Chapter 12 - The Night I Put Her Back Myself
It was a Tuesday and it was already dark outside my window. The hallway light made a thin yellow line under my door and I could hear the dishwasher running in the kitchen. My bookcase looked different now with all the pictures Dad had taken out of the closet lined up on the top shelf. The bunny with the blue ears was still there between the books, but now Mom was there too, not just in one frame. I stood on the rug in my off-white dress with the puff sleeves and I didn't wait for someone to tell me it was bedtime.
That was the strange part. For weeks bedtime had been something that happened to me. Someone would say the words and I would hold tighter to the silver frame and cry. That night I decided it first. I walked to the bookcase and I reached for the small silver frame, the one that had been fixed, the glass clear again. My hands remembered how to hold it. I didn't feel that panic from when it fell. I just held it carefully with both hands and carried it to my bed.
Dad was in the doorway. Jenna was right behind him. He still wore his navy sweater and his gray pants, and I could see the silver watch on his left wrist. He didn't move to take the frame from me. He didn't rush me. He just watched, and I could hear him breathing slow the way he did when he was trying not to say the wrong thing.
I climbed onto my bed and pulled the blanket up to my waist. I held the frame against my chest for a minute the way I always had. It was warm from my hands. I looked at Mom's face and my face together in the photo. Then I did what I hadn't done before. I got back down. My feet hit the dark wood floor with a soft thump. I carried the frame back to the bookcase and set it down myself on the middle shelf where I could see it from my pillow. I angled it just a little, so Mom could see me. That had always been the important part.
"I want her to watch me sleep," I said. It wasn't a whisper that time. It wasn't a plea. It was just me telling them what I was doing.
Jenna knelt down a little so we were closer to the same height. She didn't stand in the doorway the way she used to, with her arms crossed and her voice firm. She smiled, but not too big.
"Ready when you are," she said.
I remembered the other words. Sophia, bed, now. That was what she had said that first night when I was crying in front of the bookcase. Dad had been kneeling beside me and she had been in the doorway. This was not those words. This was softer and it left room for me to answer. I felt my shoulders drop. I hadn't realized I was holding them up.
Dad came into the room then and did what he'd done that first night. He knelt on the floor beside my bed, one knee down, his hands resting on his other leg. The same navy sweater, the same wedding band catching the warm light from the lamp. But his face wasn't just worried anymore. He looked at the bookcase, at all the pictures, and then back at me.
"Hey bug," he said quietly. "Mom sees you because we remember her. Not because you have to hold that frame all night. She sees you because she's in all these pictures and in the stories we tell and in you."
I looked at him and I felt my eyes get a little wet, but not the way they had before. It wasn't tears that made my cheeks hurt. I nodded because I understood him. Mom didn't need me to squeeze the frame so tight my knuckles turned white. I could put her down and she would still be there.
"Like when you tell me about the hospital?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said. "Like that. Like when you put her where you want her and we all say goodnight."
Jenna didn't say anything right then. She just tucked the blanket around my legs the way Dad usually did, and Dad tucked the other side. They didn't fight over who did it. I lay back on my pillow and I could see the silver frame on the shelf, and the other frames next to it, and the bunny with the blue ears. The light in the room was warm and dim, the same as always, but it didn't feel heavy.
"Goodnight, Mom," I said, looking at the shelf.
May you like
"Goodnight," Dad and Jenna both said, quiet, like they were saying it to her too.
I didn't cry. I didn't hold the frame to my chest until I fell asleep. I kept my hands on my blanket and I breathed slow. The door stayed cracked open just an inch, the hallway light still a thin line, and I fell asleep looking at that little row of silver and wood until my eyes closed on their own.
