Free A Stranger's House by Bret Lott

the big airplane until it disappeared behind hills to the south, and I began to know then the fear my mother felt, the world closing down around us, my father gone with the simple act of glancing at a watch and the gift from God of a light blanket of snow.
    Though I was only eleven—only, I saw that day, a little girl—my mother began to make sense to me, her fear sinking into my chest like so many pine boards. Her fear was clear to me, suddenly, likethe change in weather from the day of the funeral to that day with the plane. The day of the funeral the snow was still coming down, and the handful of flowers I tossed onto the casket sent the snow-flakes that had gathered there up and away like white ash in a light breeze. Now all that snow had melted, the sky open and clean.
    She was right to fear, I thought, and I moved from the circle of kids still playing dodgeball to the chain-link fence encircling the playground. Her life came to me then, and pieces of it seemed to fit somehow: her own father had died, I knew, when she was only four. It had been in the spring, I remembered my mother telling me one time, and he and some friends had gone up to Sunderland for the first swim of the year in the Connecticut. He’d climbed a low-hanging tree just north of the bridge up there, and dived in head first, breaking his neck on a submerged log that hadn’t been there the year before. So there was that loss, that vacancy with which to begin her life. When she had been a senior in high school—two weeks, in fact, before she was to graduate—her mother had been found to have cancer. Before summer was over she had died in a hospital room in Springfield, having lost fifty-six pounds—that number important enough to my mother to have been passed on to me—and leaving my mother to the care of an aunt and uncle in Newton. She moved to a town she’d been to only once before, a town at the other end of the state, where she knew no one, loved no one.
    This was my mother’s history, the only facts I knew that day, only a sketch, but one that made fear fill up in me. Accidents, I thought, are real and will happen. That was why the word had been created, a label for this unforseeable yet inevitable factor of life. And my life, I had seen, would be filled with them; my father had disappeared, and there was no one to protect me from them. My stomach seemed to tumble, and I was dizzy a moment, closed my eyes, leaned on the chain-link fence at my face. My father was gone, and I had been playing a child’s game when I ought to have been waiting for yet another accident to occur. He was gone, and the sounds he made—the crack of the stairs as he went down them and to work each morning, the engine turning over in the garage and the crunch of tire against gravel as he backed out of the driveway, him stomping snow off his shoes on the porch outside the door at the end of aday—would never come back, sounds simply gone from the face of the earth.
    I opened my eyes then, and the world was made of ugly colors and shook in my tears. I put the back of one hand to my face, tried to block tears from leaving my eyes while my stomach still twisted, and I remembered his voice. But it was more than that, more than memory: I
heard
him, as if he were just behind me to my left. I heard him say
This is Claire Shaw,
and was astounded at how solid his voice became inside me. I took in a breath and quickly turned, expecting,
knowing
he was there. But he was not. There were only kids, like me, playing a game that involved moving, moving from a hurled object that, if you weren’t quick enough or weren’t paying attention, might harm you. Only kids, and their own sounds in the world: laughter, yells, running. Sounds I made. Things I did.
    This is Claire Shaw
I heard again, this time a whisper, warm in my ear, my father there with me; and I decided then, only a little girl, that I would not let fear consume me, not let it