Bells of Avalon by Libbet Bradstreet

would understand. People who didn’t understand what she was…were the ones who tried to hurt her. She looked up at Mrs. Gallagher and smiled.
    “Oh, doodah,” she sighed.
    The ladybug pattern fell from Katie’s lap to the ground as she stood in one quick motion and wrapped her arms around Mrs. Gallagher’s waist. She clenched her eyes shut, and if she’d thought that her tears still meant anything—she would have cried them for Daniel’s mother. Mrs. Gallagher kissed the top of her head. Katie smiled, feeling the fringe of Mrs. Gallagher’s wild, dark hair over the top of her arms and bare shoulders. She breathed in, inhaling her cotton-vanilla essence until she heard Daniel’s boots scraping across the porch.
    “Oh god , what is it now?” He grimaced.
    “Tys, Daniel,” Mrs Gallagher scolded.
    “ What? ” he asked defensively, “you two look like a pair of hounds.”
    “Katie is leaving us, Daniel. We only now heard the news.”
    “Huh, that’s the breaks.”
    “Daniel, is that all you have to say? She’s leaving tomorrow.”
    “ What? ” he asked again with the same comic defense in his voice. “It’s not like she’s dying—I’m going to see her again next week when we record our air trailers. Nothing to snap your cap over.” He walked past them into the house, the screen door bawling behind him.
    “Pis og papir.” Mrs. Gallagher exclaimed, uncharacteristically aggravated. Katie smiled up at her.  They both looked toward his window and caught a glimpse of Danny’s grimy hand closing the drapes.
    “Four daughters, huh?” Katie asked. Mrs. Gallagher looked down at first with a perplexed tilt of her head then laughed. She draped her long arm over Katie’s shoulders as they went inside to start dinner.

    Katie stood across from them, carrying two suitcases. The one in her right hand was the one she’d come with. The other was a small red case that Mrs. Gallagher had bought on yet another trip to Desmonds. Mrs. Gallagher spoke to the men, not so differently from the day they’d told her that her father was gone. But Danny was missing from this version of the scene. He’d left early that morning, making a thin promise to return that afternoon—but she’d know then that he wouldn’t.
    Only tonight if there is no one else—but there was someone else: a woman—although, she was little more than a memory to Katie. As a child, she’d thought she was rather tall and a little bit mean. A woman who didn’t look much like her, although she should have. The last time Katie saw her was at the tiny house near Bushey Heath. She’d always thought of the house as belonging to her and her father. As if it had always been just theirs. But Katie somehow knew that the tall woman had also once lived there. The same way she knew her mother had been there as well. Maybe that was why she’d been angry that day—angry because it was no longer her home. She never spoke to Katie. The words were only for her father. That day when the sirens came, her words turned to shrieks. Katie watched, helpless and young, thinking even then that it didn’t seem right for a woman to shriek like that. She remembered crying when the girl tore at her long dark hair. Her father finally pulled the woman up in his arms and flung her, still flailing, over his shoulder. In one last move of resistance, the woman’s hand flattened and slapped a vase to the floor. The glass exploded while the door slammed behind them. Then the shrieking was gone. She realized sometime later that the shrieking girl had been her sister, although no one had told her as much. When her father died, she was scared they would find her. Maybe it had been one of the reasons she’d cried so much during the night. But it seemed they hadn’t found her.
    “Do you have everything, doodah?” Mrs. Gallagher asked as she swept a strand of hair from her shoulder.
    “I think so.”
    “Did you check everywhere?”
    “Yes, it’s all here,” Katie smiled and