33. Wade
— ? —
Wade
I carried her to bed. Tucked the wolf-print blanket under her chin. Stood in the doorway of her small room a good while longer than tucking in a sleeping four-year-old required, the way I’d caught myself doing every night since Luisa started letting me stay through bedtime.
On the shelf by the door was a row of photo frames. I’d clocked them before and made myself look away, the way you look away from a bright light. Tonight I let myself look.
Poppy at a few days old, red-faced and outraged, swaddled in hospital flannel. At one, cake ground into her eyebrows, then at two, at three, at four, a whole human being assembling herself frame by frame in a life I hadn’t been anywhere near.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough that Luisa found me.
“Wade?”
I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure what my face was doing and I didn’t want her to see it.
“She was so small,” I said, nodding at the newborn photo. My voice came out wrong. “I didn’t know they came that small.”
Behind me I heard her go still. Then, carefully, like a woman testing ice: “I have albums. Boxes of them. If you ever wanted-” She stopped.
Started again, and this time there was an edge under it, an old grievance that had been waiting years for its turn to speak.
“You have every right to be angry with me.”
I turned.
She stood in the hall with her arms wrapped around herself, chin up, eyes bright and defiant and frightened all at once. The exact posture of a person bracing for a blow.
“I had your number for the first year,” she said, fast, like she’d drown if she stopped.
“I knew where you worked. I could have called when she was born. Sent one photograph. And I didn’t.
I told myself it was to protect her, and some of it was, but some of it was that I wanted to keep her.
Keep the one piece of you I had left somewhere your family couldn’t reach it.
I made that choice again and again, Wade, every single day for four years, and I’d make most of it again.
So if you hate me for the years you lost. You get to. This one’s mine. This one I earned.”
She lifted her chin higher and waited for it.
And I could see exactly what she was braced for. The version of me she still half-expected in the dark. The one who kept score. The version my father built.
“Luisa.” I had to stop and breathe. “I made you believe I threw you and our child away. I stood in a courthouse and watched you sign papers thinking I’d stopped loving you.
Every locked door, every unanswered year, every mile you put between us.
You did all of it because of the story I let you live inside.
” My voice went, and I let it go. “You didn’t keep our daughter from her father.
You protected her from the man I was pretending to be.
From the man who ran you off a road for the crime of loving me.
You did the only sane thing a mother could do.
I don’t get to be angry about that. I don’t get to be anything except grateful you kept her whole until I found my way back to you both. ”
“You missed everything,” she whispered. It wasn’t an accusation now. It was just the grief, finally set down where we could both look at it.
“I know.”
“Her first word. Her first steps. The night she was born-” Her breath caught. “You’d have wanted to be there. You would have been there.”
“Tell me.” I crossed the hall and took her face in my hands. “Not to punish either of us. Because I want it. All of it, even the parts that are going to gut me. What was her first word?”
A wet, startled laugh got out of her. “‘No.’”
“Of course it was.”
“She was outraged by everything. Bathwater too warm, socks too tight, the sheer audacity of bedtime.” She was crying and laughing at once now, the words coming looser.
“She said it for a solid month before she’d say anything else.
‘No’ to the dog. ‘No’ to the moon. ‘No’ to me.
Like she’d been dispatched to this planet specifically to file complaints. ”
“She’s still like that.”
“She’s exactly like that.”
I put my forehead to hers. Down the hall our daughter slept under a blanket covered in wolves, her complaints filed for the day, and the woman I’d spent four years failing was breathing against my mouth, letting me hold the weight of it with her instead of under it alone.
“I can’t give those years back,” I said.
“I’ve turned it over every way there is and there’s no version where I get them.
But I am going to be at every single thing from here forward.
Every birthday. Every recital. Every flat, furious ‘no.’ I intend to be so relentlessly present you’ll get sick of the sight of me. ”
“I won’t.”
“You might.”
“I won’t.” She kissed me, soft and certain and a little salt-wet. “Get sick of you. I already gave it a real try. It didn’t take.”
Later, after she’d finally gone to sleep, I sat on the floor of Poppy’s room with the albums open in my lap and let myself see all of it. Every frame. Every year I’d missed. I let it gut me the way it needed to, quietly, so I wouldn’t wake her.
And then I turned to the first blank page at the back of the last album, the one still waiting for whatever came next, and made myself a private promise about exactly how many of those pages I intended to fill.