Chapter 7
Vanessa had closed the bedroom door and it stayed closed. I could hear the faint click of it and then nothing else from that hallway. The apartment felt quiet in a different way than before, like someone had turned the air conditioning down.
My dad sat on the black sofa with me. He didn't sit across from me or pull me onto his lap right away. He sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and he didn't try to take the two halves of the book out of my hands.
I'd been holding them since she tore it. My fingers had gone warm around the edges. The light blue cover with the white clouds was creased where she'd gripped it.
"Can I sit here a minute?" he had asked.
I'd nodded.
For a while we just listened to the city outside the windows behind the sofa. The lights were blurred and orange and white. The bookshelf behind us was dark. His laptop was still open on the desk across the room but the screen had gone black.
He breathed slowly and I tried to breathe like him. I wasn't crying hard anymore. My face felt tight from the tears drying.
"You've had that one a long time," he said quietly. He didn't look at the book directly. He looked at my hands.
I didn't answer at first. I turned the two halves over in my lap. The tear was jagged right through the trees and the cartoon kids on the cover. I lined them up so the clouds almost matched again.
"Dad," I said, and my voice was small. "Do you want to see inside?"
He nodded. "If you want to show me."
I opened the right half. The first page inside the cover was thicker than the other pages. That's where Mom had written. I hadn't shown anyone that part in a long time because I was scared someone would smudge it.
I tipped it toward him so the warm light from the lamp hit it.
In blue ink, in her handwriting that slanted a little to the right, it said: For Sophie — to read you to sleep and keep you brave — Love, Mom.
Under it she had drawn a tiny cloud with a smiley face, the same kind that was on the cover.
My dad stared at it. I saw his throat move. He didn't touch the page at first.
"When did she... " He stopped. He put his hand lightly on the edge of the sofa, not on the book. "I remember when she wrote that. You were four. She read it every night that spring."
I remembered too. She would do the voices for the trees and the kids in the picture. She had a tired voice sometimes but she always did the wind sound — whooo — when we turned the page with the clouds.
"She died and then it was just two years," I said. I didn't know how to say it right. "And this was hers."
"I know, baby," he said. His voice got thicker. "I know."
He remembered it then, I could tell. He hadn't forgotten Mom, but he had forgotten that this book was the one she touched every night. That it wasn't just a book from the library or the store. He looked at the inscription again and his eyes got wet. He didn't wipe them.
"Is that why you sleep with it?" he asked.
I hugged the two halves closer. "If I keep it by my pillow I can still hear her. Not for real. But in my head I hear how she said the words. If it goes away, her voice goes away too."
I hadn't ever said that out loud before. It sounded strange when I said it, but it was true.
My dad finally touched the page, just the corner, very gently with one fingertip.
"Oh, Sophie," he said.
I felt my chest get tight again. "When I said please give it, I wasn't being bad. I didn't want her to take Mom away again."
He closed his eyes for a second. A slow breath came out of him.
"I realize that now," he said. "I didn't realize before. I thought you were upset about a toy. I didn't understand you were trying to keep your mom's book safe."
We sat there with the torn halves open on my lap. The inscription looked up at us, split by the tear that ran just below the little cloud she'd drawn. The line of the tear made a shadow across her handwriting.
May you like
He didn't say anything about Vanessa. He didn't promise to fix it with tape yet. He just kept his hand near mine on the sofa and looked at Mom's words like he was reading them to memorize them again.
I felt a little less scared to hold the book open in front of him. Like it was okay that it mattered this much.
