Chapter 26 #2
Penny's room has evolved. When Sidney first arrived, it was sparse, a bed, a dresser, a handful of toys.
Now it's covered. Drawings are taped to every available wall surface, Lego structures occupy the dresser and the floor and the windowsill, stuffed animals are arranged in a complex social hierarchy that Penny has explained to him three times and he still doesn't fully understand.
There is a blanket fort in the corner that Sidney helped her build and that has become a semi-permanent fixture.
Her stuffed bear occupies the pillow of honor on the bed.
Erath kneels beside her bed. She is under the covers, freshly bathed, Sidney handled bath time before his own, with her braids still slightly damp and her pajamas on and her face scrubbed clean and glowing. She looks up at him with dark eyes that are too perceptive for her age and always have been.
"Can I ask you something?" Erath says.
"You just did," Penny says, which is something she learned from Sidney and deploys at every opportunity.
"Can I ask you something else?"
"Okay."
He looks at her. This child. His child. The small, fierce, impossible person he made with a woman who tried to use her as a sacrifice and a bridge between worlds.
She is five years old and she has seen more than most adults and understood more than most adults and she is lying in her bed with a stuffed bear and she is okay.
Not undamaged, no one comes through what she's been through undamaged, but okay.
Whole. Growing. Reaching toward the light the way all living things do, stubbornly and without permission.
"Do you think about your mama?" he asks.
Penny considers this. Her brow furrows, the same furrow she gets during cards, during stories, during any question that she deems worthy of serious analysis, and she chews her lower lip.
"Sometimes," she says. "I know she's gone."
She says it simply. Not with grief, not with bravado, but with the matter-of-fact clarity of a child who understands death in a way that most children don't, because she has lived at the intersection of it her whole life.
She has always been able to feel the boundary.
She has always known, on some level, where the living end and the dead begin.
Her mother is on the other side now, and Penny knows it intuitively, completely, without the adult need to process the details.
"Is mama in the underworld now?" she asks.
"Yes," Erath says.
Penny nods. She turns this over in her mind, and Erath can see her working through it, not with anguish but with a child's practical logic, fitting the information into the framework of her understanding and finding a place for it.
Then she asks, "Are you going to marry Sidney?"
Erath's mind goes blank.
It's not a large blank, he recovers quickly, but it's there, a beat of absolute silence in his head, because he was prepared for questions about death and grief and loss and he was not prepared for this.
He looks at Penny and she looks back at him with the patient expectation of a child who has asked a question and is waiting for an answer and does not understand why it might be complicated.
He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. He closes it.
Penny doesn't seem to need an answer. She has already moved on, her attention shifting with the mercurial speed of a five-year-old who has allocated her interest in this topic and exhausted it.
"I think you should," she says, adjusting her bear's position on the pillow. "He makes good pancakes."
The logic is airtight. Erath cannot argue with it. He doesn't try.
"Can I have a story?" she asks.
Erath tells her one. It's about a fish who lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean, he's been building on this universe, apparently, because Penny has informed him that the fish from the river story moved to the ocean in the sequel, and the fish meets a starfish who is looking for a home.
The fish invites the starfish to live in her cave, and the starfish says she doesn't know if she should because she's never had a home before, and the fish says that's okay because neither had she until she found the cave, and sometimes you don't know what home looks like until you're already in it.
Erath is not a natural storyteller. He delivers the narrative with the flat, measured cadence of someone reading a manual, and his character voices are nonexistent, and his plot structure is questionable at best. Penny doesn't seem to mind.
She interrupts twice, once to clarify that the starfish is pink, not orange, and once to suggest that the cave should have a door, and then she falls asleep mid-sentence, her hand on Erath's wrist, her breathing going soft and deep and even.
He stays there for a long time. Kneeling on the floor beside her bed, her small fingers curled around his wrist, the nightlight casting a warm circle on the ceiling.
He watches her sleep and thinks about the question she asked, are you going to marry Sidney, and he doesn't have an answer, not in the way she means it, not in the human way of rings and ceremonies and vows.
But in another way, in the way that matters, the answer has been yes for longer than he'd realized.
He disentangles his wrist from Penny's grip, slowly, carefully, tucking her hand back under the blanket.
He pulls the covers up to her chin and moves the bear closer to her face and stands and his knees ache from the floor but it's a good ache, the ache of kneeling beside your daughter's bed, and he carries it with him down the hallway.