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“Alicia.” He turned my shoulders toward him, and my body followed. “Look at me.”
I found his eyes.
“I’m here.” His eyes traveled along the slope of my nose, to my mouth, then back up again. “Whatever you need. No questions asked, no apologies necessary.”
My eyes filled with tears, but I refused to let them fall. “Thanks, Minnie.”
“Anytime.” He looked over my shoulder toward the bed. “Do you need a minute?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll wait in the hall.”
With one final gentle squeeze, he disappeared.
I turned toward the bed, toward the shell of what used to be my ox of a father. Though his chest moved up and down, nothing else moved. There was no sign that he was even in there anymore.
“It’s jarring, isn’t it?”
I jumped, turning toward the voice. Mother smiled without humor. “Your father—my husband—in a hospital bed? He wouldn’t hear of it.”
I returned her joyless smile and turned back toward him. “Yeah. If he’s still in there, he’s definitely fighting this.”
“Definitely,” Mother agreed. She came to stand beside me near the bed. She intertwined her fingers with his. “Oh, Thomas.” She sighed. “How did we get here?”
We stood in silence for several moments, watching the machines breathe for him. There was a calming rhythm to it: in for five seconds, out for five seconds. In and out—so simple.
Finally, Mother said, “He hasn’t been to a hospital since you were born, you know. Says it gives him the creeps.”
“Gives me the creeps, too,” I muttered.
She laughed as joylessly as she had smiled. “Like father, like daughter,” she said.
I turned to her. “What was my birth like, anyway?” I asked. “You two always say that it was difficult, but never tell me why.”
“You always had your own mind, your own agenda,” she said. A soft smile rested on her face like a promise. “You wanted to make a lasting impact on my body, and so you did.
“Dante gave me a lot of trouble when I was pregnant with him, and so did you. But Dante’s birth was quick, almost painless. I went into labor with him and then eight hours later, he was born.
“You, however, were a different story. I was in labor for almost forty-eight hours before they decided that a natural birth would put both our lives in jeopardy. I had to get a C-section, and then I experienced a host of medical issues afterward. All in all, we were in the hospital with you for four or five days.
“But it didn’t stop there. You didn’t want to be touched as an infant. You would cry whenever anyone would pick you up. Even if someone brushed you by accident, or you had to get bathed, you would wail for hours. We took you to every doctor, every specialist. The best of the best. ‘She’s just fussy,’ they all said. ‘Might be colic.’
“I didn’t know what to do. It felt like every move was the wrong move. I was on a giant chessboard whose strategy I couldn’t comprehend. After a while, it felt like I was running out of ways to soothe you. So I stopped trying.” She looked again at my father, with a look so intimate, I stepped back a little. “But this man, this bear of a man, pulled me through it.”
“How?”
“His strength became my oasis. I held onto it for dear life.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He would look at me and say, ‘Quinta. You’ve got this. You’re the strongest woman I know. You can do it.’” She took a shuddering breath. “And somehow, we survived.”
“But it cost you.”
“It did.” She looked at me then. “It cost you, too.”
We stood there for a moment, looking at each other. Part of me was filled with rage from years of isolation, of feeling ignored, criticized, cared for financially but not emotionally. My soul ached for the teenager I once was, always waiting for my family to support me at my gymnastics meets, to see how much I had achieved. I could feel the tears, angry and hot in the corners of my eyes, threatening to burst forth as I refused to show weakness, even now.
But looking at my mother, I could see that I wasn’t the only one who struggled. She had fought to make a connection with me, her only daughter, and was rebuked at every turn. You would wail for hours, she said. Every doctor, every specialist who told her that it was nothing, that I was just fussy, was just confirming what she already believed: that she couldn’t care for her own daughter. So she grew an armor so thick that even rejection couldn’t break it.
And here we were now, two lost souls stitched together by the men who loved us.
