They wake to screaming. Mark shoves the coffee table out of the way, the books spilling onto the floor. He throws the door open and runs inside. The man is behind him. His digital watch reads 4:17 A.M. The girl is curled up in the sheets, face white as the snow falling outside, her screams piercing. She stares into the far corner, her legs kicking under the covers. Mark runs over to her side and the man holds the Beretta pistol in his hands. Mark kneels onto the bed and the girl throws herself onto him; the man swings the gun around but lowers it when he sees her clinging to him, burying her head into his chest. Mark squeezes her tightly and runs his fingers through her golden hair. Horrendous sobs soak his shirt with salty tears. Her fingers wrap around his shoulder and arm, gripping him in a vice grip, her fingernails poking through his shirt and scratching at his shoulder-blades, drawing blood. He doesn’t care. She continues to sob and lifts her head and looks back into the corner and screams again, gripping the boy tighter. Mark winces as her fingers cut into him, and he looks over at the man. The man takes a deep breath: “She’s hallucinating.”
She’s better come morning. Mark asks her what happened, and she tells him that her mother had come, and she had been one of them, but she left a little while after Mark showed up. “She was scared of you. Because you protect me. She didn’t love me. Not anymore.” Mark tells her that she did love her, and it was dark, so she looked like a dark-walker. But really she wasn’t, and she just came to see if her baby was doing okay, and she left when she realized she was safe. The girl smiles at him. “You remind me of my big brother,” she says.
Mark stays by her side. Snowfall accumulates, melts, falls again. The days go by, painstakingly slow. Her symptoms fluctuate, but she isn’t getting better. The man recommends Mark distance himself from the girl, but he’ll have none of it—“She’s suffering, and she’s scared, and she shouldn’t be alone.” At night he reads her children’s books. Christmas is coming, so he goes to the library and finds Christmas-themed picture books. He reads her the stories, and sometimes she reads along. She enjoys the pictures: it serves as an escape. She loses herself in the stories, and Mark does, too. Some of her favorites include “The Littlest Angel,” “Shall I Knit You A Hat?”, “Santa’s Stuck,” and “Christmas in the Barn.” But she always wants him to read her “An Orange for Frankie” every night.
“Christmas is in two days,” Mark tells the man as they sip lukewarm clam chowder from coffee mugs.
“I know,” the man says.
“You don’t have to get me anything.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
Mark stares into the murky white broth, bits of pale gray clam swimming at the top. “I was thinking about getting something for Lindsey. Maybe a big stuffed animal. They have big ones at Wal-Mart. I could get her one. Maybe it’ll help her sleep at night.”
“Okay,” the man says.
Mark is quiet. “You don’t think I should.”
The man looks up at him. “She is going to die.”
The boy leans back in his chair. “It’s Christmas. She deserves to be happy.”
“Her entire family has been taken from her. How can she be happy?”
“I can at least try.”
“Fine. Then get her a stuffed animal. But it won’t fix everything.”
“I know. I just want her to be happy.”
“Are you sure you’re not just doing this for yourself?”
“How would me getting her a Christmas gift be selfish?”
“You lost your sister. And now you’ve found another one.”
“You’re saying I’ve replaced Amanda with Lindsey.”
“Subconsciously, yes.”
“Amanda’s dead. And I can’t change that. I can’t bring her back to life.”
“Of course you can’t. But maybe you’re trying to do that. With Lindsey.”
He shakes his head. “You’re incredible, you know that? Someone tries to do a selfless thing, and you’ve got to find an excuse to make them feel like shit for it.”
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