Of course I was upset about Dad having cancer again and I was worried about him having the operation, but I wasn’t thinking about that so much as I was that I hadn’t asked him what I wanted to know. Damn it! I decided that I wasn’t going to allow him to die without telling me everything he knew about her. He was going to give her back to me. He had to. I was going to make him and I didn’t care if he liked it or not.
Oliver was the only one who knew my plan. I woke up early eight days after his operation and left by myself for the hospital so I could see Daddy alone. He was in his bed, pale and weak, in a green gown with oxygen shoved up his nose. I had hardened myself to it before I got there. “Daddy?” I pulled a chair up to the bed, “How are you?”
“Silvia!” He did his best to smile, “You’re here!”
“I am,” I replied softly. “Tell me, Daddy, are you up for talking?”
“It’s not so easy to breathe,” He admitted, “But I can. What do you want to talk about?”
I was terrified. I felt exactly like I did that night in the kitchen when he’d glared at me and I’d been scolded and sent to my room. I felt stupid and small and ashamed. But I wasn’t a confused five year old child. I wasn’t small or stupid and I had no reason to be ashamed. I was angry. I knew I shouldn’t be. I knew it wasn’t proper, but there he was in his bed, half dead, doing what he could to smile, and all I could think of was the cold look he’d given me that night I’d wandered into the kitchen. Part of me wanted to cry. Part of me wanted to punch his face.
I wasn’t kind or gentle about asking him. I leaned forward and placed my hands squarely on my bare knees, looked him in the eye, and I came right out with it. “No more bullshit, Dad. I don’t want any excuses, I don’t want any lies. You’ve dodged cancer once and it doesn’t look like you’re going to have an easy time doing it the second. You have information I want.“
“What are you? Interpol?” I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or trying to be funny. “What do you want to know? “
“I need you to tell me about my mother.”
He looked very confused, “What?”
“You’re dying,” I said coldly, “Whether you survive this and beat the cancer or not, you’ll die sooner or later and when you do, you’re going to take all that’s left of my mother with you and leave me without her forever. I’ve let you have her all to yourself all my life, now you’re going to give her back to me. Do you understand, Daddy?” I was shaking. I leaned forward some more, moved to the edge of my chair and hissed, “You’ve had her long enough! You’re not going to die and take her with you! I won’t allow it!”
My father looked older than I could ever have imagined someone looking. He slouched with a sigh. “Well, this is not what I expected. All right, Silvia. I’ll tell you all about her. What do you want to know?”
I was taken aback with how easily he’d agreed. “Everything,” I told him, remembering a conversation I’d had with Alexander’s first wife, Melissa, years ago, when she’d used the same words to get information from me, “I want to know everything.”
“All right,” Daddy’s voice was soft, shallow, short of power for lack of breath, “She was beautiful, Silvia. She looked like an angel, but she liked to break rules. Never anything bad, mind you, just little things. Like she’d chew gum in class, but keep it hidden in her cheek. She’d keep pens. She had thousands of pens. And shoes. The girl couldn’t get enough shoes.“
I vaguely remembered the closet in my father’s bedroom being filled with ladies shoes. When I was small I would go in there and slip my tiny feet into them and try to walk. I recalled stumbling around quite a bit and banging into a dressing table.
“She didn’t like to be inside much, especially in the summer,” He continued, “She never wanted to stay home if she could be someplace else. She liked to sneak out of her house at night to come and see me when we were dating. I worked at a meat shop. It was freezing in there. I was always covered in muck, but she‘d ride her bicycle all the way out there about five miles and sit on a stool and talk to me all night long. She was very bright,” He was looking at me, but I could tell he didn’t really see me at all, “She knew all sorts of things. She was never boring to listen to and even when she talked too much it was all right by me.”
“How old were you when you met?”
“Seventeen,” He answered. His eyes were so far away it frightened me. He paused, the corners of his mouth twitching, “You look like her. I've always told you that. You do. You have her face right down to the crooked bottom lip. There have been times I thought you were her ghost. Your voice, too, sounds like hers.” He gasped and then let out a long breath, “I loved her, Silvia. I loved her more than life itself. “
He stared at me for a long time before he spoke again, “Being with her was like being caught in the wind. She had so much life. She was her own force of nature. She could do things that no girl I ever knew would even think of doing, like toss hand axes and hit marks stuck to trees twenty feet away. She was in the car during the accident that killed her mother. She never told me exactly what went on, but she was very close with her father after. They did everything together. His name was Darrel and he was a welding man. She knew how to make things from metal. She made lovely things. Wind chimes and little brass unicorns, holders that looked like hands and trees for her jewellery. She loved jewellery, anything that shined.”
I listened to him.
“I was too shy to ask her until we were eighteen. Shy and afraid of her old man. He was a big man! Still, I think I told her I was in love with her on our second date. She laughed right in my face. She nearly broke my heart, but then she kissed me. She was always affectionate, you know? She never passed a chance to tell somebody how she felt or to hold my hand. She made me feel like a man and I was just a boy,” I’d never heard him speak like he was. Usually so quiet, the words were rushing out of him and disappearing on the air like powder caught on a breeze, “I married her that year. Her dad knew. We had his blessing, but mine didn’t. My mother wanted me to finish university and have a degree. She didn’t want me working in the plants or the mills, but there was no way Sharon was going to wait.” He paused, shook his head and smiled again, “We got married in this little church called Saint Matthew‘s. It’s not there anymore, they pulled it down years ago. Sharon had a wobble because she didn’t want to wear white. She said it was drab, she wanted something pale pink, but her step-mother wouldn’t have it. Sharon threatened to run away then, but her dad bribed her with the dress Lucy wore at her wedding. He found it himself. Somebody had ordered it special, had it made, and called off their wedding. It had been sitting in a shop for nearly five years. Nobody wanted it. It was too flashy, too long when mini dresses were all the rage. But he knew it was all for Sharon when he saw it. It had sequence, you know, and pearls. It shined, so she lunged for it. She looked unbelievable at our wedding. She carried a single white rose.”
He licked his lips, and nodded off for a long while. The only sound in the room was oxygen gently hissing through the cannula. Just when I was certain he’d say no more, he turned his head back to me and picked up as if there had been no break, “One morning she announced you were on the way. I don’t know, Sil," He shook his head gently from side to side, “She named you Silvia for a book she’d read. Silvia was the name of a beautiful silver dragon that saved a medieval city in a fantasy story. Your middle name, Sophia, means Wisdom. She named you how she hoped you’d be one day. And you are. You are.”
He went on to tell me about my mother with us as babies, how she‘d hold us and talk to us, walk us about and show us everything there was to see. And then he began to tell of something that started a buzz deep inside of me.