I pulled my sweater close around me. Jamie hadn’t had seizures for a very long time.
“Something was going to happen eventually. You knew that,” Sam volunteered. I wanted him away from me.
“Not to Jamie. It doesn’t happen to Jamie,” I said, looking out the window. Smoky haze over the bare November trees. Jamie loved the fall.
After the funeral I opened the blue box. Not right away. I just went into her room when I got back. All her treasures there, the usual things, the pictures and ornaments and keepsakes from our trips to the lake and the seashore and our car rides out into the countryside. She’d always be excited to get out and explore a new place and would always bring something home with her.
The box looked such a pretty shade of pale blue on the bed in the afternoon sunlight. I stayed there for hours, for when I roused myself it was growing dark outside.
“How do I do it all without you, my sweet Jamie?” I couldn’t cry, so I guessed I was numb and probably should call someone and get them to come over and talk to me. But who? Who would understand?
The faint sounds came then, or maybe they had started before and I hadn’t noticed. I looked at the box. High-pitched sounds seemed to come from it, like the leaking sound when I would pass by someone listening to music, with their ear buds never good enough to keep the music in. Something tinny and persistent. So it seemed.
The box was all I had of her.
“Okay, my Jamie. If you don’t mind, I’ll open it now.” I looked up at the ceiling as if she could hear me.
A small clasp held the box closed. I released it and opened the cover. It was just as before, empty. I heard nothing. I started to cry, and found I couldn’t stop. Such a grief, I thought, I can’t survive such a grief. Where was my little girl?
It was then the sounds began again, with the cover open, and they were different from before. It was the song Jamie had sung to the doctors in the hospital, the same song they hadn’t really heard at all. The box was filled with voices singing the same music, not tinny at all, but pure, silvery, and incandescent, and all of it was the gift of my Jamie.