The pediatric floor at that hospital is painted in what somebody must have decided were cheerful colors. Pale yellow, with a border of cartoon fish running along the wall at the height of a child’s eye.I have hated those fish for two years now. I couldn’t tell you exactly why.I was sitting in one of those hard plastic chairs outside room 412, staring at a spot on the floor tile where somebody had dropped something and it hadn’t quite come up.
And down the hall, through the open door, I could hear Sophie laughing at something her grandfather had said.
That’s the part that broke me. Not the doctor. Not the chart. The sound of my six-year-old laughing forty feet away while a man in a white coat sat down across from me and pulled the chair a little closer.
He held her chart against his chest like it weighed something.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I need to be honest with you, and this is very hard to say. At this point, treatment can slow it down. That’s what it can do. We’re looking at less than a year.”
The hallway went completely silent in my head. The monitors, the intercom, the cart with the loose wheel — all of it just stopped, the way sound does when you go underwater.
“Is there anything,” I heard myself say. “Anything at all. Anything we haven’t tried.”
“We are doing everything there is. I promise you that.”
I nodded, because I did not trust my voice to make another sound.
My name is Dana. I was thirty-four years old that afternoon, and my daughter was six, and I remember thinking very clearly and very stupidly: I have prayed so hard. I have prayed harder than this should require.
That Evening, My Father Read Her the Same Book for the Fourth Time That Week
My dad’s name was Walt. He was seventy-one, he’d spent thirty-eight years as a maintenance supervisor for the school district in our county, and he had hands like a man who’d used them.
He was in the chair beside her bed with a Moana picture book balanced on his knee. He’d bought that book at a drugstore in the second month and it was already coming apart at the spine.
“Again, Grandpa.” Sophie had hold of his sleeve. “The part where she sails out on the ocean.”
“You only ever want the good part.”
“The ocean part IS the good part.”
He laughed, and then he flipped all the way back to page one and started over from the beginning, which he did every single time she asked, without one word of complaint, for eleven months.
I stood in that doorway with my hand pressed over my mouth so neither of them would hear me.
Later, after she’d gone under with her stuffed rabbit tucked up under her chin, he found me out in the hallway by the window.