“Daddy!”

Eleanor rushes in, hugging me around my legs.

My parents follow behind her. Their faces are strained and their body language is cautious. My dad nods to me while my mother asks how I’m doing. I lie, saying I’m doing much better.

“There were some things I needed to process,” I tell them, which is, for the most part, true.

My mother surveys the wanton destruction laid about the house and with a sigh begins picking up garbage and random pieces of clutter. I sigh and do the same as my dad takes Eleanor and her suitcase upstairs.

While in the kitchen putting dirty dishes in the sink and dishwasher, my mother tells me that I’m a good dad.

“I’m trying,” I tell her.

“You need to do better,” she tells me and the confrontation, subtle and quiet as it was, is now over.

In that statement though, laid the heart of the matter. Even when I voiced that I was trying, the truth was that long ago I had stopped trying and let things grow stagnant. I built habits around that laziness, and now that it was me all alone without Veronica to help pick me up, I didn’t know where to start.

“Father Matthias stopped by early,” I tell her.

“Oh?” she responds. I hoped that she would admit that she had asked him to stop by and check on me, but she didn't. She instead responded with, “How is he?”

“He’s good. We talked for a while.”

“That’s nice,” my mom says and I feel a little twinge inside my chest.

Why the subterfuge? Why not tell me that they were worried about me; that they felt some kind of emotional feeling about me? Perhaps this is the legacy they have passed on to me: the inability to feel and to share those feelings.

We ate dinner together and my parents left and I was back into the role of a parent.

Eleanor and I went upstairs and we unpacked her suitcase, putting away the neatly folded clothes in her drawer. She pulled out one dress in particular, exclaiming that this new dress was her favorite dress ever. Grabbing her toiletries we headed into the bathroom for bath time. We sat and stood quietly as the bathtub filled up. Eleanor grabbed a couple toys and threw them in before climbing in herself.

As she laid there, floating in the water, I asked, “How was Grandma and Grandpa’s?”

“Good,” she says.

“Did you guys do anything fun?”

“We went to the zoo.”

“Oh yeah? What was your favorite animal?”

“The monkey! It was so, so funny!”

“Cool,” I say and we lapse into silence.

After a while, she says, “I can count to one-hundred in tens, want to hear? Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty.” She stops, losing her train of thought, and she spins around in the water. “I need my hair washed. Make sure you use conditioner so it can be silky and smooth.”

“Did Grandma teach you that?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, and so I wash her hair.

Washing hair, as easy of a task as it is, was always something that was nitpicked. When Veronica was still around, I would do bathtime, and on the days she asked me to wash Eleanor’s hair, I would do so. Without fail, after every bath as Eleanor sat on our bed and Veronica brushed her hair, Veronica would ask, “Did you put in conditioner?” I could never get the combination of the right amount, application, and time in hair. There was always the question of whether or not I could accomplish this simple task from Veronica, and apparently I never could.

Eleanor asked if she could help and so I put a little squirt of shampoo in her hands and she proceeded to massage it in as I did the same. She laid down in the water, letting the soap fan out like a halo as it rinsed out. I brushed the hair that wasn’t in the water with my hands so that it could rinse out as well. She sat up and I got out the dreaded conditioner, squirting a little bit in her hand and my own, and together we rubbed it in.

Somehow, we’d survive, silky and smooth hair or not.

Out of the bathtub and somewhat dried off, she began her familiar routine of running and screaming down the hallway naked while I sat patiently on the floor holding a nightgown and a clean pair of underwear.

Once Eleanor was convinced to get dressed, we brushed teeth and somehow in the mix of it, she rammed her shin into a step stool and there’s crying and screaming, and I feel helpless all over again. I try to tell her a joke to distract her from the pain, but she screams at me even louder for telling a bad joke. Even though she isn’t bleeding we put a bandage over the bruised spot and suddenly everything is better.

I asked her to get three books to read and she got twelve. I told her three again and she chose four from her pile and I conceded. Two books on princesses, one book with talking bears, and one book about a worm that could spit rhymes.

As she climbed into bed and I tucked her in, Eleanor asked, “Can you tell me a story about Mommy?”

I think for a moment and begin, “A long time ago, Mommy was a princess that lived high atop a tower in a castle far, far away.”

Eleanor laughs, “Mommy wasn’t a princess. Mommy was just mommy.”

Fair enough.

I start again. “When you were growing in Mommy’s belly, she was so excited to meet you. When you’d kick and move around, Mommy would talk to you and tell you about her day and about all the exciting things we would do with you once you came into the world. She would play music and dance around the house. She would tell you to be strong and brave and fierce and to grow into the best version of yourself. And when you decided to come into the world, we were ready for you and Mommy was very brave and strong. You came out and Mommy cried because of how happy she was and she held you and gave you kisses. You opened your eyes and saw her, and she thought you were the most wonderful thing in the whole world. Mommy held you and you grabbed her finger and held on too, and she never let you go.”

At some point, Eleanor had crawled out of bed and into my lap. I held her as the story went on, talking about how she grew from a tiny little infant into an army-crawling, screeching, laughing little baby. Eleanor would laugh at the littlest thing, reserving her belly-laughs for games of peek-a-boo. During days when naps were difficult, Veronica would load Eleanor into a stroller and walk around our neighborhood. The cries and screams would end as Eleanor would stare at the sky and the trees passing overhead. When Eleanor caught the flu, Veronica stayed up with her, holding and rocking her until they both passed out. When Eleanor was old enough, but still too young to understand what princesses were, Veronica would play dress-up with her, parading around the house in their regality, even when she was too sick. At night when Eleanor wouldn’t fall asleep after a nap too early in the day, Veronica would stay up with her reading until ultimately, Eleanor fell asleep.

On and on the memories went, with Eleanor snuggling deeper into my arms. “I miss Mommy,” she whispers.

“I know, baby.”

I pause for a moment, seeing the rabbit hole before me. “Would you want to see Mommy again?” I ask.

“You mean in heaven,” Eleanor asks.

“Something like that,” I say.

I hold her tightly in my arms, imagining the possibility of her having Veronica as a mother again. I think of the time I spent with the other Veronica a few hours before and all the things I missed about her and all the things I knew Eleanor needed from her mother. All those wishes and what-ifs began to take form, and I began to see the event horizon, light falling in all around us and we began pushing towards it. I could feel myself begin to shake. Opening an eye I could see my arms and hands and criss-crossed legs vibrating, shimmering in the dimness of the nightlight. Closing my eyes again I could see the light behind my eyes red-shift and then nothingness, feeling like we were getting pulled into a horizontal ring.

Everything begins to happen at once.

I am at the center of a whirlwind, and I am in the center of Eleanor’s room. The air seems to be expanding and contracting with a whooshing sound. The room seems to be getting darker, and now the lights were all flickering and going in and out as the walls seemed to be falling around us and the ceiling cracks open.

Eleanor is calm and I pull her in closer to me, holding her even tighter.

I can see the future laid out before us with all of my unintentional failings, and how they would create a broken shell of what Eleanor’s true potential was. I closed my eyes and began pouring every ounce of my will into a singular goal.

Something breaks inside me, but I keep holding on. Eleanor grasps my forearm, calmly facing the unknown.

“I love you Daddy,” she says.

Then all is still and quiet, except for the quiet resonance of something somewhere vibrating.

Eleanor is gone and I am all alone.