THE STOLEN CHILD

Come away, O human child!

— WB Yeats

The glare of fluorescents on hospital-white walls burned through her eyelids. Behind the thin shades, she could just make out an image of memory, a flickering of moving film from the past recreated in her mind and projected into her present. This time she wasn't a participant but instead hovered above the drama, observing it. As she followed along with the memory, she waited for the moment just before it had all gone dim, and she watched as it unfolded all over again. There was the moment when her body spasmed, pushed back across the kitchen floor from the force of the blast; and she noticed, almost simultaneously, her spirit lift from its physical shell and move toward another too-white light. She followed her body's progression through space and time to this light. The intensity of it did not offend, not as the white sheen of hospital walls did. Instead, its power shimmered; it fascinated, entranced, invited her in. Her senses obliged its summons to explore, and she reached out for the light, moving forward into feeling. All the love she had ever known or could ever imagine embraced her in its emotional cocoon. Her mother's smell, her grandmother's touch — all the sensations of the familiar she had once believed were lost — became a part of her, and she saw herself, or some manifestation of herself, moving willingly toward the light's source and into its belly.

Until, that is, something in the far reaches of her consciousness tugged at her for attention. When her father's voice — dislocated, distant, connected to the kitchen-floor vigil in which her dream-self now saw him — soothed and then begged and then pleaded with her to stay with him, to return to him, she wavered in her forward motion into the light for just a moment. She fought against his pull; she clung to the light, to that feeling of all-consuming love. I'm sorry, she thought, an apology for his ache.

"Come back, sweetheart; please come back," she heard her father pray through tears. "You can't leave me too."

Traveling through his words, his pain met her on the journey, marking the gap between her feeling of weightless delight and an overpowering commitment to her father's earthbound love. She turned from the light, just for the smallest of moments, and saw her father's broken, pitiful face. No matter how much she wanted to continue onto and through the light, she couldn't shake her father's anguish, so she turned her back on the love that overwhelmed her senses. The spirit touch of her mother and grandmother and of friends and family, known and unknown, dropped from her as she stood still in a tunnel of retreating light and love, the light speeding from what had been a great vortex surrounding her to nothing but a pinprick in front of her. She felt the emptying of absolute joy from within and the cares and worries of the physical world returning. Her limbs grew heavy and dense as she stood on the threshold between there and here. And then he spoke the line that brought her fully back:

"God, don't take her. Don't leave me alone."

In the moment of his plea, the heavyheartedness of her physical existence now tarnished by the unspeakable fully returned. A feeling of being sucked into the physical plane through the end of a straw completed her journey back from light. Whirling, swirling though consciousness, she landed, finally, with a thud on the kitchen floor of her parents' half double as the paramedics worked to revive her. Only she felt and heard the thud. If it weren't for the easing, and eventual cessation, of the flatlined tone, neither perceptible sound nor movement would have accompanied her return. When the monitors, hooked to her every appendage, beeped out her reentry into the world, her father's heartbeat fell in line, beating in tandem with hers. His daughter's restarted heart had an effect on his, reviving what had stopped in all but the biological sense when he entered his own kitchen to the bodies of his little girl and his best friend in their separate but quickly merging pools of blood. The gun, she noticed in her replaying memory, lay just out of the grasp of the other man's hand even as the paramedics worked on her, not on him. The acrid smell of gunpowder lingered crisp in the air.

All this she remembered as she lay motionless in the hospital bed. All this she saw play out in her mind-movie as she struggled between conscious states, wondering not for the last time if any of it was possible, if any of it had truly happened, if she would ever be able to forget.

In time, the young girl struggled to bring the room into focus. Her father sat at the side of her bed, him a sharp contrast to the clean of the room in which she found herself. She looked at her father through slits, not yet ready to open her eyes fully, the effort of it too great. He was unshaven — dirty, even. It was so unlike him, meticulous in his appearance as he normally was. Red lines crisscrossed the whites of his Kelly-green eyes; swollen shades of gray held them in place on his face. His dark brown hair fell matted against his head under the old baseball hat — Phillies — that he had worn off and on since Steve Carlton pitched his three-hundredth win sometime in the early eighties. The hat, his daughter knew, was pulled out of semi-retirement whenever her father needed some luck. It looked like it had been on his head for days now, unmoved, its luck being tested.

"Daddy."

His look was one of confusion. He didn't know if he had wished the sound into the room or if his little girl had actually said it. Hope laid itself on his face.

"Daddy," she tried again.

The strain of the simple word on her was palpable; she suffered its formation in her throat as the sounds built themselves more from a croak than from speech. It was a word so often invoked by her before that, until that moment in the hospital room when it escaped her bruised, broken body, it had lost its magnificence and had become, for all intents and purposes, normal and ordinary. The simple word was nothing short of striking to her father now, and tears jutted straight out from his eyes as he recognized the importance of its expression to the continuation of his life.

"Oh, thank God," he choked out. "Thank you, God," he said, although he had never been one to pray. Instead, he was a man...