jumped in, positioning himself to shoulder her and nestle her into the soft, cool earth at the bottom. If he could just think of a way, he would lie down beside her and pull the dirt like a blanket around them both.
But there was no way, so he hoisted himself up out of the grave and bid her goodbye before he filled the hole.
Cynthia. Michigan. Eventually he hoped that would be all he would remember. And in time that would fade and jumble, so when the night terrors struck, he wouldn't recall which face belonged to which name, or whether last year had been the year for Laura in Milwaukee, or was it the year before? Could it really have been as long as five years ago when Valerie...
He hated when it happened that way. It seemed disloyal to Cynthia and Laura and -- no, it was best not to think of Valerie at all.
Nicholas had loved each of them, loved them to the depths of his soul, but he had to forget them. Or else how would he have the strength to go on to the next?
And maybe the next would be the one.
It was safer, he believed, to count to only two: the last one and the next one. He could not allow himself to think of the others, or to suppose there would be any beyond the next one. He was not some monster who wanted this to go on forever. Cynthia didn't think him a monster. None of them did.
Trissa
Trissa Kirk believed she must have used up her allotment of wishes long ago. Like Aladdin with his magic lamp, each person was limited to a small, finite number. Without realizing it, she had wasted hers on frivolous things, like wishing she had chocolate sauce for her ice cream or a new dress for Easter. The important wishes had never come true for her. Her father hadn't stopped drinking. Her brother hadn't come home from the army. By now she had learned the futility of wishing. Or praying. Though the habit died hard in her needy heart.
Now, even the trivial wishes were no longer granted her. When she lay awake long into the night, she remembered how often she had wished they didn't have a cuckoo clock, trivial though it may seem. For, no matter how hard she tried to avoid knowing the hours as they slipped by her, refusing to look at the bedside clock, burying her head in the pillow, the cuckoo always betrayed her. As he called out his reminders on the hour and half hour, she knew each call brought her closer to the time when her father would come home. The later it grew, the worse it would be.
There was a chance before midnight he would merely stumble in and fall asleep on the sofa. But by two or three, the cuckoo became shrill and frantic in its warning.
"Watch out! Watch Out!"
"Go hide! Go hide! Go hide!"
But they never listened. What good, for where could they go? Her mother would wait in the kitchen, scuffing across the crumb-littered floor, drinking coffee and smoking. Trissa would burrow under the covers or take her blanket to the corner of the closet and cower among the hanging hems and cluttered shoes, hoping to block out her mother's shrill screams and her father's bellowing, wishing she didn't know the crashes and slaps she heard were the sounds of them lashing out and beating each other.
She was fourteen years old, too old to believe in wishes. Trissa slept in the closet most nights now. She was afraid to trust herself to the softness of her bed, afraid her vigilance would betray her and allow her to be sucked into sleep. From her safe cubbyhole, she could hear her father's grunts of displeasure when he opened her door to find her bed empty. He rarely had the consciousness to look for her. Finding her access inconvenient, he would return to her mother for more angry harassment usually ending in the release he had thought to seek from his daughter.
Trissa learned she must look out for herself now. It was no longer a duty she could expect her mother to perform. It was an abdication she had long suspected but had finally confirmed the afternoon she had begged her for help.
"Mom, I'm afraid of Daddy."
Her mother looked up from her ceaseless game of solitaire at the kitchen table cluttered with the sleazy true crime books she never seemed to