My mom laughs and tosses it in a garbage bag that’s clearly meant for donations. “I can’t see you wearing that.”
“Do you really have to do this now?” I ask.
My mother glances up at me with a sympathetic smile. “I’ll stop, if you want. I know this is hard.”
Which makes me feel selfish. “Harder for you.”
“No, it feels good. I’ve held onto this house for so long, and everything in it. All the memories of Dad…” Her smile wobbles a bit. “It feels good to let go. Freeing. It’s certainly been long enough.”
“How did you go on, Mom?” I ask suddenly. “When Dad died? I don’t even remember you crying.”
“I cried.” She smiles sadly.
“I just remember you being there for me. Every day after school. Baking cookies even when you had a full-time job, papers to mark…”
“I knew it was important.”
“It was. I just…” I shake my head slowly. “I don’t know how anyone faces it. Losing someone.”
“You’ve lost someone, Rachel,” she reminds me gently. “You know what it feels like. You lost your dad when you were only seventeen.”
“I know.” Have I forgotten how wild the grief was, how consuming? Maybe I have. Maybe that’s the only way you can go forward, by forgetting. “It just feels different now. Thinking about Emily.” A lump forms in my throat and I will it to dissolve.
“I know it does. Losing a child… it’s unnatural. It feels wrong.”
“Have I already lost her?” The hope I felt, looking at those paltry page views, vanishes in an instant. “Should I not be doing this, Mom? Seeking this treatment?” I look at her anxiously, waiting for an answer, and she pulls me into a hug. Her body trembles against mine as I rest my head on her frail shoulder.
“You’re doing this out of love for your daughter, Rachel. It’s not wrong. It might not have the outcome I know you’re longing for, but it’s not wrong.”
I close my eyes as I breathe in her familiar scent—Tide detergent and lavender perfume. “Thank you. Thank you for saying that.”
“I believe it,” my mother says staunchly. “I will always believe it.”
Later, as I’m unlocking my car to head home, I check my phone. Thirty-one views. A ripple of something—I don’t know what—goes through me. Who is looking at the page? Who is reading Emily’s story?
Over the next week I kept checking Emily’s page on my phone. Andrew designed a logo that Eva uploaded, and it was perfect—a little, smiling rubber duck with a pink bow in her quiff. Eva even designed a sticker of it that people can put on their social media, when they’ve donated.
We do all this, and still neither of us tell James what’s going on. There’s opportunity, of course. He comes to the hospital on Emily’s birthday, and we sit together as we watch our daughter silently and try not to think of the birthday that could have been—the cake, the candles, the party, the presents. Our little girl, gap-toothed and grinning, twirling around the house in her excitement.
I can picture it so perfectly, so easily, I can’t believe it hasn’t happened… and that it never will.
We sing happy birthday to her, softly, so the words feel like an apology. Her eyes flicker back and forth, making me catch my breath, but then she sinks back into herself, as she always does. I touch her hand, wishing there could be more to this moment, even as it slips away.
James hands me a card, and I see it is from both him and Eva, in her handwriting. This is the perfect opportunity to tell him about the page, but I don’t. I can’t.
The words crowd in my throat and press against my tongue and it feels as if I physically can’t get them out of my mouth. I don’t kno
w why; I’m not scared of James’ reaction. I just don’t want this ephemeral feeling of optimism to pop, and I know it will once James finds out, and he is either furious or hurt, and definitely disapproving.
So I convince myself it doesn’t matter, because so few people have seen the page. But over the course of the week the number of views has kept creeping up, slowly, slowly. Forty, then sixty, then one hundred. A week after Eva and I put the page up, it’s at two hundred and forty-one, hardly life-changing. A veritable drop in an endless ocean of need and desperation.
And yet. Two hundred and forty-one people know my story. Emily’s story. And, I see when I check the donations page, almost six hundred dollars has been donated for the cost of her treatment.
Those figures both hearten and discourage me. At least someone cares, enough to read the page, give some money, although of course it’s not nearly enough. The cost of Emily’s treatment will be in the many thousands, most likely in the hundreds of thousands. Who am I kidding? Who is Eva? How is this going to help?
The realization of how little it is, even though it feels like so much, throbs through me. Hope that was starting to unfurl inside me like the tenderest green shoot begins to wither, and it’s only been a week. It feels worse to have hoped and then lost than to have never hoped at all. I go to bed on Sunday night sick at heart, tomorrow stretching ahead of me bleakly.
Then, on Monday morning, as I bolt a cup of coffee, I check my phone again, because there is still some small hope pushing up through the dry, desert soil of my heart, and I nearly drop it in shock. There are four thousand views. I check the donation page, letting out a little gasp at the number there. Three thousand dollars. What…? How…?