Free Star Time by Joseph Amiel

her, but they were being separated now and he could do nothing about it. The decision had already been made for him. He ran from the room before his mother could see he was crying.
    When she left a few days later, Greg and Meggy had to be torn apart, sobbing. Matt said good-bye to his daughter at the door. He would not look at his wife or drive her to the bus station.
    Sensing emptiness in the house, loneliness swiftly rushed in to appropriate the space Essie and Meggy no longer occupied, rebuffing all attempts at eviction; the other occupants were never rid of loneliness after that. Nor was Matt ever rid of anger at his wife's departure nor of his weighty sadness at his powerlessness to hold her. Taciturn before, he spoke even more rarely afterward. He allowed both his and Greg's lives to be ruled solely by the clock: time to wake, to eat, to work, to eat, to sleep, to wake again. He knew there were things he should do to comfort his son, but did not know what they were and would be incapable of doing them if he did. They stopped eating in the dining room — it was too painful; loneliness appropriated all the empty, precious chairs and grabbed gluttonously at food for which they had no appetite.
    Losing the two people who had always brought him happiness devastated Greg. Their departure gouged huge ruts along his heart, leaving a large tract of inner landscape scarred and barren. Wherever he went, their absence awaited him.
    Greg's solace was the world that welcomed him from the television screen. Its population was the most dependable friends; they did not desert him. Its families were happy and their problems minor and always soluble. Its dining rooms were filled with carefree children and wise parents who never left. He believed it to be the real world, everyone else's world; his own existence was a terrible, nightmarish mistake. He longed for a family like Ozzie and Harriet's, and imagined their children were he and Meggy , not David and Ricky. He longed simultaneously for something even more inconceivable: for his mother to be there watching TV beside him as before, telling him they would have that car some day .
    His father sometimes watched with Greg, accepting whatever programs his son chose. They never watched Essie’s favorites. Occasionally they told each other how funny something was, but mostly they just sat together watching in the dark. Having his father there was better somehow, as if sharing their separate loneliness lessened it.
    Greg scrutinized his mother's letters for word that he would soon be allowed to join her, refusing to let himself recognize that his father would then be left alone. He missed Meggy desperately and wrote to her with stories and drawings and with jokes he had heard on television. Writing was a difficult chore for his father, but each weekend he would set himself to the labor of writing a note to his daughter and ask Greg to include it with his.
    As the second summer approached, his mother wrote that she and Meggy would be returning for a visit. Greg was sure she was coming for him. He began to make private choices: He would take his tennis racket, to be sure, and his baseball mitt, but not the bat, which was too heavy.
    Only a few weeks before the scheduled arrival, very late at night, the phone rang. His father was holding it to his ear, listening, when Greg reached the living room.
    "They're sure?" his father finally asked in a tone of utter desolation. And then he added, "I'll tell him myself."
    His father slowly lowered the receiver. When he turned at last to Greg, his face was ashen.
    " Meggy is very sick. She has a very bad disease: leukemia. The doctors don't know if she'll live."
    Greg prayed fervently that night and every night afterward for his sister's recovery. He told God how much he loved her and missed her and how good she was. God would not let someone so young and wonderful die, he was sure.
    Meggy died less than three weeks later. She was buried in California.