Chapter 1 #2
I squeezed my eyes shut, mentally prepared myself, then threw back the covers, ready to stand under the weight of his disdain. I could do it, had to do it.
For my future. For Clara.
BEAU
She was going to be the death of me.
Or drive me insane.
I thought I’d been on the edge of both things for the past two years—half in the grave, preparing for my daughter to leave this world, certain I’d follow her the second that happened.
I still wasn’t out of it. My grave. Clara’s.
Still didn’t trust that tragedy wasn’t right around the corner.
I had to stop myself from holding her at every moment, terrified that if I let her go, she’d just float away from me.
I had to force myself to leave the house, go to work, and leave her with a fucking stranger.
The coffee pot banged as I set it down harder than necessary.
Clara wouldn’t wake; the kid could sleep through a freight train passing through the house.
The deepness of her slumber these days also terrified me.
I’d just come from her room, where I’d spent five minutes with my hand on her chest, reassuring myself that her heart was beating. That she was here. She was healthy.
I had to repeat that mantra to myself many times a day.
And even when I was feeling her chest rise and fall, sometimes I couldn’t convince myself.
Sometimes, I was right back in that plastic hospital chair, clutching her tiny hand, watching her struggle to breathe while hooked up to machines, waiting for her little chest to stop rising and falling and for my entire world to end.
Everyone wanted me to be happy. Clara was okay now. She had a future.
Happy…
As if I was fucking capable of such a thing when I’d spent years thinking my only reason for existing was going to be taken from me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Happy… as if that wasn’t still a possibility.
The leukemia could come back. She could get hit by a car, choke on a fucking Fruit Loop.
There were thousands upon thousands of ways my daughter could be taken from me.
And I had to think of them all, simply because I hadn’t even considered leukemia a possibility.
I’d been blissfully ignorant. I wouldn’t be blindsided again.
I wouldn’t sit in a beige doctor’s office while my toddler played with blocks and she gently told me she had a 40 percent chance of survival.
No, I would never be powerless like that again.
The smell of coffee fragranced the air as I got out pans for breakfast. We’d have ricotta pancakes this morning.
With a berry compote. I’d add hemp seeds and maybe some aloe vera juice to her smoothie.
Every meal was a mission to make it exciting, appetizing, and full of the shit that would boost her immune system.
Keep her alive. Healthy. Fight off any cancer cells, disease, the fucking flu—anything that could take her from me.
My brain stopped when I saw a figure move out of the corner of my eye.
A flash of pink.
I could smell her.
Even over the fucking bitter tang of coffee, despite being across the room from me, I could smell her. Vanilla. Sweet. I did not have a sweet tooth, but fuck, did I want to sink my teeth into her.
Hannah.
Clara’s nanny.
Clara’s nanny who was over a decade younger than me.
Of course, the first woman I wanted in over six years would be barely out of fucking college. Actually, she was technically still in college. She hadn’t graduated yet.
I was aware of her every single moment. I smelled vanilla when I jerked off in the shower, picturing her writhing underneath me as I finished.
It infuriated me.
But I couldn’t control it. Couldn’t stop it. My longing for her. Which was why I should’ve fired her. Which was why I shouldn’t have hired her in the first place.
Not turning, not acknowledging her existence, I thought back to the interview that changed everything.
Three Months Earlier
“How many do we have left?” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose.
I felt a headache coming on. I hadn’t interacted with this many people voluntarily in …
months? Until recently, the only people I’d spoken to outside of my family were doctors and nurses.
People treating my daughter. They’d long familiarized themselves with my hatred of small talk, of any kind of conversation that wasn’t pertinent to my daughter’s care.
They didn’t ask me about my day, about sports, the weather, or the restaurant.
They gave me news on Clara’s blood, her health, her response to treatment, and that was it.
My brother Elliot rightfully gave me shit for being a recluse, a grump.
I didn’t give a fuck about that. I gave a fuck about how many times my daughter smiled at me.
About how many days had passed since she was last in the hospital.
