I can’t hold back any longer. “Andrea, you don’t really believe you should have died?” I blurt.
She shakes her head. “No, I don’t,” she answers easily, taking her sandwich apart. “Not anymore. I did, though…for a while.” Then she glances up into my eyes. “Michael, can we stop going to counseling now? I hate it there.”
“Nobody loves seeing the doctor, but we all need to go sometimes.”
She blinks back at me. “Only if we get sick.”
“Or if we’re hurt,” I remind her. “Doctors help us then, too, remember? Like Daddy used to do over at the hospital? He’d help the kids who were sick?”
Her head pops up, and she opens her mouth, drawing in a breath. There’s something she wants to say, something monumental; I know it like I know the hairs prickling on my arms.
But then her expression changes and she tugs her hand out of mine, becoming melancholy as she stares out the tall bank of windows beside us.
I’ve pushed too far. “What is it, sweetheart? What’s wrong?” No answer, just a slight shaking of her head. “Tell me.” My voice rises slightly with panic that I’ve broken our connection. “What are you thinking?”
She looks back at me, pain shadowing her blue eyes. “Daddy was hurt, and they didn’t help him.”
Panicked, I stare at her, blinking. All the people surrounding us, the din of noise and clatter of silverware intensifies around me, until I can hear nothing else, only the rushing void humming between us.
This is what I’ve been waiting for, hoping for. But now that I’m here, I’m terrified. From another dimension I hear a voice that sounds a lot like mine. “Sweetheart, Daddy couldn’t be helped. They had to save you. It was too late for Daddy, you know that.”
“No,” she whispers, tears filling her eyes. “No, they could’ve tried with Daddy. But they took so long helping me.”
“Is that what you think?” Tentatively, like reaching for a feral child, I touch her arm and she flinches. But she allows my hand to stay, as I ask fiercely, “That his death was your fault?”
She says nothing, doesn’t answer at all. “Andrea, please,” I beseech her. “Tell me. Do you really think his death was your fault?”
“I just wish they hadn’t worked on me for such a long time.” The paramedics told me that for more than an hour they carved and welded and worked the bent Mercedes door while she remained unconscious, unaware that her little leg was caught in the mangled wreckage. “I wish they’d helped Daddy, too,” she says, wiping at her eyes.
“Andrea, this might be hard to understand, but Daddy was already gone by then. The paramedics who arrived on the scene knew that. You know it too.”
She gets a strange, distant look in her eyes, staring out the windows again. I’m not sure why, but it spooks me a little. “But he talked to me. In the car.”
I’m supernaturally calm. Relaxed even, as if her comment doesn’t fly in the face of everything we’ve been told about the accident: that my partner died immediately on impact.
“What did he say?”
“Not to be scared.” She glances up at me, tears shimmering in her soft blue eyes. “That the men would help me.”
I get an idea, and ask, “Like in the dreams? When he tells you he’s okay?”
She nods, and I wonder when hot tears began rolling down my own face. “Sweetie, he was just looking after you,” I say. “Like he always did.”
“But it felt real. Like he was alive.”
Sucking in a breath, I conjure up the lost faith of my childhood. The faith Alex was forever working to resurrect within me. I remember what Rebecca told me about the night she nearly died.
“I think he is alive. Just not here, not with us.”
“That’s how come I can’t call you Daddy anymore.” It’s so quiet I almost miss it, this whisper-thin admission—the key to my existence. “You can’t be Daddy too,” she explains, “’cause then he won’t be real anymore.” Looking up at me, it’s as if she’s begging permission—maybe permission to stick with this thread of reasoning, or then again, maybe permission to finally let him go.
Or maybe she’s seeking permission to truly be my daughter once again after such a broken journey together.
“Letting me be Daddy doesn’t change what he was to you.”
“They’ll see you, and…” She looks away, hesitating. “They’ll think you’re my only daddy.”
“You know that wasn’t true.”
“But you are my only daddy,” she whispers, staring up at me. Beseeching me to help her through this moment. “My only real daddy,” she finishes. I wonder if she’s saying what I think, right here in the commissary. My heart races in my chest, my mouth goes dry.