“A lot of kids do,” Allie told him—although she didn’t know anyone else who ate them that way. She dipped the spoon into the pink milk and let the last applejack float in like a lone life preserver.

“More, please.”

Her mother poured a second bowl. Allie pushed down the orange cereal circles with the back of her spoon, coating them with milk.

“I guess that was your daughter’s room I was in, huh?”

Her mother nodded, but didn’t meet her eyes.

“Something happened to her, didn’t it?”

“Yes, Danny, something did,” her father answered.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Allie said, realizing this was going too far.

“No, that’s okay—it was a long time ago,” he said.

Not that long, Allie wanted to say, but instead she said, “I’ll bet she loved you very much.”

She should have left it there, but she could see a police cruiser pulling up to the curb outside, and then a second one. If she was going to do this, she had to do it now.

“Sometimes people go away,” Allie told them. “They don’t mean to, but they can’t help it. It’s nobody’s fault. I’ll bet if she could, she’d want to tell you that it’s okay—that she’s okay. I mean, people die, but that doesn’t always mean they’re gone.”

Then her mother and father looked to each other, then back to Danny Rozelli with moist eyes, and her mother said, “Allie’s not dead.”

Allie grinned. It was so like her parents to see things that way. “Of course she’s not. As long as you remember her, I guess she’ll never really be dead.”

“No,” her father said. “We mean that she’s still alive.”

Allie slowly lowered her spoon into the bowl, staring at them. “Excuse me?”

“She’s just asleep, Danny,” her father said. “She’s been asleep for a long, long time.”

CHAPTER 28
The Sleep of the Dead

Comatose.

Nonresponsive.

Persistent vegetative state.

All complicated words used by medical specialists to label a patient who remains unconscious. You would think that the labels mean something—that doctors know exactly what’s going on in the brain of a comatose patient. But the truth is, nobody really knows anything. A coma can actually mean a whole range of things, but at its heart, all it really means is that someone simply won’t wake up.