“I love you,” Liz whispered for a last time, as she breathed the smallest of last breaths…. “I love you….” It was only an echo. She had left them on angel wings. The gift had been taken from them. Annie Whittaker was a spirit. And her brother slept on in the hall remembering her …thinking of her …loving her …just as they all had. A remembering only days before when they had pretended to be angels in the snow, and now, she truly was one.

Chapter Two

The funeral was an agony of pain and tenderness, the kind of stuff of which mothers' nightmares are made. It was two days before New Year's Eve, and all their friends came, children, parents, her teachers from kindergarten and nursery school, John's associates and employees, and the teachers Liz had taught with. Walter Stone was there too. He told them in a quiet aside that he reproached himself for not having come out the night Liz called. He had assumed it was only a flu or a cold, and he shouldn't have made that assumption. He admitted too, that even if he had come, he wouldn't have been able to change anything. The statistics on meningitis were in almost every instance devastating in young children. Liz and John kindly urged him not to blame himself, and yet Liz blamed herself for not asking him to come out to the house that night, and John blamed himself equally for telling Liz it was nothing. Both hated themselves for having made love while she slipped into a coma in her bed. And Tommy was unsure why he felt that way, but he blamed himself for her death too. He should have been able to make a difference. But none of them had.

Annie had been, as the priest said that day, a gift to them for a brief time, a little angel on loan to them from God—a little friend come to teach them love and bring them closer together. And she had. Each person who sat there remembered the impish smile, the big blue eyes, the shining little face that made everyone laugh or smile, or love her. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that she had come to them as a gift of love. The question was how they would live on now, without her. It seemed to all of them as though the death of a child stands as a reproach for all one's sins, and a reminder of all one stands to lose in life at any moment. It is the loss of everything, of hope, of life, of the future. It is a loss of warmth, and all things cherished. And there were never three lonelier people than Liz and John and Tommy Whittaker on that bitter cold December morning. They stood freezing at her graveside, among their friends, unable to tear themselves away from her, unable to bear leaving her there in the tiny white, flowered coffin.

“I can't,” Liz said in a strangled voice to John after the service was over, and he knew immediately what she meant and clutched her arm, afraid she might slip into hysterics. They had been close to that for days, and Liz looked even worse now. “I can't leave her here … I can't …” She was choking on sobs, and in spite of her resistance, he pulled her closer.

“She's not here, Liz, she's gone …she's all right now.”

“She's not all right. She's mine … I want her back … I want her back,” she said, sobbing, as their friends drifted awkwardly away, not knowing how to help her. There was nothing one could do or say, nothing to ease the pain, or make it better. And Tommy stood there watching them, aching inside, pining for Annie.

“You all right, son?” his hockey coach asked him, as he drifted by, wiping tears from his cheeks without even trying to conceal them. Tommy started to nod yes, and then shook his head no, and collapsed into the burly man's arms, crying. “I know … I know … I lost my sister when I was twenty-one, and she was fifteen … it stinks … it really stinks. Just hang on to the memories …she was a cute little thing,” he said, crying along with Tommy. “You hang on to all of it, son. She'll come back to you in little blessings all your life. Angels give us gifts like that …sometimes you don't even notice. But they're there. She's here. Talk to her sometimes when you're alone …she'll hear you …you'll hear her …you'll never lose her.” Tommy looked at him strangely for a minute, wondering if he was crazy, and then nodded. And his father had finally gotten his mother away from the grave by then, though barely. She could hardly walk by the time they got back to their car, and his father looked almost gray as he drove their car home, and none of them said a word to each other.

People dropped in all afternoon, and brought them food. Some only left food or flowers on the front steps, afraid to bother them or face them. But there seemed to be a steady stream of people around constantly nonetheless, and there were others who stayed away, as though they felt that if they even touched the Whittakers, it could happen to them too. As though tragedy might be contagious.

