3
Floss
It was the same nightmare I’d had for sixty years. There were different versions, but they were fundamentally the same: I go into my baby’s room or pick up my little girl from school and she’s not there. Initially I stay calm; there must be some kind of explanation. She’s rolled under the bed. She’s hiding. It’s someone else’s turn to pick her up. But my neck already feels sweaty and I can’t hear my thoughts too well past the sound of my thundering heart. It’s not long before the hysteria starts. I start thrashing around the nursery or school parking lot, searching for a glimpse of that soft red hair or freckles. Instead I see another face. The face that is synonymous with the end of life as I know it. The end of life with my daughter.
I jerked upward into darkness, my fingers twisted in the bedcovers. Lil was by my side, her warm body a stark contrast to my chilling dream. I lay down again, mimicking her slow breaths—in out, in out—until my heart began to slow. It felt like déjà vu. The situations weren’t exactly the same, but the similarities were striking. Neva was going to be a single mother. The father of her child remained under a shroud of secrecy. And if her reasons for this were anything like my own, well … that was what terrified me.
I needed to go to sleep. But when I closed my eyes, all I could see were gray clouds and seagulls. Wind tangling my hair and briny sea air in my lungs. It was 1954 and I was on my way to America. As I strolled the windblown deck, newborn Grace peeked out of my wool coat, perhaps wanting a glimpse of the new life we were about to start. I continued to stroll until, on the third trip around, she drifted off. I waited until I was sure she was completely out, then gingerly lowered myself onto a plastic seat.
“Do you mind if I have a look?”
A woman about my age hovered over me, tugging the hand of the young man beside her. She strained to see inside my coat. Grace’s eyes flickered under her lids with new sleep, but seeing the woman’s enthusiasm, my motherly pride rose up. I opened my coat an inch.
“Oh, Danny, look—it’s so tiny! A boy or a girl?”
“A girl. Grace.”
“You lucky thing. We’re desperate for a baby, aren’t we, Danny? She’s beautiful. How old?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks? But … shouldn’t you still be in hospital?”
I opened my mouth, releasing a cloud of smoggy air but no words.
“Well,” the woman said, “your husband must be taking very good care of you.”
Ah, my husband. There wasn’t one of those, of course. But my mother, unable to completely turn her back on me, had prepared me with an answer to that question.
“Actually, my husband … passed away. He was a farmer. There was an accident.”
“Oh no.” The woman looked at her husband and then back at me. “You’re raising the baby alone?”
“A lot of people have worse luck.”
Again, the woman turned to her husband. She just couldn’t seem to get her head around it. Life—and love—had obviously been kind to her. “That’s so sad. You’re going to America alone?”
“No.” I smiled at the ginger-haired bundle in my arms. “I’m going with my daughter.”