Chapter Seventeen
Malena
I slide Luna’s sleeping body into Celia’s waiting arms. “Your niece,” I say, looking at Celia in her glassy eyes as she runs her hand over Luna’s Leif colored hair. “She has his eyes. The exact same shade.” Leif’s sister has aged since I last saw her. A lot. So much that it pains me to see the severity of the agony she’s endured without my knowledge. Pain I should have been sharing.
Celia slides her finger gently over her cheek. I see her falling in love. “She looks just like him,” she remarks, unwrapping the blanket to look at her tiny fingers and toes. She rewraps her quickly as the hospital waiting room is freezing. Celia shakes her head. “I didn’t believe you. It’s a lot to take in, but there’s no denying this is Leif’s child. He would be so in love with her.” A pang of regret hits me square in the chest. “I’ve arranged for the nurse to take you up to Leif’s room. Go by yourself first. I’ll stay here with her. Okay?” She meets my gaze, like she’s wondering if I’ll take the baby from her.
I nod. “That’s fine. Here’s her diaper bag just in case. She likes it if you hum when she’s fussy,” I say, gazing at my sleeping daughter adoringly. “You’re her aunt, I’m sure you’ll have the touch,” I add. Celia beams down at the baby.
“This means so much. Having a piece of him. Thank you, Malena,” she says, earnestly. “Luna lessens the blow of losing him.”
She talks as if he’s already gone and it’s painful. I haven’t had enough time to digest the severity. I glimpse over my shoulder once more before entering the elevator with the nurse, and Celia begins swaying back and forth with Luna. Luna loves that. She’ll be fine I think to myself as the elevator begins its climb to Leif’s floor. The nurse preps me when we’re outside Leif’s room. When I enter, I’m hit with a gust of warmer air and the typical antiseptic scent that belongs to hospitals. The man in the bed, hooked up to machines isn’t my Leif. Celia was right. He is pale and wasted away to almost nothing.
His lashes flutter as I sit down on the edge of the bed, and take his skeletal hand in mine. The machine that breathes for him is loud and overbearing. Running my thumb across his knuckles, I say, “Sorry I haven’t been by yet.” The pit in my stomach forces the tears to fall. “I didn’t know about the attack. I didn’t know a lot of things, Leif.”
I squeeze his hand and run my other hand across his pallid forehead. “They say they’re taking you off life support because you can’t live without it. I can’t believe that, though.” His hand twitches a bit, but the nurse said that may happen and not to think anything of it. His muscles spasm on their own. I wipe some of my salty grief from my face. “Leif, I came here to say hello and goodbye. I came here to tell you the truth even if you don’t hear me, you deserve for me to say it out loud before you go.”
Another squeeze of my hand and my heart skips. I can see why his family has fought for his life for this long. “I lied to you when I told you I was in love with another man because it was an easy way to let you go. My love for you is so strong that it can’t even be compared to what I felt for Dylan. I visited him to tell him…to tell him…that I was pregnant with your baby. To shove it in his face. I’m sorry you saw the photos and thought something different was going on. I’m sorry I let you believe something else was going on between us. I haven’t seen Dylan since that day. I don’t even know if you got the email I sent. I assumed you did because you never contacted me. Now I see why,” I say, sobbing. “I’ve only ever been in love with you, Leif.”
Leif’s monitor beeps and it startles me into a jump. “We have a daughter and she looks just like you,” I tell him, stroking his face with my own tear-stained fingers. “She has blonde hair and blue eyes like you. She has my lips and ears. I think she has your appetite.” I laugh, a small moment of happiness thinking about Luna’s belches after she feeds. “I wish I got to see you hold her. I wish you could see her. What our love created. It’s the coolest thing in the entire world. She’s a real, live miracle. I think maybe this is why I was granted this miracle,” I whisper, looking at the equipment keeping him alive. “She might be a parting gift from the world.”
I swallow hard, leaning down to press my lips against Leif’s forehead. My touch is as light as a feather. His eyelashes flutter. I kiss each closed eye. “I’m going to make sure she grows up and knows how awesome her daddy is, Leif. Don’t worry. I got this. I’m going to do right by her…by you. I’ll make you proud.”
There’s light music playing, the radio, I realize and it happens to be the song that was on the jukebox at Bobby’s Bar when Leif introduced himself to me. I smile, a sweet memory. The door creaks open and Celia moves into the room with a crying Luna.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I think she’s hungry,” Celia says, eyes apologetic.
I hold out my hands for Luna and she drops the crying baby into my arms. She soothes right away when she smells me. “Meet your daddy, Luna Love,” I coo, bouncing her up and down in my arm, one hand still on Leif.
“I feel like he knows I’m here, Celia,” I say.
She shakes her head. “We all feel the same way. You can’t argue with tests, though. It’s maddening.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be able to have a baby,” I whisper. “We need one more miracle in our corner,” I say. Celia sits in the chair next to me. “One more,” I plead. I set Luna in the crook of his arm and the sight makes me weep for all of the memories she’ll never have with him. Memories I never had with my own father, and ones I did have that are marred by his abandonment. It’s not fair. Life is never fair, I remind myself.
Leaning over, I kiss Leif again, lingering longer this time and grab Luna when I stand up. “Let’s go,” I tell Celia. I hand the baby back now that she’s settled and turn to the lumbering man in bed. Celia closes the door again to give me privacy. Leaning over I whisper into his ear. “Love me, Leif. Love me.”
A tear falls on his face and it almost looks like it belongs to him and that upsets me even further. “I love you. Forever and always.”
I take his hand again, hoping maybe he’ll squeeze it, or a muscle spasm will give me a false, warm feeling. “Come back to me. Luna needs a daddy. Please, come back.”
He doesn’t, though. We leave the hospital with the knowledge that he didn’t hear anything I said. That in a few days what little existence he has left, will be extinguished.
______________
Celia is playing with Luna on the hotel bed, a serious game of peekaboo. I’m wistful as I watch them together and I realize this is something to be thankful for. Family coming together in the face of tragedy. The only family I have left.
“Have they tried to take him off life support?” I ask Celia, cradling the hand that Leif held.
She nods. “A few times. It’s always been disastrous. These past nine months have been the worst of our lives. I think when Monday rolls around we will be relieved that he will finally be at peace. He’d hate that we haven’t let him go yet, but we’re stubborn like that.”
“Can I be there? When he passes?” I ask, fighting back tears.
Celia looks wistfully from me back to the baby. “It would only be fair. You were there when he first started living.”
Closing my eyes, I turn away. “I can’t believe this happened.”
“He killed him,” Celia says like it’s a consolation. “The guy he’s been after all these years. The one he said he’d die trying to kill.” Celia laughs. “Never thought that would be funny, but it is now that it’s coming true.”