Liz and John sat in the living room, looking exhausted and wooden, trying to welcome their friends, and relieved when it was late enough at night to lock their front door and stop answering the phone. And through it all, Tommy sat in his own room and saw no one. He walked past her room once or twice, but he couldn't bear it. Finally, he pulled the door closed so he wouldn't see it. All he could remember was how she had looked that last morning, so sick, so lifeless, so pale, only hours before she left them. It was hard to remember now what she had looked like when she was well, when she was teasing him or laughing. Suddenly, all he could see was her face in the hospital bed, those last minutes when she had said “thank you …” and then died. He was haunted by her words, her face, the reasons for her death. Why had she died? Why had it happened? Why couldn't it have been him instead of Annie? But he told no one what he felt, he said nothing to anyone. In fact, for the rest of the week, the Whittakers said nothing to each other. They just spoke to their friends when they had to, and in his case, he didn't.

New Year's Eve came and went like any other day in the year, and New Year's Day went unnoticed. Two days later he went back to school, and no one said anything to him. Everyone knew what had happened. His hockey coach was nice to him, but he never mentioned his own sister again, or Annie. No one said anything to Tommy about any of it, and he had nowhere to go with his grief. Suddenly, even Emily, the girl he had been flirting with awkwardly for months, seemed like an affront to him because he had discussed her with Annie. Everything reminded him of what he had lost, and he couldn't bear it. He hated the constant pain, like a severed limb, and the fact that he knew everyone looked at him with pity. Or maybe they thought he was strange. They didn't say anything to him. They left him alone, and that's how he stayed. And so did his parents. After the initial flurry of visitors, they stopped seeing their friends. They almost stopped seeing each other. Tommy never ate with them anymore. He couldn't bear sitting at their kitchen table without Annie, couldn't bring himself to go home in the afternoon and not share milk and cookies with her. He just couldn't stand being in his house without her. So he stayed at practice as long as he could, and then ate the dinner his mother left for him in the kitchen. Most of the time, he ate it standing up, next to the stove, and then dumped half of it into the garbage. The rest of the time he took a handful of cookies to his room with a glass of milk and skipped dinner completely. His mother never seemed to eat at all anymore, and his father seemed to come home later and later from work, and he was never hungry either. Real dinners seemed to be a thing of the past for all of them, time together something they all feared and avoided. It was as though they all knew that if, the three of them were together, the absence of the fourth would be too unbearably painful. So they hid, each of them separately, from themselves, and from each other.

Everything reminded them of her, everything awoke their pain like a throbbing nerve that only quieted down for an occasional second, and the rest of the time, the pain it caused was almost beyond bearing.

His coach saw what was happening to him, and one of his teachers mentioned it just before spring vacation. For the first time in his entire school career, his grades had slipped and he seemed not to care about anything anymore. Not without Annie.

“The Whittaker boy's in a bad way,” his homeroom teacher commented to the math teacher one day at the faculty table in the cafeteria. “I was going to call his mother last week, and then I saw her downtown. She looks worse than he does. I think they all took it pretty hard when their little girl died last winter.”

“Who wouldn't?” the math teacher said sympathetically. She had kids of her own, and couldn't imagine how she'd survive it. “How bad is it? Is he flunking anything?”

“Not yet, but he's getting close,” she said honestly. “He used to be one of my top students. I know how strongly his parents feel about education. His father even talked about sending him to an Ivy League college, if he wanted to go, and had the grades. He sure doesn't now.”

“He can pull himself up again. It's only been three months. Give the kid a chance. I think we ought to leave them alone, him and his parents, and see how he does by the end of the school year. We can always call them if he really goes off the deep end and fails an exam or something.”

“I just hate to see him slide down the tubes this way.”

“Maybe he has no choice. Maybe right now he has to fight just to survive what happened. Maybe that's more important. Hard as it is for me to admit sometimes, there are more important things in life than social studies and trig. Let's give the kid a chance to catch his breath and regain his balance.”