How often she was out of breath. How many needles were stuck in her.
I gave a fuck about how many times in her life my four-year-old daughter had to “be brave” against pain, spinal taps…
Whatever fresh hell we called treatment for her illness.
“She’s the last one.” Clara happily looked down at her clipboard.
I’d given it to her to involve her during the process of interviewing nannies.
The clipboard didn’t have much on it besides the names and stickers I gave her after each woman left.
She’d doodled on the back with black crayon and written her name at the top. Her Rs were still backward.
They were all women, the applicants. I hadn’t even given the few male candidates an interview.
Sexist of me? Probably. But I didn’t want a man taking care of my four-year-old daughter.
Truthfully, I didn’t want anyone else but me.
Sometimes, I’d let my father or my brother care for her, Calliope recently making the cut too.
I wanted it to be me. I wanted my eyes on Clara, every second of every day so I could ensure that she didn’t go anywhere, that she didn’t grow or change without me witnessing it.
I wanted to soak up every second I could because there was a real possibility there would be a time—a short fucking time—before she would no longer walk this earth, when there wouldn’t be any more seconds left to look at my daughter.
Now that we had the transplant scheduled, there was a very real chance she could beat this. That I wouldn’t have to continue waking up wondering how many days my daughter had left. How many days I had left.
I mused over Naomi’s arrival, her volunteering for the transplant.
Apparently, she wanted nothing from us. Which made me brace, suspecting imminent disaster.
The woman hadn’t even looked back after leaving her daughter when she was still an infant.
She couldn’t be relied upon; she would bail at the last second, and I’d be a fool for hoping that I’d get more time with my brilliant, vibrant daughter.
At the crunch of wheels in the driveway, Clara scuttled over me, putting her pink tutu-covered booty in my face as she peered over the couch to look at the woman getting out of the car.
I didn’t bother looking. I instead gazed at my daughter resting her head in her hands, watching the driveway carefully.
I memorized the angle of her nose, the color in her cheeks, the life in her eyes.
The way the small dark curl fell on her forehead.
I tried to grasp the moment like a physical thing, to imprint it onto my being.
I wanted to will Clara into being here forever.
There was simply no other option. There was no way this world could keep spinning if she wasn’t in it.
No way my heart could continue beating unless hers did.
“She’s pretty,” Clara declared.
I forced my expression to something resembling normal. I tried to let go of the desperation clawing at me—the constant, silent begging for my daughter to live—so she didn’t see it on my face. As if it wasn’t stitched into my every inhale and exhale.
As if I wasn’t bartering away pieces of my soul with every passing moment.
“That’s nice, but as I told you with the last four, it doesn’t matter if she’s pretty; it matters if she’s qualified.
” While speaking to Clara, I marveled at the perfect composition of her features, her upturned lips, the gap in her teeth.
Her dark hair was piled into a messy bun at the top of her head, butterfly clips scattered through her hair.
She’d insisted on putting them in herself.
Clara had called each of the women “pretty” whether that was objectively true or not. I barely noticed what they looked like. I’d actually tried to find older women who wouldn’t cause any shit with me—shit being whatever crap my brother would give me if I had a remotely attractive nanny.
“She’s younger too,” Clara remarked with light in her eyes. “Maybe she’ll know what Wednesday is besides the third day of the week.”
I gritted my teeth to hide a smile. The older candidates were highly qualified, experienced, but hadn’t quite known what to do with my co-interviewer, especially when most of her questions were pop-culture related.
“Maybe.” I shrugged, getting up to answer the door, my knees smarting as I did so. My body was getting old, telling me that surviving on black coffee and hospital cafeteria food while sleeping in hospital chairs was wreaking havoc on my body.
I could handle the pain if it served as evidence of what was behind us.
The next hospital bed I planned on seeing was the one I died in.
With my adult daughter holding my hand. Because that was how it was supposed to be.
We watched our children enter this world, they were there when we left it.
We were not supposed to survive on a planet where our children drew their last breath.
“Let me open it!” Clara ran to the door.