Free The Window by Jeanette Ingold Page B

"Mandy, it probably won't live, you know. Wild things often don't."
    I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but I can't. "Please don't let it die, Aunt Emma," I say. "Please, please don't."
    Ted, on the drive to school, is absolutely delighted with himself, all out of proportion to saving an orphaned opossum.

    At school Hannah's lining up my day, telling me we should go shopping in the afternoon.
    I tell her I can't. I have to get home to the opossum.
    Besides, I wish Hannah would understand that I don't want her help shopping. Finding the right presents for Aunt Emma and the uncles is something I should be able to do by myself.
    The school halls are even more noisy than usual, and at lunch the cafeteria is thundering with band instruments playing a preview of a holiday concert. I can't hear what anybody is saying, can't even hear voices well enough to know who's sitting where.
    "I'm leaving," I shout, to whoever's listening. I get up, only where I thought there was a space there's not and I knock a tray crashing to the floor. I reach down, touch something cold and wet, wonder how to clean up.
    Someone says, "I'll get it."
    I sink back into my chair. For a moment everything—the tray, all the noise—it's more than I can deal with.
    "Hey," somebody yells in my ear, "you're complaining about the food?" I recognize Ryan's voice. He's trying to make me feel better.
    Then Hannah's with me, and we're walking outside toward the building where the resource room is.
    "I don't know what happened," I begin. I realize I owe Hannah some sort of explanation, but I'm just too tired and overwhelmed to make it. The opossum, Aunt Emma giving in to me, those blasted presents I don't know what to do about ... This day feels like it's been thirty hours long.
"Sometimes I just want to get away from everything."
    "Me top," says Hannah.
    In Ms. Z.'s room I slump into a seat, and for once nobody comes and asks me if I need help. I must sit there twenty or thirty minutes, listening to the quiet click and chunk of keyboards and printers, to the hum of machinery fans, to the murmur of one of the boys reading under his breath. Slowly things calm down inside me, until I'm finally ready to get to work.
    I go to my computer and begin a file for a paper I'm writing for English. The assignment is to capture an instant using sensory detail. I'm doing mine on an early summer morning, as far from Christmas as I can get.
    It's pretty boring stuff, how the sunrise looked through the back window of the car the summer Mom and I drove west. How the sky went clear down to the earth. How empty the road was, empty as we were because we hadn't stopped for breakfast yet, empty like I always felt when we'd left one place and hadn't yet found the next.
    I hear someone come up behind me. Ms. Z. says, "You make it seem real."
    "It's just what I remember," I say.
    "Being able to remember details is a gift."
    And then she goes away and Ted takes her place. He must have been watching us, reading our lips, because he says, "I heard the ocean once, in a seashell. When I was little, before my hearing got so bad. But I don't have words for the sound."
    I know what he's saying, that he wishes he could put sounds on paper, to keep them.
    The way I wish I could know for sure I won't ever forget the sky, or the color of an empty road.
    "I hope Ms. Z.'s right," I say, "about me having a gift for remembering. Because sometimes I wake up and everything is black, and for an awful time I wonder if I've forgotten how it was, what things looked like."
    "Like the sun," says Ted. "Like the sun through the car window. You won't, Mandy."
    I shrug. How can he know?

Chapter 12

    E MMA'S WAITING for me on the front lawn when I get home. She tells me right away that the opossum is alive. "Cute little thing," she says. "And hungry! He's been eating all day, eating and sleeping."
    Emma's been busy, made some phone calls, bought some stuff that is supposed to be better than the cow milk replacer.