The window

There was a window that sat in the dining room. The window seat was topped with a cushion colored off white and covered in falling pastel flowers. Books were splayed across the window cushion and pillows and blankets were kept in the corner of the seat. The girl sat on the cushion but she was not yet heavy enough to depress it with her weight. She was just three years old. She knelt on the seat and rested on her heels, with her hands and forehead pressed against the windowpane. Her dress cascaded down past her knees and onto the window seat. The tulle underneath her dress was itchy but the girl remained unmoved by it.

Her mother strode over and placed her hand on the child’s shoulder. She set a tray of food on the seat cushion. The girl did not move. Her eyes were trained on the street in front of her. Her wet, grey eyes darted back and forth from one end of the street to the other as her father could come from either side. Her mother was talking but the girl either couldn’t hear her or wouldn’t listen. The mother tried to coax her away from the window but the child would not budge.

The first night her father did not return home the girl watched the window. She was persuaded to leave the window only for dessert. She slept in her mother’s bed. As the days passed, it got harder and harder to pull her away from the window. After a week had passed, police showed up at her door to tell the girl’s mother that her worst fears had been confirmed. The girl’s father would never come home.

The mother tried to tell her daughter the truth but the girl was too young to understand. When her mother was no longer able to persuade her daughter to play or eat at the table or sleep in her own bed she tried to move the girl through the day to the playroom, to the dining table, to her own room. What followed broke the mother’s heart. Tantrum is not the right word for it. Only a mother would be able to understand what happens when you see your own child break apart forever. If she had kicked and screamed and thrown things and ran away from her mother’s arms it would have been easier to bear. The child looked up at her mother. The mother knew her child’s eyes. They were once filled with hope and joy and innocence. Her child’s eyes changed in that instance. Her child of three years old, changed that day. She looked at her child and saw understanding and fear and sadness and stubbornness.

In the back of her mind, the girl must have understood her father was was gone, he had been out far too long but she was so young. Her mind refused. Her mind said no. Her mind told her that her mother was a liar. That her mother could not be trusted, not anymore. Her mind told her that if she just sat at that window and watched for her father, that he would come back to life and somehow come strolling up the driveway and into the house. That he would run up the girl, take her in his arms and spin her around. That he would hold her up to the sky and swing her and he would be everything he had always been.

So, she sat on that window seat and she waited. When her mother tried to move her, tried to keep up a real life for the girl, her child would lock gazes with her and begin to cry. The child did not fly into hysterics, she never struggled or hit her mother. Her eyes would fill with tears. Her face became rosy red and she closed her mouth tight. She would blink and tears silently rolled down her cheeks and fell into her mouth and down her chin. Her tears would fall from her chin and dot her hands and her dress. Her face did not contort and she did not cry out. She was silent. It was almost as if the act of prying her daughter from the window was killing her child’s father many, many times, every day.