Total pages in book: 179
Estimated words: 170878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 854(@200wpm)___ 684(@250wpm)___ 570(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 170878 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 854(@200wpm)___ 684(@250wpm)___ 570(@300wpm)
“She’s the last one.” Clara happily looked down at her clipboard. I’d given it to her to involve her during the process of interviewing nannies. The clipboard didn’t have much on it besides the names and stickers I gave her after each woman left. She’d doodled on the back with black crayon and written her name at the top. Her Rs were still backward.
They were all women, the applicants. I hadn’t even given the few male candidates an interview. Sexist of me? Probably. But I didn’t want a man taking care of my four-year-old daughter. Truthfully, I didn’t want anyone else but me. Sometimes, I’d let my father or my brother care for her, Calliope recently making the cut too.
I wanted it to be me. I wanted my eyes on Clara, every second of every day so I could ensure that she didn’t go anywhere, that she didn’t grow or change without me witnessing it. I wanted to soak up every second I could because there was a real possibility there would be a time—a short fucking time—before she would no longer walk this earth, when there wouldn’t be any more seconds left to look at my daughter.
Now that we had the transplant scheduled, there was a very real chance she could beat this. That I wouldn’t have to continue waking up wondering how many days my daughter had left. How many days I had left.
I mused over Naomi’s arrival, her volunteering for the transplant. Apparently, she wanted nothing from us. Which made me brace, suspecting imminent disaster. The woman hadn’t even looked back after leaving her daughter when she was still an infant. She couldn’t be relied upon; she would bail at the last second, and I’d be a fool for hoping that I’d get more time with my brilliant, vibrant daughter.
At the crunch of wheels in the driveway, Clara scuttled over me, putting her pink tutu-covered booty in my face as she peered over the couch to look at the woman getting out of the car.
I didn’t bother looking. I instead gazed at my daughter resting her head in her hands, watching the driveway carefully. I memorized the angle of her nose, the color in her cheeks, the life in her eyes. The way the small dark curl fell on her forehead. I tried to grasp the moment like a physical thing, to imprint it onto my being. I wanted to will Clara into being here forever. There was simply no other option. There was no way this world could keep spinning if she wasn’t in it. No way my heart could continue beating unless hers did.
“She’s pretty,” Clara declared.
I forced my expression to something resembling normal. I tried to let go of the desperation clawing at me—the constant, silent begging for my daughter to live—so she didn’t see it on my face. As if it wasn’t stitched into my every inhale and exhale.
As if I wasn’t bartering away pieces of my soul with every passing moment.
“That’s nice, but as I told you with the last four, it doesn’t matter if she’s pretty; it matters if she’s qualified.” While speaking to Clara, I marveled at the perfect composition of her features, her upturned lips, the gap in her teeth. Her dark hair was piled into a messy bun at the top of her head, butterfly clips scattered through her hair. She’d insisted on putting them in herself.
Clara had called each of the women “pretty” whether that was objectively true or not. I barely noticed what they looked like. I’d actually tried to find older women who wouldn’t cause any shit with me—shit being whatever crap my brother would give me if I had a remotely attractive nanny.
“She’s younger too,” Clara remarked with light in her eyes. “Maybe she’ll know what Wednesday is besides the third day of the week.”
I gritted my teeth to hide a smile. The older candidates were highly qualified, experienced, but hadn’t quite known what to do with my co-interviewer, especially when most of her questions were pop-culture related.
“Maybe.” I shrugged, getting up to answer the door, my knees smarting as I did so. My body was getting old, telling me that surviving on black coffee and hospital cafeteria food while sleeping in hospital chairs was wreaking havoc on my body.
I could handle the pain if it served as evidence of what was behind us. The next hospital bed I planned on seeing was the one I died in. With my adult daughter holding my hand. Because that was how it was supposed to be. We watched our children enter this world, they were there when we left it. We were not supposed to survive on a planet where our children drew their last breath.
“Let me open it!” Clara ran to the door.
I let her reach up, fumble, and open the door. Because you let your daughter with leukemia do pretty much fucking anything that gave them even an ounce of joy.