The Night Gift by Patricia A McKillip

Author:Patricia A McKillip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-22T16:00:00+00:00

I went home, then, alone. I went upstairs and sat cross-legged on my bed, not moving, feeling as though an ice cube were stuck, cold and hard, in my chest. I didn’t think very much; I just waited for the ice cube to melt. The wind set the half-rolled blind tick-ticking against the window; an airplane droned sleepily, persistently in the sky. Somewhere outside people were talking; somebody was mowing a lawn. They were all soft, lazy sounds I had heard all my life; I never realized before how pointless they could sound. I swallowed after a while, but the ice in my chest didn’t move.

Erica came in. I hardly noticed her until halfway through doing what she called making her bed, she looked at me and asked suspiciously, “Are you sick?”

“No.”

“You sound sick,” she said cheerfully. “Adrian Carne stayed home from school for six days with mono. Her mother said she’d been swimming too much, but Liz Cramer says you get mono from kissing. Maybe you’ve been kissing too much.”

That was hardly my problem. I moved a little, surprised that I could do it even with the ice cube. I said wearily, “I haven’t. I wish you would shut up.”

“Well don’t be so polite,” she grumbled. She kicked her shoes off and started looking for something, opening drawers and slamming them, picking things up and looking under them. She asked finally, “Have you seen my swim goggles?”

“No. I don’t know. Look under your bed.”

She went down on her knees. Her voice rose. “Well, what—Who put all this stuff under my bed? Here’s my goggles, and all my overdue library books and that blouse I was looking all over for this morning. Did you—What’d you do that for?”

“I was trying to find the floor.”

“Well, Joslyn—” Her voice squealed irritably, and I found myself on my feet before I even realized I moved.

“Well, God damn it,” I shouted, “how am I supposed to walk in here?”

Her head came out from under the bed, flushed, surprised. I went out, down the stairs, out the front door. I walked above the flowing, oblivious evening traffic, across the park where kids squealed as they pushed each other down the slide, kept walking until I found myself in front of the deserted house. I didn’t even check to make sure no one could see me. I just went in and closed the door.

The house was dark, still, musty. I took a big battery-operated lantern of Neil’s we kept by the door and went to the back room. I didn’t turn the light on for a while; I just sat on the floor in the dark. After a while I started to think.

I tried to figure out, from the time Neil had met Barbara on the mountain, what she had done to make him touch her face like that. She liked him, but she always seemed to be thinking more about Joe than about Neil. Girls were always chasing Neil, but she didn’t even have to touch him; he had reached out for her.

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