Dan saw Laura wincing, but she didn’t let go of Melanie to cover her own ears. She maintained her loving grip, squeezing the girl tight, holding on.
The noise rose to an unbearable level, and Dan thought he had misjudged the girl, thought she was going to bring the roof down on all of them and kill everyone in order to kill herself. But abruptly the cacophony stopped, and the animated wreckage crashed back onto the floor, and the doors stopped slamming open and shut.
One last ceiling tile sailed down, struck the aisle beyond them, and tumbled over twice before coming to rest.
Stillness again.
Silence again.
For more than a minute they waited fearfully — and then the air grew warm.
At the back of the theater, a man who might have been the manager said, ‘What the hell happened in here?’
An usher, standing at the manager’s side, having apparently seen the start of the destruction, tried to explain but couldn’t.
Dan noticed movement up at the projectionist’s booth and saw a man peering out of one of the portals there. He looked amazed.
Laura finally pulled back from Melanie while Dan and Earl crouched at her side.
The child’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at anyone. Her gaze remained unfocused. But it wasn’t the same haunted look that had possessed her before. She was not yet focused on anything in this world, but she had ceased to gaze inward upon the haven in which she’d recently taken refuge. She was now on the borderline between that fantasy and this reality, between that introverted darkness and the world of light in which she would eventually have to make her life.
‘If the suicidal urge is gone — and I think it is — then the worst is past,’ Dan said. ‘I think she’ll come back all the way, in time. But it’ll take an infinite amount of patience and a lot of love.’
‘I’ve got enough of both,’ Laura said.
‘We’ll help,’ Earl said.
‘Yes,’ Dan said. ‘We’ll help.’
Years of therapy lay ahead for Melanie, and there was a chance she might remain autistic. But Dan had a feeling that she had closed the door to December for good, that she would never let it come open again. And if it was closed, if she could make herself forget how to open it, perhaps she could eventually forget the pain and violence and death that had occurred on the other side of that door.
Forgetting was the start of healing.
He realized that this was a lesson he himself needed to learn. A lesson in forgetting. He needed to forget the pain of his own failures. Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey. A desperate, childish hope flooded him: If only he could at last put those grim memories behind him and close his own door, then perhaps the girl would be able to close hers too; perhaps her recovery would be encouraged by his own determination to turn away from death.
He decided to bargain with God: Look here, Lord, I promise I’ll put the past behind me, stop dwelling too much on thoughts of blood and death and murder, take more time to live and to appreciate the blessings of life You’ve given me, be more grateful for what You’ve given me, and in return, God, all I want from You is, please, for Melanie to come all the way back. Please. Deal?
Holding and rocking her daughter, Laura looked at him. ‘You seem so … intense. What’s wrong? What’re you thinking?’
Even smeared with dirt and spotted with blood and disheveled, she was beautiful.
Dan said, ‘Forgetting is the start of healing.’
‘That’s what you were thinking?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all?’
‘It’s enough,’ he said. ‘It’s enough.’