Danielle Steel: The Gift

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, taken 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.”

“Daddy, it's the spring dance. And everyone wears makeup and prom dresses.” The girl her older brother had taken out two years before, at her age, had looked a whole lot racier and her father had never objected. But that was Ryan's girlfriend, and that was different of course. Ryan could do anything. He was a boy, Maribeth wasn't.