by Jeff McLaughlin

We stood in the supermarket parking lot, midway between our house and the hospital. Bright morning sunlight, that faint yellow color particular to early autumn dawn, fell across us. My wife and I each held hands with our three-year old daughter while we quickly talked. I had no meaningful updates; she told me all was well at home. We hugged, briefly before I picked our daughter up so we could wave goodbye together.

I knelt before my daughter. “Ok,” I said. “We have like three hours, three! There’s a library here, and a park, and hot chocolate. Almost like home. Where should we go first?”

She frowned, contemplative, her wide, expressive face gone narrow, considering. “Park!” she decided, beaming. I swung her into the back seat, buckled her, and pulled the straps as tightly as I could. While we waited at a stoplight I watched her in the mirror. She looked out the window, her perfect skin illuminated by that same joyous sunlight, a smile swelled over her face, and that small expression was enough to break my heart.

Not our city, not our park. Only a circumscribed and confined section of trees left within suburban development. We started up an asphalt path, holding hands. I let her lead.

“There was a BIG storm last night,” she told me.

I had already mentally drifted back to the hospital wondering if anything consequential was happening there. My wife had not, of course, made mention of some meaningless storm. I started noticing evidence of its strength and passage and marveled, slightly, that I had heard no sound, nor even sensed any indication of it, from my insulated place within the thick hospital walls.

Farther along, a pine tree had fallen across the path. Someone had already sawed out the obstructing section and rolled it aside, leaving bright, exposed wood over two piles of fresh sawdust. I watched my daughter crouch to touch the beads of emerging sap. She pulled her hand away, rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, and started to taste it.

“No, no,” I said, gently.

She nodded and turned her attention back to the sawdust. A wavering column of ants curled around and over one pile. She pointed and leaned closer, her face only inches from them. They continued, oblivious to their fates in the arbitrary hands of a child, as helpless, clueless, and vulnerable as every other living creature.

I wanted to say no, don’t touch them, but of course simply touching them wouldn’t harm anything. I wanted to say, look, they must have found something to eat, and now they’re going to carry it back home, but that was only a guess, and I couldn’t lie to her. She worked her way around the small pile to watch them vanish into the thicker underbrush.

Then she stood and reached up for my hand. We walked, not so very far, to the end of the asphalt. A bench marked the summit of a modest hill, and she started to clamber up on it until I picked her up, whirled her around, and set her beside me. She giggled and wiggled her ankles, her knees forced straight by the seat.

We rested there. She leaned against me, her head low on my chest, her hand lying, nearly weightless, alongside her cheek. I cradled her closely holding her as firmly as I could. I felt her rapid heartbeat. I watched my breath waver the tiny, fine, delicate hairs on the crown of her head.

The path remained empty except for us. Sunlight blinked through the canopy with each slight shift in the wind. Birds called. The faintest shush of traffic sighed through the trees. I could still smell the sweet, pointed scent of sap, from my daughter’s fingers, perhaps, or from some other shattered limb.

She nuzzled closer to me, her hand clasping at my shirt, so I embraced her more tightly. I wondered how she understood the world, how she understood our ongoing family crisis. I wanted to ask, but worried that questions might instill some confusion or fear that she did not already feel. I wanted to ask but felt it would be terrible to expect a small child to give words to feelings I could not fully express myself. I kissed her forehead.

She sighed. “Ok,” she finally said. She looked up at me.

I smiled, genuinely, since I loved her, desperately loved her, loved her in a way she could not have fathomed, and I hope, will never come to fathom, my first child, so complete, precious, healthy, and yet still fragile. I smiled to try and overwhelm any sign of fear or worry I might inadvertently communicate.

She loved the marvel of a second library, the novelty of one not our own. We sat on a plush green couch as I read to her. Afterwards, we sipped hot chocolate together at the coffee shop. I remember us talking, our conversations marked with pauses as she considered what she would say next, strangely adult behavior for a small child. But I hate to admit I recall nothing, nothing specific that she said. I was distracted. I was faking attention. All I could think about was my son. That, and trying not to cry, not because I needed to appear masculine or unfeeling, but because I wanted my daughter to remain free of worry, immersed in childhood happiness and innocence, free of fear, despite our reality.

We drove back to the supermarket and sat on the hood waiting for my wife.

“Are you coming home?”

“No, sweetheart,” I told her and rested my hand across her small shoulders. Since it was Saturday and I had no work, I could stay at the hospital. What I said aloud was, “I think mom’s going to watch a movie with you.”

She smiled and widened her eyes at the same time.

I could picture them, nestled together on our couch, my wife exhausted from the stark weariness carved by fear, my daughter beside her, protected, my God, I hoped, protected in some adequate-enough versions of parental care and attention and love.

Back, back to the hospital, to sit at the bedside of my infant son, to listen to the incessant monitors beep away his tenuous hold on life, shivering in the artificial chill, waiting, waiting, in the shadowed room, for those random moments when he emerged from sedation, slowly fluttering his heavy, swollen eyelids. Everyone, the nurses, the doctors, everyone, told us he would neither remember our presence nor notice our absence.

But if he was going to die, if he was going to be taken from us as quickly as they predicted, that was all we could do. Be there. Be there, within his view, to promise, falsely, hopefully, truthfully, that we would always be there, to love and protect him from anything and everything.

Jeff McLaughlin was born in Nebraska, grew up in the Carolinas, and went to school in Minnesota, where he now lives with his wife and two children. His stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, december magazine, The Southern Humanities Review, and most recently BOOTH. Alongside querying his first novel, he serves as a reader for the Raleigh Review.