During those two months, I saw Lily every Saturday. We made cookies. We went to the zoo. We went to the library and checked out every horse book in the children’s section. I learned that she was afraid of the dark and liked her nightlight shaped like a moon. I learned that she hated socks with seams. I learned that she missed her mother most at bedtime, and that if you sang her the song from the yellow kitchen in Indianapolis, the one Megan used to sing, she’d fall asleep in five minutes.
Ethan taught me the song. It was “You Are My Sunshine.”
I sang it to her the first time on a Saturday night in November. She fell asleep in four minutes.
When I came downstairs, Ethan and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table. Both of them were crying.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t you dare. Both of you.”
They wiped their eyes. They didn’t stop.
Ethan and I started going to counseling together.
It was a woman named Dr. Okonkwo, in an office over a bakery downtown. The whole room smelled like cinnamon rolls. Every week, we sat on her gray couch and talked about trust and lies and fear. Mostly fear.
“Ethan,” Dr. Okonkwo said in our third session. “What were you most afraid of? When Megan first called?”
He thought about it for a long time.
“That Claire would leave,” he said. “That she’d look at Lily and see everything she couldn’t have. That she’d hate me for having it.”
Dr. Okonkwo turned to me.
“Claire? Is that what happened?”
I thought about Lily on the bottom stair in her horse pajamas, clutching Ruby. Are you leaving because of me?
“No,” I said. “That’s not what happened at all.”
“What happened?” Dr. Okonkwo asked.
“I looked at Lily,” I said slowly, “and I saw a little girl who’d lost her mother and was scared nobody wanted her. And I thought, I know exactly what that feels like. I was sixteen once.” I swallowed. “I didn’t see what I couldn’t have. I saw somebody who needed someone.”
Ethan was crying again. He cried a lot those days.
So did I.
