Page 73 of Crushed
CHAPTER 24
Cormac
Rose rubbed the hair out of her green eyes, the locks long and frizzy. She looked down at a paper and filled in the grass in strokes of green, then added a blue flower made of circular petals.
Rose looked up from her drawing. “You’re not working today, Daddy?”
“I decided to take the day off.”
“Why?”
Such an inquisitive little child. “Because I wanted to see you,” I said in a soft voice. “Is that okay?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I guess so.”
In the corner of the paper, she drew a rectangular house, topped with a triangle roof.
“Is that our home?” I asked.
“I think so. Ms. Anderson says it’s white but white doesn’t show up. So I’m using blue.”
My heart ached. Perhaps Scarlett was right. No… IknewScarlett was right. Rose needed to be able to see her own house, even if that meant exposing her to an uncontained world, and a universe of possibilities. With the right guidance, perhaps Rose would turn out better for it, like Scarlett had.
I didn’t understand how someone could survive everything Scarlett had endured. She was stronger than I ever gave her credit for. I wanted Rose to have that strength too, but she wouldn’t be able to grow trapped inside of the nursery.
“Where’s that lady?” Rose asked, reading my mind. “Scarlett?”
“She’s—” I started, but then stopped. How did I explain our break up to a child who didn’t understand the complexities of relationships? “She and I had a fight.”
“A fight?”
“Like an argument.”
“Oh.”
She continued drawing, a misshapen oval with two dots and a red half-circle mouth, bulbous ears, and yellow hair. Next to it, she drew another face, bigger with green dots for eyes, and then next to that one, she drew a smaller oval with green eyes and a red half-circle mouth.
“Who are they?”
“Scarlett, Daddy, and me.” She wrinkled her nose, then clasped her hands together. “Can she come back, after you finish the argument?”
“Finish the argument?”
“Yeah. Ms. Anderson said that after we have an argument, we make up. Say we’re sorry and try to fix what’s wrong. She said you and the old doctor had an argument, but that you made up. But that you both agreed that that’s why she would be better somewhere else.” She furrowed her brows. “Are you going to send Scarlett somewhere else?”
“Scarlett chose to go home,” I said, and though it was true, it didn’tfeelright. I had played a bigger part in that, than I liked to admit. “She and I had too many disagreements.”
“Why can’t you make up?”
Rose stunned me with those words. It was so simple to her. There was no reason why we couldn’t make up, why we couldn’t come to a different conclusion.
How was it that a five-year-old child was wiser than a thirty-six-year-old man?
“We’re too different, sweetie,” I said.
And again, those words didn’t ring true. Scarlettwasdifferent; she wasn’t someone who could be contained; her job, herrealjob, depended on her analytic abilities and flexibility. But she wasstillsubmissive when it came to me, obeying the commands I set in front of her. She trusted me to take her to dark places, to help her survive them.
And perhaps she had shown me dark places too. Perhaps she had exposed the flaws in my soul that I needed to fix. That I needed to be better to Rose by giving her freedom.
