He smiled the entire time, and it was not a real smile and she was eleven and she knew that, and when it was done she put her hand flat on the top of his head and said, “It’s the same you,” and my husband had to leave the room.
He d*ed in March.
I want to say what the three months after were, because “Saffy was heartbroken” is the polite summary and it was not polite.
She stopped talking.
Not dramatically — she answered questions, she went to school, she did her homework at the kitchen table the way she always had. But the narration stopped.
Saffy had been a narrator her whole life. From the age of four she had reported on her day in unbroken paragraphs from the moment the car door shut, and in March that simply switched off, and I spent eleven weeks driving a silent child home from a school I could not get her to describe.
The grief counselor said give it time.
My sister said give it time.
And I gave it time, because what else is there, and because I was doing my own version of it, which was crying in a parked car outside a grocery store approximately four times a week like a woman in a country song.
Then there was the night in May.
She came into my room at eleven o’clock, which she had not done since she was seven, and she stood in the doorway and said: “Mom, is it bad that I can’t remember what his voice sounded like on the phone?”
“Sweetheart—”
“In person I can. On the phone I can’t. It’s been two months and I already lost one.” She was very calm about it, which was the worst part. “What else am I going to lose?”
I did not have an answer.
I have since learned, from a woman named Ottoline who is a school nurse, that this is the most common question a bereaved child asks and that there is no good answer and that the correct response is to sit down on the floor with them, which I did not know in May and did not do.
I said something about photographs.
She went back to bed.
And three weeks later she was in a bathroom with a pair of kitchen scissors, and I understand now — it took me most of a year — that the two things are the same event.
A child who has just discovered that she cannot hold on to anything will go looking, urgently, for something she can actually do with her hands.
One evening in June, she locked herself in the bathroom far longer than usual.
“Sweetheart, is everything okay?” I asked, knocking gently.
The door opened, and my heart stopped.
I noticed long blond strands scattered across the floor.
My beautiful, long-haired girl stood in front of the mirror with her hair hacked off to her shoulders.
Uneven.
Jagged.
Her hands were shaking.
“Saffy… what have you done?” I whispered.
Her lips began to tremble.
“There’s a girl in my class named Odetta,” she said. “She has canc*r. Today, everyone saw that she’d lost her hair, and some boys laughed at her. She ran into the bathroom crying, Mom.”
Saffy lifted the hair she had carefully gathered and tied with a ribbon.
“I read that real hair can be made into wigs. Maybe mine can help.”
My chest tightened.
Saffy had watched her father lose his hair during treatment.
She still remembered the day he asked me to shave what little remained while trying to smile for her.
I pulled my daughter into my arms.
“Your dad would be so proud of you,” I whispered.
And she said — into my shirt, in the bathroom, with her own hair on the floor around us — the thing I have never repeated to anyone until now.
“I couldn’t do anything for Dad, Mom. I just held the mirror.”
That very evening, we took the hair to a salon to have it turned into a wig.
The woman who runs it is named Berenice, and she has been cutting hair in that shopping plaza for thirty-one years, and she looked at a twelve-year-old holding a ribboned ponytail and did not charge us one dollar.
Not the cut to even it out.
Not the wig.
“Honey,” she said to me, at the register, with Saffy in the chair out of earshot, “I did your husband’s in the fall. He came in on a Tuesday and asked me to do it before it all went, so he’d look like a choice and not like a patient.” She rang up nothing. “Put your card away. I’m not taking money from that family twice.”
When Saffy brought the finished wig to school, she was glowing with happiness.
And so was I.
The next morning, my phone rang.
