Let You Go

She was five years old when her father bestowed her with a mottled gray rabbit’s foot, the size of her little hand and clipped to a delicate golden chain.

“What is this for?” she’d asked, and in response, her father had closed her hand around the amulet, one finger at a time.

“For luck, sweetheart. For when I’m gone.”

“For when you’re gone?” she echoed. “But you’re never going to leave me, right? We’re going to be together forever, right?”

“Right,” her father agreed, but his smile never quite reached his eyes, and later, when the little girl bounded off to show her prize to her mother, his own hands quivered as he twisted open a pill bottle and shuddered when he shook half a dozen into his open palm.

She was seven years old the first time she had to see her father lying in a hospital bed, plastic tubes taped to his skin like spider webs, forehead lined and slick with sweat. He’d been cold to the touch, cold to the world.

“What happened?” she asked her mother, whose eyes hadn’t met hers all night. “Why does daddy look dead? Is he-”

“No,” her mother said abruptly, before exiting the hospital room in a whirl of fabric and coughing.

The girl had reason to suspect that the coughing was a cover up.

She was ten years old the second time it happened.

Ten and a half the third time.

Eleven when he was finally sent away. He’d promised to come back- kneeled down to look her in the eye the way he’d always done when she was little, even though she had grown taller than he was on his knees now- but as she stared into his sunken, dark eyes, she’d clutched her rabbit foot and hoped that the father who returned to her wouldn’t be the one before her now.

She was twelve when he came back, with a renewed flush across his cheeks and the first offer in years to play frisbee.

She was fourteen when his eyes grew dark again, when his hands trembled as he cleared the table after dinner

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” her father had said, “Don’t worry. It’s just because of my job. My coworkers can be a pain in the neck and it’s a lot of hard work. I’m just tired, okay?”

She’d closed her lips against the next words that came to her, swallowed them down into the pit of her stomach. Her mother worked all the time, too. Had been working for longer than her father, had been working harder than her father, and yet she’d never looked like him.

She was sixteen when she found her father hunched over the downstairs toilet, heaving up his stomach. An open bottle of pills lay on the floor next to him, vomit-orange against the marble floor.

This time, she’d been the one to call the ambulance.

This time, she was still the one to stand next to his white hospital bed, rubbing her thumb over the matted surface of that rabbit foot.

She was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen when her father lay against the couch cushions day after day, murmuring to himself in the native Portuguese he'd never taught her, only rising to go to group therapy in the little blue office across from her high school.

Her mother refused to look at him most days, refused to interact with him at all.

So it landed on the girl to drive him there and back, to bring him his dinner, to tell him about her classes, her teachers, her friends, her life, even as he had none of his own. It landed on her to stand by his side even as he stayed incapable of returning the favor.

Every night, before she went to bed, she laid the rabbit foot beneath her pillow, and whispered prayers into the night sky, into her cold home.

“I won’t let you go,” she promised her father every time he asked her to leave. “I won’t let you go.” Somedays, the words felt empty on her tongue, like an unfilled pastry shell. Somedays, she wasn’t sure why she said them at all.

She was twenty-five when she put on her nicest skirt, looped her arm through her mother’s, and shook hands with the friends and family who had gathered.

She was twenty-five when she unfolded a creased piece of paper and began her speech, when tears spilled down her cheeks and past her chin, when she kissed her rabbit foot and tucked it away.

She was twenty-five when she celebrated five years sober with the father she had never let go.