Shoot / Don't Shoot

then. “See there?” she asked as she finished. “It may not make you feel any better, but at least you’re not the only kid it’s ever happened to.”

“I still hate it, though,” Jenny said.

“I don’t blame you.”

Despite Jenny’s fervent pleading, Joanna nixed the idea of watching even one video that night. “Tomorrow morning will be plenty of time for E.T.,” she said, reaching up and turning out the lamp on the bedside table between them. “Right now we’d both better try to get some sleep.”

“Good night, Mom,” Jenny said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Jenny. Sleep tight.”

And they did. Both of them, until the sounds of police and aid-car sirens brought them both wide awake sometime much later. Joanna checked the time—one o’clock—while Jenny dashed over to the window and looked outside.

“What is it?” Joanna asked. “A car wreck?”

Jenny peered down at the flashing lights and scurrying people far below. “I guess so,” she said, “but I can’t tell for sure.”

Joanna climbed out of bed herself to take a look. In the melee of emergency vehicles and flash lights, she caught a glimpse of a blanket-covered figure lying on the ground.

“It looks like someone hit a pedestrian,” she said, drawing Jenny away from the window. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

But instead of crawling into her own bed, Jenny climbed into her mother’s. “I don’t like sirens,” she said softly. “Whenever I hear them now, I think of Daddy. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Joanna answered.

“Do they make you feel like crying?”

“Yes,” Joanna said again.

For some time after that, Jenny and her mother lay side by side, saying nothing. At last they heard another siren, that of an ambulance or aid car pulling away from whatever carnage had happened on the street below. As the siren squawked, Jenny gave an involuntary shudder and she began to cry.

Joanna gathered the sobbing child into her arms. When the tears finally subsided and Jenny breathing steadied and quieted, Joanna didn’t bother suggesting that Jenny return to her own bed. By then the mother needed the warmth and comfort of another human presence almost as much as the child did.

Soon Jenny was fast asleep. Joanna lay awake. The fact that Jenny associated sirens with Andy’s death jarred her, although it shouldn’t have. After all, would she ever be able to see a perfect apricot-colored rosebud or her diamond solitaire engagement ring without thinking of the University Hospital waiting room, without thinking about Andy dying in a room just beyond a pair of awful swinging doors?

Jenny was, after all, a chip off the old block. The resemblance between mother and daughter went far beyond the eerily striking similarity between those two photographs taken twenty years apart.

What was it Jim Bob was always saying? Something about the apple not falling far from the tree.