A girl is sensitive. Delicate.
This means I must learn to be sensitive and delicate. I’m still panicking over this until I look at my Bella. So soft and beautiful and exhausted, clutching our baby girl in her arms.
She looks up at me, and there are tears in her eyes.
“She’s so…”
Her voice is weak. Raspy. She must be so tired, I reason.
“Pretty.”
The word is barely a breath.
A machine starts beeping. The doctor yells something. But I can only focus on Bella. Her eyes have closed, and her body is limp, and I only blinked, and I don’t understand what’s happening.
Someone shoves the baby into my arms and tells me I must leave. I tell them no. The machines keep beeping, and Bella is not waking up, and I am so scared. The most afraid I have ever been, with such a tiny baby in my arms.
I cannot fight them. I cannot get to them. Because it would hurt the baby. The nurses push me from the room, and I tell them no again.
“Mr. Castillo,” the nurse says. “You must be calm. You have to let us try to help her.”
But that isn’t the way it sounds. That isn’t the way it sounds at all. Because her voice is grim, and her eyes are apologetic. She’s looking at me like my Bella is already gone. And the only thing I can do is look down at the little baby in my arms.
The little baby that looks so much like Bella.
Epilogue
-Four years later-
“Aria, come to Papa.”
The little girl with black hair and pale blue eyes bounds from the other end of the room and leaps up onto the sofa.
“What is it, Papa?” she asks.
I tap her on the nose and shake my head. “It is long past your bedtime, yes?”
She giggles and shrugs.
“I’m not tired, though.”
“Ah yes, this is what you say. However, in the morning it will be, Papa I’m too tired to get out of bed.”
She giggles again.
“Can you tell me one story first?”
Like most things, I cannot turn her down when she uses this voice. The same one she got from her mother.
She is a songbird, like her mother too.
“Which story would you like tonight, my Aria? Will it be Kings and Queens or fairies and toads?”
“I want the story about the caged bird,” she tells me.
I smile.
My heart aches whenever I tell this story, but I indulge her. It is good for me, to never forget.