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Show Moon - 66 The silence grew thicker and Joy did not breathe. "She wouldn't let him go to a doctor until it was too late. He had it everywhere, even in his fingertips. Ruth pretends. She lies. I hate her." The shadows on the stairs seemed to swoop around Joy, and she turned, afraid that her father would wake up and find her there. But she could not seem to get up. She heard the clatter of a coffee cup dropped into a saucer. Then, "His face was purple, and his tongue, it was black." Joy leaped up then and ran to her room. Shivering and sobbing, she pulled the blanket off her bed as if to uncover something hidden there. She rolled inside the blanket on the floor, wanting never again to get into her bed. Esther was gone the next morning. It wasn't even Christmas yet. Joy never asked her mother about that night. Perhaps her mother didn't believe Esther. Perhaps her grandad really did die peacefully, after all, in his warm soft bed. Inside you was the seed of my second brother, Lee, who grew up to be the most beautiful of men. A few years after you died, he told Caleb and me that your death might not have been as peaceful as Aunt Alice had said. He told us that a group believing in astral bodies invited him to one of their sessions about a year after you died. Those people told him that a whole host of people hover around us, living on another plane. You can't normally see them, but they touch us, talk to us, need us to know that they're there. He sat with the group around a table where they chanted and held hands. An icy draft came into the room and blew up the corners of the tablecloth. It became deathly silent. Lee swears that he |