Rebecca had been happy in the simple, uncomplicated way children are happy when they feel safe and loved. But there had always been 1 question sitting quietly at the back of everything. Where is my father?
She had asked it for the first time when she was about 6 years old. She had come home from school, where a teacher had asked the class to draw a picture of their family. Rebecca had drawn herself and her mother, then looked at the empty space beside them and not known what to put there.
Victoria had been quiet for a long time after that question. She was mending a blue dress, and she kept her eyes on the needle when she finally answered.
“His name was Simon,” she said. Her voice was flat and careful, like someone walking on a floor they were not sure would hold them. “We were young. Things did not work out.”
“But where is he?” Rebecca pressed. “Does he know about me?”
A pause. The needle went in and out of the fabric. “He knew,” Victoria said very quietly. “He chose not to stay.”
Rebecca had not fully understood it then. She was 6. But she had understood the feeling. The way her mother’s shoulders dropped slightly when she said those words. The way she set the dress down for a moment and pressed her lips together before picking it up again.
She understood it better as she got older.
And when she was 16, her mother became sick.
It came quickly. That was the thing about it. One week Victoria had a cough. The next week she was tired in a way sleep did not fix. By the third week, she could not get out of bed.
A neighbor took them to the hospital, and the doctor spoke in a low voice that Rebecca was not supposed to hear, but did. She sat outside the ward on a hard plastic chair and stared at the floor and felt the world rearranging itself around her into a shape she did not want.
Her mother died on a quiet Tuesday morning.
The ward was bright with morning sun. A nurse had opened the window. There was a bird singing outside, a loud, cheerful, completely inappropriate bird. Victoria had looked at Rebecca and held her hand and said her name once, softly, like a full sentence. Then she was gone.
Rebecca was 16 years old. She was alone. And she had a question that now had no one left to answer it.