the intruder meant, the threat shifted to Katherine. Isabel came into the room carrying Peter’s shotgun and fired at the intruder. He retreated from the conservatory as Peter pursued him, but Isabel had been struck during the exchange of gunfire. Katherine called for an ambulance and returned to find her mother motionless. The holiday gathering ended with Isabel’s death and Peter returning to the room to find Katherine grieving beside her.

The Holiday’s Return in Katherine’s Memory

The Christmas attack returns to Katherine’s mind during her flight from Mal’akh. She recognizes him as the man who had attacked her family and whom she had believed dead after Peter shot him and he fell into a frozen river. The remembered holiday therefore does more than establish the history of the attack: it connects Mal’akh’s return to the earlier violence that had already devastated the family.

Christmas works through contrast and recurrence. The feast and conversation belong to a family custom intended to bring the siblings together; the intrusion transforms that familiar occasion into the memory of their mother’s death. Years later, the recollection breaks into Katherine’s immediate escape, showing how the past remains active in the present rather than staying confined to the date on which it occurred.