When Daniel is home, he’s a good dad. He is sweet and generous and patient. He knows when she’s tired. He packs snacks, water, blankies, wet wipes—the whole range of possibilities. He loves her completely. He reads her stories before she can understand them, and she is silent just listening to his voice. I see the bond growing between them.
When she bawls, he carries her around the house or puts her in the car and drives miles until she falls asleep. We go to the park and I sit on a blanket in the grass and watch them. He pushes her high on a swing into the sparkling sky. I hear the squeal of her laughter, see her dress fluttering like bird’s wings, her legs kicking the wind. My heart too kicks in happiness. This is all I ever wanted. These two people, one large and one small. They are my tribe. I belong to them only. When I can’t stand it anymore, I go to them. I grab her off the swing and squish her small face against mine. She looks into my eyes, deep and long as if she can read secrets there, as if she sees entirely how I am and loves me anyway.
A photograph from this time: I’m holding her over my shoulder and he is bending to kiss her high-sloped forehead. Her face is turned toward the camera while we are in profile. He has tucked a small white daisy behind her minuscule ear. It mirrors the perfect purity of her face, the softness of her skin. She is beatific, her mouth an open oh, her eyes wide and amazed to find herself held in so much love.
*
She is one and a half and we go to the zoo. We watch her eyes grow wide at these far-fetched creatures, the strutting emu, the plodding giant tortoise. She makes us consider the impossibility of the giraffe, its head teetering on that ridiculous neck; the painted symmetry of the zebra. We laugh at her clear consternation, the way her eyebrows rise, and you can see her thinking What are those things? What are they? She flaps her arms toward the animals and says, “Bow-wow, bow-wow,” the sound that dogs make in picture books. This is her word for all animals—some logic here, some rendering all creatures into a kingdom of their own.
We stop in front of the elephants and she won’t let us leave. We must stay here and look at these creatures, their gray bulk, those strange flat feet with the familiar toenails, the intelligence in their small lashed eyes as they sway back and forth and back and forth with that slow, lumbering grace.
A lost afternoon blooms around me. Humidity and that scent of home, lush and green. I am small, watching the elephants walk up Kandy road, my hand tight in my father’s. There are a line of them ambling up the mountain road, coming from all parts of the island for the annual procession, enormous loads of grass balanced on their backs. “They are carrying their lunch,” my father says. I can feel him tall and straight next to me, the rub of his fingers over mine. His presence true and unshakable, but some menace also there. I shake my head to clear him away; my adult body comes back to me, and I am again with him and her in the kingdom of animals.
*
He says, “Shouldn’t she be talking more by now?”
I say, “She’s fine. She’ll talk when she’s ready, won’t you, sweetness?” kissing her, that sweet scent of baby girl, the perfect curve of forehead under my lips.
Thinking, Maybe for me it is better that she doesn’t talk. Not yet at least; that it is strange, of course, but maybe also convenient. There are so many secrets we share. So much I don’t want her telling her daddy.
*
When he’s gone she watches me with those great brown eyes. Every bit of her attuned to my mood, my state. I am her deity. She knows how I feel and adjusts her mood to mine as if I am her weather. She knows my anxieties, my terrors, and my dangers, and she accommodates herself to them. This is something not noted or commented upon: the gentleness with which they approach us. We who are not gentle with their small, delicate selves. In this way they know us in a way that we do not ever know them.
She comes to me where I lie on the old gold couch, staring into the occluded sunlight that falls through the window. She puts one small hand on either side of my face, pulls my clouded face close to her own bright one, dispels the images, says, “Mama sad?”
And I, startled to be seen so clearly, say, “I’m not sad, baby. I’m fine … I’m good. I’m just very tired.” I flash the brightest smile in my repertoire, know that it comes off like a shark spotting something seal-shaped in the water above. Her face works as she assimilates this, the evidence of her own eyes at odds with my words. I see her coming to the inevitable conclusion that she must be wrong, that her reading is mistaken, that mommies can lie on the couch not talking, not moving, barely breathing, tears rolling silently over the planes of their faces, and still be happy. I see it as it happens, the first time she knows she can’t trust her own feelings, that they are unreliable. It is perhaps the cruelest moment, but I can’t do what was required, which is to say, “Yes, Mommy is very sad. But it’s okay. I’ll be okay soon.” She rests her forehead against mine, little and confused, wanting to understand.