the braided throw rug next to her bed and slung an arm over her waist.
“You getting tired?”
She nodded.
“You had fun playing basketball with the boys, didn’t you.”
Another nod.
“Shayla . . .” I wasn’t sure how to broach this subject. It felt like shoving a porcupine into a wool sweater—not easy, at best. “There’s something I think I need.”
Tired eyes opened a fraction more. “You want a donut?”
I loved this child. “Actually,” I whispered, adjusting my seating so I could prop my head sideways on my arm and be nose-to-nose with her, “I think it would make me really happy if I could call you my daughter.” Shayla’s eyes were so close to mine that I could see the dark flecks in the blue and her pupils dilating and retracting. “When we meet new people,” I continued, trying to make it clear to her young mind, “I’d like to be able to say, ‘This is my daughter, Shayla.’ You know what I mean?”
A shy smile curved her lips and she tightened her hold on her animals.
“So, beautiful—” I could feel a tear escaping from the corner of my eye and running down into my hairline—“is it okay if I call you ‘my daughter, Shayla,’ from now on?”
She watched another tear follow the path the first had taken and looked into my eyes, worried.
“I’m not sad,” I assured her, and I knew my smile proved it.
Shayla let go of the blue rabbit she’d been holding and reached out to hook her arm around my neck, pulling my face down to touch hers. We stayed like that until she was asleep, me kneeling next to her bed, cheek to cheek with my daughter, her breath warm against my neck, the smell of her sweet and heavy like warm honey in my lungs. And it struck me with so much force that I had to hold back sobs that this was the antithesis of a God-spitting-on-me moment. This was God pouring such a deluge of wondrousness and overwhelmingness and profound healingness on me that I could hardly stand it. As I knelt there by Shayla’s bed and tried to absorb the enormity of the moment, it was all I could do not to crawl up under the blankets and huddle there all night with Shayla—with my daughter—in my arms.
11
TREY AND I had been huddling a lot in the week since Dad had gone all Godzilla on us, though it had taken a couple tries for me to figure out how to make it up the ladder to the attic without using my injured arm. We’d been off school all week, and I wanted to think that was because Mom was giving us time to get our heads sorted out. After all, last Saturday had been the kind of thing that muddles the brain a little. I wasn’t used to seeing my brother being strangled by my dad, and the image kept coming back to me, no matter what I did. Opening a carton of orange juice—Dad strangling Trey. Cleaning up my bedroom—Dad strangling Trey. Watching game shows on TV—Dad strangling Trey. It had been a Dad-strangling-Trey kind of week.
But I knew my mom hadn’t kept us home from school just because we needed to get over the shock to our brains. I figured it was also to allow time for Trey’s neck to heal. Explaining that her daughter had sprained her wrist in a fall was one thing. But explaining how her son had gotten bruises all over his throat and a bad cut to the side of his mouth? That would take a little more creativity than my mom possessed. We hadn’t complained about the weeklong vacation, though. Instead, we’d spent it reading books, playing video games, eating tons of food (Mom always cooked when she was stressed), and turning the Huddle Hut into Ali Baba’s cavern. We brought up pillows and comfy blankets; we moved in lamps and extension cords; we even dangled Christmas tree lights over the wardrobe at one end of the attic so we could lie in our tent at night and imagine they were stars. I’m not sure what had prompted the Huddle Hut overhaul. There was just so much uncomfortable going on inside that we felt compelled to build something comfortable on the outside, I guess.
It was shortly after lunch, and Trey and I were lying on our backs shoveling trail mix into our mouths. Mom had discovered our attic hideaway. I knew that because we’d crawled