Free Betrayed by Carol Thompson Page B

much school, she was registered as a part-time student so that she could write her final exams.

Surviving
    I had spent nine days of hell, hunting and praying. Now I had to con front the fact that my child was gone. Not for a few days, months or years, but forever. I would never again hear her laughter or her voice , never smell her special scent. Never hear whatever thrilling song she’d hoped one day to sing for the world. It was over. A hefty door had been slammed shut and left me outside, alone. There would be no more sharing of good times, no more arguing over little things that seem so important at the time but in reality aren’t important at all. The knowledge bruised and frightened me.
    My mind skimmed back to the last time I had seen her. There was such a clear image of her in my mind and heart, but I wondered how long it would be before I would battle to remember the tone and pitch of her voice. I picked up a photo of her, fearful that I would forget what her precious face actually looked like and in time remember only the memory. I relived those last moments with her over and over. The haunting moments that neither of us realised would be our last together. I tried to remember what our final words had been. Had I said “I love you”? I couldn’t remember. All I knew was that my last sight of her was when she was running out the kitchen door to the car she had left idling in the driveway, calling something now forgotten to me over her shoulder.
    Monday was a day to endure. There was nothing any of us could do, but there were still twenty-four hours to get through before we could go to the mortuary. Against the fog of that day only a few things have stuck in my mind. One memory is of many of Tracey’s friends coming to see us, and of me comforting them. It was as if I was unin volved in all this emotion; their friend had been murdered, not my daughter. Perhaps I had buried the hurt deep so that I could survive. We had the rest of our lives to face without our daughter and my body was protecting me from reality. This gave me the strength to support her friends. But even when I went to my bedroom to try and get some rest and a breather away from death, death followed me, permeated my every pore.
    The other memory that emerges from the dim murkiness of that long day is of a brief escape into lightness. Marsha had had a bad night on the soft mattress on Tracey’s bed, so on her second night we decided to use an air mattress on the floor. We took it outside so we could blow it up using the compressor from my car. Talking and listening to the air whoosh into the mattress had a calming effect, but the mattress stayed flat. We checked the stopper at the top but it was tight, so no air could be escaping. We pumped some more, and still it stayed flat. Then I remembered that the mattress had two stoppers , one at the top and one at the bottom. As we pumped air in at the top , it was simply escaping from the one at the bottom. We collapsed on the mattress, whooping with laughter way out of proportion to how funny it really was.
    Suddenly there was a deafening hush. We looked at each other in horror, knowing how out of place our laughter was in a house of death. A desperate attempt to pretend nothing had changed in our lives, a way of clinging to our sanity, a brief escape from harsh reality.
    Coldness gripped me. Darkness, never-ending unfathomable dark ness . My life became a collection of splinters and fragments I carried inside me. Some were sharp and painful to touch. I hardly dared hope that I would salvage enough of the less intense pieces that I needed to make my life whole again. I tried to step forward into the light, but the darkness pulled me back into despondency. How long would I have to live in this barren place without warmth or comfort? How long before some small sign of life would warm my frozen heart? My child, my reason for living, had been taken in death.
    My heart was beating but