Free The End of Forever by Lurlene McDaniel

stomach feel fluttery. He was sitting so close that she caught his fresh, clean scent.
    They flipped through the albums and watched the years parade past in a collection of color photos. Amy in her playpen. Erin on her first tricycle. Amy with her front teeth missing and clutching her school lunch box. Erin wearing a crown as May Day queen in the fifth grade.
    “When was this one taken?” Travis asked.
    Erin gazed at a blowup of one of her fathers favorite photographs. Erin and Amy were running barefoot through a grassy field full of dandelions, their long hair streaming behind them, their mouths wide with laughter.
    “I still remember that day,” Erin said. “I was five and Amy had just turned four. I thought that field was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, that it was a place where a fairy princess lived. And all Amy wanted to do was run around and make the seeds fly off the weeds. I started to cry and asked Dad to make Amy stop, but of course she didn’t, and I eventually got into the game too. We chased those seeds for over an hour. I can still see them floating away in the sky.”
    They stared at the photo in silence until a wave of melancholia engulfed her and she was afraid she might start crying. She looked at Travis, and his expression was blank. She wondered what he was thinking, and then she saw the cuddly stuffed bear on the sofa. “Is that for Amy?”
    Travis followed her line of vision. “Yeah. She sawit at the mall and made a big fuss about how cute it was. So I bought it for her.”
    “I asked the nurses if it was all right to bring some of her things from home for her room, and they said I could. Why don’t you just bring the bear up to her tomorrow?”
    Travis studied the bear for a long moment before speaking. “I’m not going back up there, Erin.”
    “What?”
    “Not until Amy’s sitting up in her bed and talking.”
    “But it may help her subconsciously knowing that you’re in the room with her.”
    He looked at Erin as if she were crazy. “Erin, she doesn’t know when
anyone’s
in the room with her.”
    Erin snapped, “How do you know? What makes you an authority?”
    “Take it easy,” Travis said with a placating tone. “I’ll keep calling for reports, and you can call me too. But I can’t go back inside that room when she’s so—you know—so out of it.”
    “She’s unconscious. She’ll wake up.”
    “She’s in a coma. It’s different.”
    By now they were both on their feet amid the jumble of photo albums. “It’s just a deep sleep, that’s all. It’s a way for her brain to recover from being so banged around.”
    “Erin, face reality. She can’t even
breathe
by herself.”
    Erin wanted to scream at him, but just then her father came home. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
    Erin stood facing Travis, her heart pounding, her fists balled. “Travis was just leaving,” she said tersely.
    Travis mumbled apologetic words to Erin and her dad and retreated out the door. She longed to slam it hard against his back.
    “What was
that
all about?” Mr. Bennett asked when she bent and started piling the albums.
    “Nothing. He’s just so negative about Amy’s condition, and I got mad. He says he’s not even going up to see her again until she comes out of the coma.”
    Mr. Bennett knelt down next to her and held her by the shoulders. “Don’t be so upset about it, honey.”
    Erin felt tears well up in her eyes. “But she likes him so much, and he acts like he doesn’t even care!”
    “You can’t expect everyone to handle this thing in the same way, Erin. Grief doesn’t affect us all alike.”
    “Grief?” She said the word incredulously. “Grief is when you cry. Travis isn’t crying. I guess he’s too macho for tears.”
    “In other words, real men don’t cry?”
    She held her spine stiff and put a chill in her voice. “Real men stick by the people they say they care about. They don’t have to bawl and blubber, but they
do
have to keep their