The Gift

by Danielle Steel

  John carried her into the emergency room, and the nurses were waiting for them. Walt had called before they left the house, and Liz stood next to Annie, holding her hand and shaking as they did the spinal tap. They had wanted her to leave the room, but she had refused to leave her daughter.

  “I'm staying right here with her,” she said fiercely. The nurses exchanged a glance, and the doctor nodded.

  And by the end of the afternoon, they knew for a fact what he had suspected. Annie had meningitis. Her fever had gone up still further by that afternoon. She had a hundred and six point nine, and none of their efforts to lower it had had any effect whatsoever. She lay in the hospital bed, in the children's - ward, with the curtain pulled around her, and her parents and brother watching her, and she moaned softly from time to time but she never woke or stirred. And when the doctor checked her, her neck was completely rigid. He knew she couldn't last for long unless the fever broke, or she regained consciousness, but there was nothing they could do to bring her back or battle the disease for her. It was all in the hands of the fates. She had come to them as a gift five and a half years before, and had brought them nothing but love and joy, and now they could do nothing to stop the gift from being taken from them, except pray and hope, and beg her not to leave them. But she seemed to hear nothing at all, as her mother stood next to her, and kissed her face, and stroked her blazing little hand. John and Tommy alternately held the other hand, and then left to walk in the hall and cry. None of them had ever felt as helpless. But it was Liz who refused to let go, or give up without a fight. She felt as though leaving her for a moment might lose the battle. She wasn't going to let her slip silently into the dark, she was going to cling to her, and hold on, and fight to keep her.

  “We love you, baby … we all love you so much …Daddy, and Tommy, and I …you have to wake up …you have to open your eyes …come on, baby …come on … I know you can do it. You're going to be fine…. This is just a silly bug trying to make you sick and we won't let it, will we? …Come on, Annie …come on, baby …please….” She talked to her tirelessly for hours, and even late that afternoon, she refused to leave her. She finally accepted a chair, and sat down, still holding Annie's hand, and sometimes she sat silently, and sometimes she talked to her, and sometimes John had to leave because he couldn't bear it. By dinnertime, the nurses took Tommy away because he was so beside himself he couldn't take it anymore, watching his mother beg her to live, and his little sister whom he loved so much, still so lifeless. He could see what it was doing to his dad, and to his mom, and it was all too much for him. He just stood there and sobbed, and Liz didn't have the strength to comfort him too. She held him for a moment, and then the nurses led him away. Annie needed her too much. Liz couldn't leave her to go to Tommy. She would have to talk to him later.

  He had been gone for about an hour, when Annie let out a little soft moan, and then her eyelashes seemed to flutter. For a minute it looked as though she might open her eyes, and then she didn't. Instead, she moaned again, but this time she gently squeezed her mother's hand, and then as though she'd simply been asleep all day, she opened her eyes and looked at her mommy.

  “Annie?” Liz said in a whisper, totally stunned by what she was seeing. She signaled John to come closer to them. He had come back into the room and was standing near the door. “Hi, baby …Daddy and I are right here, and we love you so much.” Her father had reached her bedside by then, and each of them stood on one side of her pillow. She couldn't move her head toward either of them, but it was obvious that she could see them clearly. She looked sleepy, and she closed her eyes for an instant again, and then opened them slowly, and smiled.

  “I love you,” she said so softly they could hardly hear her. “Tommy? …”

  “He's here too.” There were rivers of tears pouring down Liz's face as she answered her, and she gently kissed her forehead as John cried too, no longer even embarrassed for her to see it. They loved her so much. He would do anything to get her to come through this.

  “Love Tommy …” she said softly again. “…love you …” and then she smiled clearly, looking more beautiful and more perfect than ever. She looked like the perfect child, lying there, so blond with big blue eyes, and the little round cheeks they all loved to kiss. She was smiling at them, as though she knew a secret they didn't. Tommy came into the room then, and he saw her too. She looked toward the foot of her bed and smiled right at him. He thought it meant that she was better again, and he began to cry with relief that they wouldn't lose her. And then, seeming to take them all in with her words, she said simply, “…thank you …” in the smallest of whispers. She closed her eyes then, with a smile, and a moment later she was sleeping, exhausted by her efforts. Tommy was rejoicing at what he'd seen as he left the room again, but Liz knew different. She sensed that something was wrong, that this didn't mean what it appeared to. And as she watched her, she could sense her drift away. The gift that she had been was gone again. It was being taken from them. They had had her for so brief a time, it seemed like barely more than moments. Liz sat holding her hand, and watching her, as John came and went. Tommy was asleep in a chair in the hallway by then. And it was almost midnight when she finally left them. She never opened her eyes again. She never woke. She had said what she had needed to tell them …she had told each of them how much she'd loved them …she had even thanked them …thank you … for five beautiful years …five tiny short years …thank you for this golden little life given to us so briefly. Liz and John were with her when she died, each one holding a hand, not so much to hold her back, but to thank her too for all she gave them. They knew by then that there would be no keeping her from leaving them, they simply wanted to be there when she left them.

  “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.”

  “It's been three months,” the other teacher reminded. It was already late March by then. Eisenhower had been in the White House for two months, the Salk polio vaccine had tested successfully, and Lucille Ball had finally had her much publicized baby. The world was moving on rapidly, but not for Tommy Whittaker. His life had stopped with the death of Annie.

  “Listen, it would take me a lifetime to get over that, if it were my kid' the more sympathetic of the two teachers said softly.

  “I know.” The two teachers fell silent, thinking of their own families, and by the end of lunch agreed to let Tommy slide for a while longer. But everyone had noticed it. He seemed not to take an interest in anything. He had even decided not to play basketball or baseball that spring, although the coach was trying to convince him. And at home his room was a mess, his chores were never done, and for the first time in his life, he seemed to be constantly at odds with his parents.

  But they were at odds with each other too. His mother and father seemed to argue constantly, and one of them was always loudly blaming the other for something. They hadn't put gas in the car, take
n out the garbage, let out the dog, paid the bills, mailed the checks, bought coffee, answered a letter. It was all unimportant stuff, but all they ever did anymore was argue. His father was never home. His mother never smiled. And no one seemed to have a kind word for anyone. They didn't even seem sad anymore, just angry. They were furious, at each other, at the world, at life, at the fates that had so cruelly taken Annie from them. But no one ever said that. They just yelled and complained about everything else, like the high cost of their light bill.

  It was easier for Tommy just to stay away from them. He hung around outside in the garden most of the time, sitting under the back steps and thinking, and he had started smoking cigarettes. He had even taken a couple of beers once or twice. And sometimes he just sat outside, under the back steps, out of the endless rain that had been pelting them all month, and drank beer and smoked Camels. It made him feel terribly grown up, and once he had even smiled, thinking that if Annie could have seen him, she'd have been outraged. But she couldn't, and his parents didn't care anymore, so it didn't matter what he did. And besides, he was sixteen years old now. A grown-up.

  “I don't give a damn if you are sixteen, Maribeth Robertson,” her father said, on a March night in Onawa, Iowa, some two hundred and fifty miles from where Tommy sat slowly getting drunk on beer under his parents' back steps, watching the storm flatten his mother's flowers. “You're not going out in that flimsy dress, wearing a whole beauty store of makeup. Go wash your face, and take that dress off.”