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“Where’s my daughter. Where is she.” I rip the sheet off me and swing my legs over.
“Tillie!” Madison rushes over, her arm coming around my back.
“Where is she. I need to see her. I need. We, I, we read The Wizard of Oz last night. She needs to know how it ends. She needs to know the end of the story. I need to tell he—”
“—Tillie.” Madison’s cheeks are wet with tears, but I don’t care. I need her. I need Micaela.
“We can see her soon. Not right now, okay?” Her coaxing me only makes me angry.
My eyes go to Tate who is now sitting up, sniffing back her tears. “I’m—I’m sorry, Tillie.” Tate bolts out the door, bursting into tears.
I have nowhere inside of my head that I want to retreat to. Everywhere is a memory of Micaela. I find myself looking directly into Madison’s eyes. Smoked Macha powder stirred with honey. “Where is she?”
“I’m sorry, Tillie…”
“Stop fucking saying sorry and tell me where she is!” I grab my chest and squeeze. Waiting. Waiting for simple words to extensively split me open.
“She passed away in her sleep—”
My legs give out, dropping to the ground. Reality blurs in and out. She was right here. She was mine, and I was hers. I was supposed to take her for her first day of school, be the tooth fairy when she lost her first tooth. I was supposed to watch her grow and mature into the girl she was going to be. I will never know what she was going to grow to look like. Whether she would be sassy and smart, what her voice would sound like when she’d ask me for another cookie.
Another pang of pain slices through my chest, and my breathing becomes slow and labored. I can hear the gushing of blood pound behind my eardrums.
“The angels can’t have her,” I whisper, rocking back and forth on the ground.
I can see Madison out of the corner of my eye, crying hysterically while trying to get me up, but her movements are in slow motion. My once colorful world has now fallen to a dull sepia.
I lost my angel, now I want to sin.
I stand from the ground, straightening my shoulders. Madison swipes the tears from her cheeks.
“Tillie. We can leave. Come on.”
I shake my head, trying to build a wall where my broken heart lays beating to a strum that orchestrates the sound of death. “I can’t leave without her.”
“Okay,” Madison says, and then walks toward the same doors Tate departed out of. “Give me a second.”
“Madison.” I stop her movements. She pauses, her hand on the door. Like she knows what I’m about to say and she’s dreading it. “Where is Nate.”
She sucks in a breath, and I watch as her shoulders tremble.
“I’m sorry, Tillie.”
Then she leaves, the swing of the doors the only thing left inside this room. My eyes close and I lean over the bed, my hand coming to my stomach. After everything she went through. My head throbs and my fingers itch for something. Anything to take this pain away. To take away the hollow pit that’s now leaking residue out of my chest. Madison returns with a man dressed in a long white coat and a woman attired in a blue plaid dress that hangs down to her shins.
“Hello, Tillie, I’m Doctor McIntyre and this is one of the nurses, Jenny. I’m very sorry for your loss. Are you prepared to have a talk, or it can wait for another time?”
I take a seat on the bed, shaking my head and swiping away my tears angrily. “I want to know everything right now.”
I zone out but hang off of every word that he spews. “There are no known causes for SIDS, just that recent studies have shown it may be connected to a defect in the portion of the baby’s brain that controls breathing…” I hear the word “healthy” said every two seconds, and that it is very “common” in children under the age of one.
Something feels wrong. Blinking back the tears, my eyes come to his. They feel heavy and lazy, tired from being awake. Tired from being alive. Tired of breathing air that I do not deserve to breathe. It should be her breathing, not me.
“When can I see her?”
His hands come to the front of his body, and I watch as his thumbs twirl together like small tornados. Maybe it’s a nervous trait. Who knows.
“We can release her into family care as early as tonight.”
I look to Madison. “Her funeral.”
Madison hasn’t stopped crying and I have to fight the urge to scream at her. I know she loved Mi—my daughter. But I need her, someone, to be strong for me right now because I’m not feeling very resilient. I feel like Icarus, flying too close to the sun, only my wings don’t melt off because I fly straight into the core and burn myself to ash. I need to be able to break down. I suck in a breath.