For the Girls' Sake - By Janice Kay Johnson Page 0,7
when you’ve washed them."
He closed his eyes for a moment, acknowledging more failure. Or maybe not—he hadn’t had the guts to ask the mothers who picked up their three-year-olds whether they had potty accidents still, too. Or the occasional father, none exclusive parents the way he was. Adam didn’t even like to ask Melissa, because he didn’t want to know something was wrong, that he’d already warped his beloved child.
If only he knew what on earth he was doing.
If only Jennifer were alive to help him do it.
"Hey, Rose Red," he said softly, crouching. "Ready to bloom?"
"Daddy!" She erupted to her feet and into his arms, her sky-blue eyes flooding with tears. "You’re late, and I’m hungry, and I had a accident, an’..."
He stemmed the flow. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Here you were, all by yourself."
"Except for Lissa," Rose mumbled against his shoulder. She snuffled. "Lissa didn’t leave me."
He felt the crushing addition, Like you do. Every day.
She’d taken lately to holding on to him and screaming when he tried to drop her off in the morning. He felt like the worst parent in the whole world when the day-care workers had to pry his daughter’s fingers off him and haul her away, when the last thing he saw was Rose’s round tear-streaked face. Those desperate, pleading eyes haunted his days, gave him a feeling of self-loathing.
But, he had to work!
Rationally he knew that other kids cried in the morning, too, that it was probably just a stage. Reason didn’t quell the guilt that ate at his gut like too many cups of coffee.
She needed her daddy, and he wasn’t there.
He hustled her out to the car, belatedly grabbing the white plastic garbage sack that held Rose’s own clothes. That meant laundry tonight. He didn’t want to leave these for Ann, their twenty-something housekeeper-cook. When Rose wet the bed, he always changed it, too. Three and a half wasn’t so old, he tried to tell himself, but he hadn’t seen those discreet plastic bags go home with Rose’s friends Rainy and Sylvie, either. Not in months.
His daughter fell asleep during the drive home, worn out by a ten-hour day, and more guilt stabbed him. Poor Rosebud. How did a little girl grow into a woman without a mother to lead the way? What did he know about girlish secrets or adolescent crushes or makeup or menstrual cramps?
Well, he’d just have to learn. He was mommy and daddy both, determined not to foist his daughter’s upbringing on a series of nannies. Jennifer wouldn’t have wanted that.
I didn’t mean it, he said silently, speaking to her as if she were listening. No nanny.
A nanny would be a replacement. A substitute mother. No one could be Jennifer, petite, quick moving, eternally optimistic, alive.
Dead, in every meaningful way, long before her daughter was cut from her belly.
He hadn’t even looked at Rose when doctors performed the C-section. He’d been holding Jennifer’s hand, although Jennifer didn’t know it, would never know it, because she was brain-dead. He’d been saying goodbye, because the shell of her body had no purpose anymore, now that it wasn’t needed to sustain her child. He had agreed that she would be unhooked from machines as soon as the baby could survive on her own.
"I’ll do my best," he had whispered to the love of his life. One last promise, he thought, praying she didn’t know how he had dreaded the birth because it meant severing any last wisp of hope that the doctors were wrong, that she would yet wake up.
How could she be gone? He had gripped her hand so hard it should have hurt, but she only lay there, eyes closed, breast rising and falling with the hissing push of the respirator, unaware of her daughter’s birth, of his tears and whispered, wrenching, "Goodbye, Jenny." Unaware when he blundered from the room.
Unaware when her heart stopped, when the last breath caught in her throat.
His bright-faced, pretty, otherworldly wife was already dead when her daughter began life.
He named her Jenny Rose, and called her Rose, this little girl who showed no signs of looking like her mama, to his relief and disappointment both. Her hair had developed red tints and curls, and the deep blue of her eyes never changed, as everyone said it would.
Some days, Adam was intensely grateful that he didn’t have to think about his lost Jenny every time he looked at his daughter. And yet, he’d wanted to hold on to a part of her,