A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry Page A

since the last time we did it, and I think I have, a little. But he's pretty uninhibited, and he tried. It was dark outside; we had eaten late. Mom turned on the light, and I could see on the kitchen walls some of the drawings of wild flowers that Molly had been doing, that she had hung here and there. Dad and I danced and danced until he was sweating and laughing. Mom was laughing, too.
    Then the music changed, to a slow piece. Dad breathed a great sigh of relief and said, "Ah, my tempo. May I have the pleasure, my dear?" He held out his arms to me and I curled up inside them. We waltzed slowly around the kitchen like people in an old movie until the music ended. We stood facing each other at the end, and I said suddenly, "I wish Molly was here."
    My mother made a small noise, and when I looked over at her, she was crying. I looked back at
Dad in bewilderment, and there were tears on his face, too, the first time I had ever seen my father cry.

    I reached out my arms to him, and we both held out our arms to Mom. She moved into them, and as the music started again, another slow, melancholy song from some past summer I couldn't remember, the three of us danced together. The wild flowers on the wall moved in a gradual blur through our circling and through my own tears. I held my arms tight around the two of them as we moved around in a kind of rhythm that kept us close, in an enclosure made of ourselves that kept the rest of the world away, as we danced and wept at the same time. I knew then what they hadn't wanted to tell me, and they knew that I knew, that Molly wouldn't be coming home again, that Molly was going to die.

9.

    I dream of Molly again and again.
    Sometimes they are short, sunshine-filled dreams, in which she and I are running side by side in a field filled with goldenrod. She's the old Molly, the Molly I knew all my life, the Molly with long blond curls and her light laugh. The Molly who runs with strong tan legs and bare feet. She runs faster than I can, in my dream, looks back at me, laughing, and I call to her, "Wait! Wait for me, Molly!"
    She holds out her hand to me, and calls, with her
hair blowing around her, streaked with sun, "Come on, Meg! You can catch up if you try!"

    I wake up; the room is dark, and her bed is empty beside mine. I think of her somewhere in a hospital I have never seen, and wonder if she is dreaming the same dream.
    Sometimes they are darker dreams of the same field. I am the one, in this darker dream, who has run faster; I have reached some misty destination, a dark and empty house, where I stand waiting for her, watching her from a window as she runs. But the flowers in the field have begun to turn brown, as if summer is ending too soon, and Molly is stumbling; it is she who is calling to me, "Meg, wait! Wait! I can't make it, Meg!" And there is no way I can help her.
    I wake from this dream, too, in a dark and empty room from which the sound of her breathing in the next bed has gone.
    I have a nightmare in which a baby is born, but is old, already, at birth. The baby looks at us, those of us who are there, with aged and tired eyes, and we realize with horror that his life is ending at the very moment of its beginning. "Why? Why?" we ask, and the baby doesn't answer. Molly is there, and she is angry at our asking; she shrugs coldly and turns away from us. Only she knows the answer, and she won't share it with us, although we plead with her.
    I wake terrified that it is real.

    I told my father of the dreams. When I was a very little girl and had nightmares, it was always my father who came to my room when I cried out. He used to turn on the light and hold me; he showed me that the dreams weren't true.
    Now he can't. We sat on the front steps in the evening, and I blew the gray fuzz of dying dandelions into the pink breeze as the sun was setting. The fears that come into my room in the night seemed far away, but Dad said, "Your dreams come out of what is real, you know. It helps,