The Gift Read Online Free PDF Page A

…” 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