I tapped my pen on my knee, going over every moment of today but it was too big to capture in a few strokes. I decided to focus on the room and the ridiculousness of someone like me being in a suite like this. The space was elegant as if it was a millionaire’s lair, complete with a balcony that was all very action hero inspired, like Batman, with carved gargoyles on the corners. I was in my happy place, quite at peace, as I drew a superhero with a large M on his chest, complete with cape, standing on the balcony, the wind tugging at his cape.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Millionaire Man!” I announced to the empty room and winced in case I’d woken up Sophie. There was no sound from her room, but I checked in there anyway, and then it was back to the cartoon. I had Millionaire Man lamenting that his life was destroyed because there was no swimming pool in his penthouse, and in the next scene, had a single tear running down his face over the fact the coffee wasn’t fresh. In the last frame, his anguished expression over the wrong kind of snacks was way too close to home, and I realized I’d unintentionally drawn a reflection of what I felt.
I wish my thoughts were as simple as missing pools and the wrong kind of snacks.
With the preliminary sketch done, I turned to my iPad to create the real version for uploading, but a soft knock on the door pulled me from my safe world of art. Fear made my heart stop when I saw Joachim through the peephole. Had I misjudged him? Was he here to tell me he’d changed his mind? I yanked open the door prepared to do anything to get him to help Sophie.
“You have to help us, please,” I demanded and begged before he could even get a smile in, and his eyes widened.
“I am. I will. I just thought I’d check in, and uhm, I get it’s late.” He stared down at his hands, the confident determined man who’d called Sophie his daughter was nervous, and compassion pushed aside my fear and the surge of adrenaline ebbed away leaving me shaky and confused. “Can we talk?” He hesitated. “I don’t have to come in if you’re…” He waved at my PJs, and I shook my head. I didn’t care what I was wearing right now, I was in relieved mode, and hell, since Sophie came into my life, if anyone visited me past the magic evening hour of eight, then they should expect me to be getting ready for bed. I took every single second of Sophie sleeping to at least chill, even if I couldn’t get my own sleep in.
“No, come in. It’s fine. Just talk quietly because Sophie’s sleeping.”
“Can I see her? Not wake her up, just look at her?”
Again, he was so uncertain, but I led him to the room because I couldn’t deny him access to his daughter even if I was torn between needing him for her and not wanting him anywhere near her.
He stood at the end of the large crib, and the room shrank around us with the big hockey player hovering. His hands pushed into his jeans, his big shoulders hunched, and I’d never seen such confusion in a person before.
“Is she okay?” he whispered.
I nodded, then indicated we needed to leave before talking. He was new to this parenting thing, and he had to learn that sometimes you had to let a sleeping baby lie.
“She’s fretting some, but she’s at least sleeping,” I explained as we ended up by the two sofas in the sitting area. I gathered up all my art things and shoved them in the messenger bag, and in all that time, Joachim hadn’t moved, just stared out the window in a daze.
“I have this whole list of questions…” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “Things that she’s feeling. Pain, bruising, infections, fevers, what symptoms does she have? Does she have them all? Is it me? Is it my fault? Did I do this to her?”
The visible spiraling was senseless as all the words spilled out, and I pressed a hand to his chest. “Sit down.”
He blinked at me as if he hadn’t heard me right. After a moment, he slumped into the sofa as if strings had been cut.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Can I get you a coffee or something? Hot chocolate?”
“Water is fine. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
I found a bottle of water in the packed refrigerator and passed it to him before retaking my seat on the sofa and nursing my hot chocolate. He deserved to hear it all. After all, he was Sophie’s baby daddy, but whereas I’d learned the overall picture in small doses with time to process, I was going to have to lay everything on him all in one go. One of the small marshmallows bumped my nose as I licked the cream. I caught it with my tongue and sighed as it melted in my mouth. I heard a noise, but it was just Joachim coughing. Now it was time to concentrate.
“Where do you need me to start?”
He wriggled to sit upright and toyed with the label on his bottle, not quite meeting my gaze.
“When did you know?”
That was the hardest of all questions. “I was so new—I mean new at looking after a baby—so maybe I overreacted a few times to innocent things, and I guess that was a lucky thing. She was tired, lethargic, there were bruises, and her belly seemed hard. I took her to the ER, and then everything was out of my hands. They did all kinds of tests, but I recall, through all of them, she was just exhausted. They told me she had B-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia. I didn’t know what to do or say. I mean, I’d lost her mom, and I was caring for her and somehow on my watch she’d become ill.”
“None of this is your fault,” he blurted, but he didn’t know what he was saying. Mom and Dad had died because Ashley and I were supposed to be watching our pet terrier, and I’d been too scared, and our parents looked for him just to stop us crying, and they’d never made it to shelter. Even counselling couldn’t completely strip me of guilt.
Then Ashley had passed when I had hold of her hand. I couldn’t save any of them, and I might not be able to save Sophie either. I had come to a point in my life where I felt cursed.
“Her outlook is good as long as she gets the stem cells from your blood to balance the chemo.”
He went white, bent over, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging, and something compelled me to touch him. Reassurance cost nothing, and I’d had a lot of touches from a hundred nurses and doctors. Every single touch was a mark of hope on my skin, and he needed that. He glanced at me then down at my hand on his forearm, and I squeezed quickly before moving back. Sometimes there was no need for words.
“I can’t imagine… she’s so little,” he whispered, and my chest tightened.
“You can save her,” I murmured and edged away from him into my corner of the sofa, pulling up my legs and encircling them with my arms. For the first time, I got a real look at the man who’d been part of making Sophie. He was a classic professional jock, all muscles and power, but he looked like a broken man right now, and compassion swelled inside me.
“I want to save her. I want to know her.” He glanced at me, and there was a sincerity in his gaze that I believed completely. “She deserves to have her dad in her life.”
“She calls me Dad,” I reminded him.
“Of course she does.” He tripped over himself with the speed those words came out. “You’re her uncle and you’re all she’s known. I get that. But we could be Dad and Uncle for her, and when she’s older she’ll have both of us.”