Chapter 7: The Second Letter
*Mom,*
*If you're reading this, you've already read the first one.
You know about Rosie.
You know about Lauren.
You know why I did what I did.*
*I want to tell you the rest.*
*I called Dad before the surgery.
I know you probably know that by now.
I called him because I needed to say it out loud to someone who wouldn't cry.
That sounds harsh.
I don't mean it harshly.
I mean that I needed to hear myself say "I have a daughter" without having to hold someone else together while I said it.
Dad is good at not crying.
You know that better than anyone.*
*He told me not to do it.
I expected that.
Dad has always been afraid of the things he can't control, and this was something he couldn't control.
I don't hold it against him.
I hope you won't either.*
*Here is what I want you to know.*
*The morning they prepped me for surgery, I wasn't afraid.
I want you to hold onto that.
I know you'll worry that I was scared and alone and I need you to know that I wasn't.
I was thinking about Rosie.
I was thinking about what it would feel like for her to go home.
I was thinking about her learning to ride a bike.*
*I was also thinking about Danny.*
*I've thought about Danny a lot since Lauren told me about Rosie.
Danny was twenty-six when he d*ed.
He never got to be a father.
He never got to do any of the things he talked about.
I used to think that was the unfairest thing I knew.*
*But here's what I've come to understand: Danny's life mattered.
Every part of it.
Not because of how it ended but because of what it was while it was happening.
He was funny and stubborn and he taught me how to throw a baseball and he called you every Sunday without fail.
That was a whole life.
A real one.*
*I think mine has been a real one too.*
*I have a daughter.
She has my eyes.
She is going to grow up and she is going to be fine.*
*That is enough.
That is more than enough.*
*There is one more thing I need to ask you.*
*Don't let her grow up not knowing me.
Not the hero version — not the newspaper version.
The real version.
The version that was afraid of needles and burned every piece of toast he ever made and cried at the end of every single nature documentary.
Tell her the embarrassing things.
Tell her the small things.
That's who I was.*
*I love you, Mom.
I have loved you every single day.*
*Ethan*
I sat in his chair for a long time after I finished reading.
The light through the window moved across the floor the way it does in the late afternoon, slow and golden, the way it had moved across this same floor for the twenty-three years I had lived in this house.
Ethan had grown up in this light.
He had done his homework at that table and argued with me about curfews in that doorway and once, when he was nine years old, fallen asleep on this very chair with a library book open on his chest.
I heard the front gate.
Lauren's voice.
Rosie's higher one answering.
The front door opened.
"We're back," Lauren called.
"Rosie found a stick.
She's very committed to it."
Rosie appeared in the doorway holding a branch roughly the size of her own arm.
"I found it," she said seriously.
"I can see that," I said.
She looked at me.
Then she looked at the letter in my hands.
Then she looked back at me.
"Were you crying?" she asked.
"A little," I said.
She considered this.
Then she crossed the room, climbed up onto the arm of the chair — not quite fitting beside me, but trying — and leaned against my shoulder.
"My mum cries sometimes," she said.
"I pat her back."
Her small hand found my back and patted it twice, carefully.
I put my arm around her.
Lauren stood in the doorway watching us.
May you like
Her hand was over her mouth.
I held Ethan's daughter in his chair, in his light, and I let myself feel all of it — the grief and the love and the impossible, unbearable gift of her — without trying to separate one from the other.
