Kealan Burke - Kin

“I loved him,” she told his father. “They were my life.”

She half-expected him to say, “A life you still have,” and spit on the floor as he stormed out, but instead he nodded, and put a hand on the door. He was almost in the hall before he turned, looking more troubled than she’d yet seen him. “Has Danny’s brother been to see you?”

“No.”

“He will,” Ted told her. “He’s calling on all the parents, and he mentioned wanting to see you too.”

“Why?”

A curious look passed over the man’s face. It was almost relief. “It’s better if he explains it to you himself.”

Any further questions she might have asked died in her mouth as he exited the room. She heard him talking to her mother as she escorted him downstairs, then he was gone, and once more the house was quiet.

In the photo album, beside a picture of Daniel in his football uniform, was a scrap of yellow notepaper riddled with creases. On it was written his cell phone number and beneath that, his barely legible scrawl tangled into the words “ Call Me! ”

Claire smiled and ran a finger over the clear plastic sheet holding it in place beside the photograph. In her old life, the happy, unthreatening one she’d known before the men had taken it from her, she’d been a packrat. There were no empty spaces in her room, and her closet was filled with old boxes, each of them containing memories and keepsakes from her years spent wandering through the minefield of teenage life. There were rolled up posters of football games, victories made memorable by the mischief perpetrated later beyond the sidelines. There were ticket stubs and receipts, kept to remind her of special moments with old boyfriends, most of whom she still cared for in some small way, but seldom thought about anymore. Pennants and flyers, old high school and even middle school notebooks, branded with scribbles of trivial significance now, but which had had monumental import back then; love letters from nervous young boys on the threshold of puberty; report cards which had earned her $50 a piece from her father, allowing her to save up and be the first of her group of friends to own a car; the police report of the drunk-driving incident that had seen that car totaled; video cassettes of long gone birthdays and Christmases her mother had wanted to throw away after her father died, too pained by the memory of his prominent role in them; brochures from vacations with her family, getaways with Daniel and her friends; the audio CD Daniel had given her of love songs for Valentine’s day. She hadn’t cared for most of the songs, but had appreciated the sentiment.

And of course, there were the photo albums.

She looked at the slip of paper bearing Daniel’s cell phone number and felt a tightening in her throat.

Then she thought of Muriel Hynes, and though her face was hard to recall, Claire remembered she’d been a mousy, shy girl with glasses, lank brown hair, and a prominent overbite. She remembered feeling sorry for the girl, then being ashamed that she had. It was not her place to pity anyone, and by doing so was subconsciously assuming herself on a higher position on the social ladder. But as wrong as it felt to think it, she realized it was true. Claire had always been popular, blessed (and often cursed) with long blonde hair, generous breasts, and a trim figure. It had made her passage through high school much easier for the most part, despite the disdain her appearance and the company she kept instilled in the other cliques. The Goths had viewed her as a stuck-up rich girl, though she’d been neither. The art students and rockers had sneered at her as if though one day she might provide them inspiration for their work, they wouldn’t be seen dead with her. The “nerds” worshipped but never dared approach her, conscious of their appearance and the stigma long-associated with the intelligent. Among them had wandered the painfully demure Muriel Hynes, but only for one semester. By the next, she’d already been interred in Oak Grove Cemetery after slashing her wrists in the bathtub. She’d been dead for over four hours before her father kicked in the door and found her.

Claire looked down at her own wrists, at the angry red lines carved into the flesh, and thought of Muriel, of the picture hanging in the hall at school. The girl in the portrait was smiling, but only just, as close to an imitation of the Mona Lisa as Claire had ever seen. In that moment, forever frozen in time, it seemed as if Muriel had been privy to knowledge that the Goths, for all their posturing and claims to the contrary, didn’t know: Living is hard; Death is easy . And there are no answers on either side.

The night of Muriel’s funeral, Claire had booted up her computer, logged on to the Internet and checked her old email folder until she found what she was looking for. It was the one and only communication she’d ever had from the dead girl. Eight weeks before her suicide, the girl had written to Claire with one odd simple message: “I like ur hair.” Confused, Claire hadn’t written back, but that night, as she reread those four words in an attempt to derive some greater meaning from them, some hidden significance that might help her understand why Muriel had taken her life, she wished she had. And then a strange and not entirely pleasant thought had occurred to her as she looked from the message to the girl’s email address.

What if I answer now?

And even more unsettling: What if she replies?

The uneasiness these thoughts summoned had been enough to make her shut down the computer in a hurry.

Now, looking at the picture of Daniel, and the number scrawled on that small piece of paper— Call Me! —it came to her again.

What if I called?

What if he answered?

She struggled to remember what had become of Daniel’s cell phone during the attack. Panic had blinded her, of course. She’d only been aware of the impossibility of what was happening, sure, right up until Katy was stabbed, that it had all been some kind of sick joke. She did not recall seeing Daniel reach into his pocket for his phone, and later, did not see their attackers take it.

But she’d heard it ringing.

In her prison, as the strength tried to leave her, consciousness flickering like a candle flame in a draft, she’d been pulled back into the cold horror of her circumstances by the distant sound of a computer circuit’s attempt to replicate Mozart’s “Symphony Number 9”—the familiar sound of Daniel’s phone as someone tried to call him. Then his agonized scream had drowned it out.

Claire peeled the protective plastic away from the page of the photo album, and gently removed the yellow slip of paper. She held it in her trembling hands for a moment, then looked at the photograph of her dead boyfriend.

I loved you , she said. Did you love me?

She had only memories from which to draw an answer, but even they betrayed her, for Daniel had never told her he’d loved her, and so she would never know.

Unless she asked.

She turned her head.

The phone, girly pink like the rest of the room, sat on her nightstand, silent.

Don’t be silly , she cautioned herself. This is madness . It won’t do anything but aggravate the pain. She smiled grimly at that. She could not imagine a pain worse than this, no suffering worse than that of the sole survivor.

She pushed the photo album aside, eased herself across the bed, and picked up the phone, then set the number beside it, under the tasseled pink lampshade.

Her heart began to race.

What am I doing?

Carefully, breath held, she dialed.

The digits, registering as dull beeps in her ear.