Chapter 1
Wake up in the morning, it’s spring, the flowers are blooming, and the birds are chirping outside; you’re lying lazily in bed in a hazy slumber for several long minutes as the light filters through your window and fluttering curtains, drawing long shadows on the maroon carpet. It should be a great day, instead you find your daughter painting landscapes on her bedroom walls.
She’s only five and she’s a nightmare to you and your sanity.
She spends the rest of the morning watching cartoons in the kitchen island while you go and about making lunch. Every once in a while she looks at you out of the corner of her eye, and she flinches whenever you put the lid on a pot just slightly too loud, but you don’t notice it, no, your eyes are too occupied watching the stale tomato soup.
That afternoon, after she’s had a nap, she looks up to you with those big brown eyes from where she’s playing with her blocks on the floor, and asks you who decides who gets to be a boy and who gets to be a girl.
You don’t have an answer.
You don’t know if you wish you did.
He comes back home around six, smelling of alcohol and motor oil, slaps two fifty dollar bills on the counter with bright eyes and a pleased grin. It’s the tip his clients left him at work, and it goes straight into the savings jar.
You’re gonna be rich one day, he says, and you believe him.
It’s been three years, it’s summer, and you’re sitting on the warm sand with your big straw hat and light blue sunglasses, your husband is building a sand castle with your two year old son, and life couldn’t be better.
Your daughter is standing off to the side with her feet buried in the wet sand. There’s a vacant expression in her eyes as she watches the horizon, the waves push her back but she remains there, in her baby blue shorts and white long sleeved shirt, she doesn’t even seem the feel the push and pull of the ocean. Her hair is brushing just slightly past her shoulders.
You don’t notice the way her eyes glaze, or how she fiddles with the edge of her shorts.
You never do.
She’s still a baby, but she’s not your baby, she’s never been, no, she’s barely been your daughter.
