Chapter 6 - A Daughter's Drawing
The house was too quiet when I arrived home at four o'clock.
My sister, Claire, was sitting on the living room sofa, a lukewarm mug of tea between her hands. When she heard the front door click, she stood up immediately, her face tight with worry.
"How is he?" she whispered, glancing toward the stairs. "Is he awake?"
"He was awake for five minutes," I said, leaning my forehead against the cool wood of the entryway door. My entire body felt like an empty shell, scraped hollow by the adrenaline of the confrontation in the boardroom. "They have him on high-dose anticonvulsants to keep his blood pressure from spiking. If his pressure goes up, the vessel ruptures. If it ruptures... he’s gone, Claire."
Claire pulled me into her arms. I didn't cry. I didn't have the luxury of tears anymore.
"Where’s Maya?" I asked, pulling back.
"Upstairs in her room. She’s been quiet all afternoon. Sarah... she knows something is wrong. An eight-year-old knows when her father doesn't come home two nights in a row, even if you tell her he's just 'at work.'"
I climbed the carpeted stairs, my feet dragging.
The door to Maya’s room was pushed open an inch, a sliver of warm yellow light spilling out into the dark hallway. Inside, the soft scratching of colored pencils on paper was the only sound.
I pushed the door open gently. "Hey, monkey."
Maya was sitting cross-legged on her rug, surrounded by sheets of white construction paper. She was wearing her favorite oversized green t-shirt—an old scrub top of Ben’s that hung down to her knees like a nightgown. It still had his name stitched in faded white thread over the pocket: *DR. B. MILLER, SURGERY.*
She looked up. Her eyes—Ben’s eyes, deep brown and serious—searched my face with terrifying accuracy.
"Is Daddy coming home for dinner?" she asked.
I sat down on the rug beside her, my heart breaking into a thousand jagged pieces. I reached out and tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear.
"Not tonight, baby," I said softly. "Daddy is... he's at the hospital, but not as a doctor. He’s sick. His head hurts, and the other doctors are taking care of him."
Maya didn't cry. Instead, her small mouth tightened, her lower lip trembling slightly. She looked down at the drawing she was working on.
It was a picture of our kitchen table.
There were three chairs. In one chair was a woman with wild brown curls—me. In the other was a little girl with a ponytail—Maya. And the third chair, Ben’s chair, was colored entirely in grey pencil, with a big red question mark drawn over the seat.
"Did I do something bad on my birthday?" she whispered, her voice so small it could barely be heard over the hum of the small space heater in the corner.
My breath caught. "What? Maya, no! Why would you ever think that?"
"Because Daddy didn't come," she said, tears finally welling in her eyes, spilling over her cheeks like tiny diamonds. "He promised he would come for the cake. He promised he would see me blow out the eight candles. And then he didn't. And then he stopped sleeping in his bed. I thought... I thought he was mad because I lost the stethoscope he gave me."
I pulled her into my lap, crushing her against my chest. I buried my face in her hair, smelling the sweet, strawberry scent of her shampoo, and for the first time that day, the dam broke.
I wept.
I wept for every dinner I had wrapped in tin foil. I wept for every bedtime story Ben had missed while he was hunched over another human being's open chest. I wept for the months of silence, for the terrible, lonely burden my husband had carried on his back until his spine literally cracked under the weight of it.
"Daddy loves you more than the whole world, Maya," I sobbed into her hair. "He wasn't mad. He was sick, and he was trying so hard to protect us that he forgot how to ask for help. He didn't miss your birthday because he wanted to. He missed it because his body was fighting a war."
Maya pulled back, wiping her nose with the sleeve of Ben's oversized scrub top. She reached behind her pillow and pulled out a folded piece of paper, worn at the creases from being opened and closed a hundred times.
"He left this in my backpack on the morning of my birthday," she whispered, handing it to me. "He told me not to open it unless he was late."
I unfolded the paper with shaking fingers.
It was written on a prescription slip, in Ben’s tight, cramped, trembling hand:
*Maya-bird,*
*Eight years ago today, I held you in my hands. You were so small you could fit from my elbow to my fingertips. I made a promise to you that night: that I would build a world where you never had to be afraid of the dark.*
*If I’m not there to eat the chocolate cake tonight, look at the stars outside your window. The brightest one is me, watching you. I might be late, monkey. I might be very late. But every breath your daddy takes is for you. Don't ever forget that. Keep drawing. Keep singing.*
*Love, Daddy.*
I clutched the note against Maya’s back.
He had known. On her birthday, three weeks ago, he had already felt the final collapse coming. He had written a goodbye letter to an eight-year-old child because he thought he was going to die alone in a hospital basement.
"Come on," I said, standing up, lifting Maya in my arms.
"Where are we going?" she asked, wrapping her thin arms around my neck.
May you like
"We’re going to see Daddy," I said, my voice hardening with an absolute, unbreakable resolve. "We’re going to tell him that he doesn't get to be a star in the sky yet. He has to stay down here with us."
***
