Free The Gift of the Darkness by Valentina Giambanco Page B

fifty people, mostly adults, some children.
    All the men wore yarmulkes, the Jewish skullcap worn during prayers. A man had put his hand on the father’s shoulder; he was saying something. Next to him the two surviving boys, John Cameron’s right arm in a sling. They looked lost. Standing by them, Nathan Quinn, a few years older, probably already in college. He was looking at his mother, raising his left hand as if to touch her.
    A chill shook Madison as if the temperature had suddenly dropped, a wave of nausea and a sense of falling. She slapped the folder shut and left her palm on it.
    She let a minute go by, just sitting in the gloomy silence, then gathered her things and left.
    She turned the engine on in her car, and out of nowhere she smelled the sweet air of the day in March when her mother had been buried. There were cherry blossoms in the breeze. Madison wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. Her father had stood behind her, the weight of his hands on her shoulders.
    She let the engine turn over and closed her eyes, waiting for the car to warm up.
    It was always the same funeral, over and over. Madison had gone to cops’ memorials, men and women she barely knew, but it was her mother’s grave she would be standing by in dress uniform while the flag was being folded.
    Her grandparents had arrived in Friday Harbor that morning, and they would leave shortly after the service. She hadn’t seen them in years. In their anguish they kept looking at this young girl who was so much like their dead daughter yet was a stranger to them.
    Five months later, Alice woke up in the middle of the night. Her Mickey Mouse clock read 2:15 a.m., and the full moon shone in her open window. Her room looked neat in the pale light, the efforts of a twelve-year-old girl who had a stack of school counselors’ telephone numbers and bereavement support groups’ notices pinned to her bulletin board and had not talked to any of them.
    Alice made her own lunches and got good grades. She’s a fighter , her class teacher had said. She’ll pull through . So she covered her schoolbooks in plain brown paper and lined up her bunny slippers when she went to bed, and that somehow got her through the days; inside, though, she was drowning.
    Alice heard the steps in the hall and knew it couldn’t be her dad, who wouldn’t be home till morning. She grabbed her baseball bat and waited, the adrenaline making her chest hurt.
    When the intruder’s steps had receded down the hall and out of the house, her relief tasted like copper from a bite on her lip. She waited for a minute, then slid out of bed and peeked out the window to make sure the man had really left: way down the road, half in gloom, she saw him, walking fast and away from her. He passed under a street lamp, and, even at that distance, Alice knew it was her father. She dropped her baseball bat and stood there feeling stupid. Sugar! Why didn’t he turn the darn light on? She’d almost had a heart attack.
    Turning the lights on as she went, Alice padded into the kitchen. Still unsettled and a little out of herself, she ran water from the tap and into a glass. As she was walking back, the door to her parents’ room—her father’s room—was ajar, and she saw that the top right-hand drawer of the dresser was sticking out a couple of inches. Her mother’s private drawer. They hardly ever opened it; it contained her mom’s jewelry box, and Alice allowed herself to hold her things only very rarely, every one of them a memory too sharp and sweet.
    She stood by the dresser now, and everything in her soul told her to close the drawer and go back to bed. Nothing good could possibly come of it, that pinprick of doubt that would make her feel too guilty to look her father in the eye for days. She rested her forehead against the dresser; she had to look, and she knew it.
    She pulled the drawer open and lifted the black velvet jewelry box; the small latch in the shape of a hook was undone. The