He looked at the heaping mess of his daughter on the bed. Her voice was hysterical but her body stiff as a corpse. She didn’t react to his touch. She couldn’t control the fluids escaping her face. They leaked onto her pillow as her father watched the darkness build inside her.
He felt utterly and completely helpless. He too needed time to mourn the situation. But perhaps mourn wasn’t the proper word. It wasn’t a person who died, it was a marriage. From the time of her birth he had tried to tell her what marriage and love is. And they were overjoyed when she told them she finally found it. That God handed it to her. But of course they were all wrong. If they weren’t, his daughter wouldn’t be in a life-altering disaster. His 22 year old daughter wouldn’t be a sobbing mess in her childhood room.
The Christian in him wanted to forgive his ex-son-in-law for giving into temptation. But the father in him wanted to sink that boy in a river.
“Why did this happen to me? How could I not have seen it coming?”
“No one saw this coming, May.”
“But I knew him. Or I thought I knew him. He played me. I was just a piece in his game!” Her face remained as far away from the sky as possible, her head buried in mounds of fabric and cushion. He moved to her bed, trying to remain calm, “I believe in my heart he truly loved you some point in time. I do. I wish I could do something to help…”
She remained glued to her pillow. Through the crack in the door a sharp whistling noise trailed in. Shortly after, when the sound had died down and stopped to a silence, his wife came in through the door.
“Tea’s ready.”
But his daughter didn’t sit up to take the mug, shaky in the unsteady hands of her mother. The cup remained on her bedside table for days. It became cold and stagnant.
Months later she announced, “I’m moving away. Somewhere far away.”
©2019