PART 3
“I’ve been talking to her,” Greg said. “At night. For about two months now.”
I lowered myself down onto the cold grass beside him, because my legs wouldn’t hold me.
“Two months ago,” he said, “I had a health scare. That day I told you my back was bothering me — it wasn’t my back, Laura. I had chest pains at work. I went to the ER. I didn’t tell you. They ran tests, said it was stress, sent me home. But sitting in that ER, alone, thinking I might be dying—”
His voice cracked.
“All I could think about was Grace.
That I might die and go wherever she is, and I hadn’t thought about her, hadn’t SAID her name, in thirty years, because we buried her twice — once in the ground and once in the silence. And I got so scared that I’d spent thirty years pretending my daughter never existed, and that if there’s anything after this, she’d meet me as a stranger.”
I was crying now too.
“So I started coming down here at night,” Greg said. “After you fell asleep. I got out her box — I kept it, all these years, hidden in the crawl space, her hospital bracelet and the one photo and the little cap they put on her. And I’d sit in the rocking chair, the one we rocked Michael and Emma in but never her, because she never came home — and I’d just… talk to her.
Tell her about her brother and sister. Tell her about our life. Tell her I was sorry it took me thirty years to say her name.
‘It’s okay, sweetheart.’ ‘Daddy loves you too.’
I wasn’t losing my mind, Laura. I need you to know that. I was finally, thirty years too late, being her father.
For two days she had a father who loved her and never got to say it. I’m just… saying it now. Every night. Making up for lost time.”
“Why the blanket?” I asked. “Why did you take Michael’s blanket?”
“Because she never had one,” Greg whispered. “She never had a blanket, or a room, or a rocking chair, or a single ordinary night of being someone’s baby. And I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I wrapped her box in her brother’s blanket, so that for once, some part of her would be wrapped up warm the way her brother and sister always were.
I lied about donating it because I didn’t know how to explain any of this without breaking your heart. You seemed so healed. I didn’t want to reach into you and pull the grief back out after thirty years.”
“And tonight?” I asked, looking at the small hole in the flower bed. “What are you doing tonight?”
Greg looked at the hole, and then at me, and something in his face was both grief and, underneath it, the beginning of peace.
“I’m giving her a place,” he said. “That’s the thing we never did, Laura. We were so young and so destroyed and the hospital handled everything and we just… let her disappear. She doesn’t have a grave. She doesn’t have a spot. There’s nowhere in the world I can go and sit and say, this is where my daughter is.
So I was going to make her one. Here. In the garden. Where I could visit her. Where she’d be home, finally, in our yard, with us.
I was going to do it alone.
I didn’t think I had the right to ask you to grieve her all over again.”
I looked at my husband — this good, gentle man who had carried our daughter alone in the dark for two months because he loved me too much to make me carry her too — and I reached over and put my hand on the little wooden box.
“You don’t get to do this alone,” I said. “She was mine too.
We buried her in silence for thirty years, Greg.
We’re done doing that.
Go get the good trowel. We’re going to do this together. And we’re going to do it right.”
