Too Late, My Ex-Wife: Her Regret After Our Daughter's Death

Chapter 10: My Writhed Flower

Nathan's POV:

I did not move for a long time after the doctor left. Everything exactly the same. Except Lily was gone.

The ward beside the waiting area had its curtain half open. I was not trying to look. I just looked.

A man was sitting on the edge of a child's hospital bed. The girl on the bed was maybe six or seven, cheeks flushed pink from fever, a damp cloth on her forehead. She was whining in that particular way sick children had, not crying exactly, just existing loudly and without apology.

Her father was trying not to smile.

"Listen," he said, tucking the blanket around her legs, "you get better. That is your one job right now. Just get better."

"I do not want to get better I want to go home."

"You can go home when the fever breaks."

"That is taking forever."

"It has been four hours."

"That is forever when you are sick." She coughed dramatically. "I might die."

He laughed. The easy laugh of a man who knew his daughter was not going anywhere. "You are not dying. You have a fever and a cough and you are being very brave about it."

She considered this seriously. "If I am brave do I get something."

"You were already getting something."

"What."

"The Barbie doll house." He said it like he had been saving it. "The one you circled in the catalogue. The big one with the elevator."

She sat up so fast the damp cloth fell off her forehead. "You did not."

"I did. For your birthday. But only if you are better by then."

She grabbed his arm with both hands. "I will be so better. I will be the most better I have ever been."

He laughed again and pushed her gently back against the pillow and replaced the cloth on her forehead.

I looked away.

I looked at the wall opposite. Then at my hands. Then at nothing in particular.

I do not know when the tears started. I only knew that at some point they were there, running down without permission, and I was not doing anything to stop them because stopping them would have required a kind of energy I did not have anymore.

Lily had not asked for a Barbie doll house.

She had not asked for a bicycle or a gaming console or any of the things children her age circled in catalogues and taped to refrigerator doors. She had asked for her mother to stand in the same room long enough to watch her blow out the candles on a cake from the bakery on Clement Street with the flowers on top.

That was the whole wish.

And she had not even gotten that.

She had not gotten the cake. She had not gotten the candles. She had not gotten the one morning she had put on her yellow dress and held both our hands and believed for approximately forty minutes that everything was going to be different.

A small sound came from beside me.

I looked up.

The girl from the ward was standing in the corridor in her hospital gown, damp cloth still in hand, looking at me with the direct unsentimental assessment of a sick child who had wandered out to investigate something interesting.

"Why are you crying," she said.

"I am just a little sad," I said.

She looked at me for a moment. Then she walked over and reached up and pressed her small palm against my cheek. She wiped the tears with her thumb, very seriously, the way Lily used to wipe paint off her own hands after art class.

Something in my chest cracked open completely.

I pulled her into a hug before I could stop myself. Just for a second. She let me, patient and slightly confused, and then pulled back and looked at me with her head tilted.

"You should feel better soon," she said. "That is what my dad says."

Her father appeared in the doorway, expression shifting from alarm to something softer when he saw what was happening. He crossed the corridor and put his hand on his daughter's shoulder.

"Sorry," he said to me. "She escapes constantly."

"It is okay." I straightened up and looked at this man. "She is lucky to have you."

He looked down at her with that particular helpless fondness of someone who had completely lost and did not mind at all.

"Cherish every moment," I said. My voice came out quietly. Not performing anything. Just saying the truest thing I knew. "Every single one. Not everyone gets to watch their little girl grow up." I stopped for a second. "Not everyone gets that."

He looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who understood that something had happened here that he did not have the full picture of. Then he nodded once and guided his daughter gently back toward the ward.

I watched them go.

~.~

Dr. Reyes came back forty minutes later. She pulled the chair beside me around and sat down like she intended to stay for a moment.

"Mr. Cole," she said. "There is something I need to tell you."

I looked at her.

"There has been a significant development in Progressive Myelin Decay research in the last several months," she said. "A clinical trial. Early phase but the preliminary results have been very promising for pediatric cases." She paused. "I reviewed Lily's file this morning. She met the qualifications. Age, disease progression, overall profile. She would have been an eligible candidate."

I did not say anything.

"The survival probability for qualifying patients is sitting at around sixty two percent," she said. "That is not a guarantee. But it is a real chance." She looked at me carefully. "Enrollment began eight weeks ago. I am telling you this because I think you deserve the full picture."

Eight weeks ago Lily had been holding the railing with both hands on the stairs and not saying anything about it. Eight weeks ago I had been trying to get Vivienne to agree to a full examination and being told I was overreacting.

"She met the qualifications," I said.

"Yes."

"Eight weeks ago the window was already open."

"Yes."

I looked at the scuff mark on the floor near the water machine.

Sixty two percent.

Not a guarantee. But a real chance.

If Vivienne had listened six months ago. If she had agreed to one appointment. If she had not been at a banquet the night I called. If she had not driven away and left us on the side of a road while Lily struggled to breathe.

Lily never had to die.

I said it to myself very quietly and felt something shift in me that had no name and no bottom.

"She could have survived."

Dr. Reyes stayed a few more minutes and then left me alone.

I got up after a while and walked outside.

The air was cold. I looked up at the sky. Gray and ordinary and completely indifferent.

"Sorry," I said quietly.

Not to anyone passing. Not to the sky. To her.

"Sorry for being a loser dad, my flower." My voice did not break. It just went very small. "I tried. I want you to know that. I tried every way I knew how."

A car went past. Then another.

"But your loser dad is not going to forgive the one person who could have at least tried to understand. Who could have shown up just once. Who could have looked at you, really looked at you, and chosen you."