“Dad, why can’t I play like the other kids? Why do I have to stay in bed?” she asked Andre more times than either of us could count, and he always found some way to answer her that didn’t involve a lie, even when the truth was more than a nine-year-old should have to carry.
By the time Amara turned ten, her doctor called us into his office and told us, as gently as a person can tell you something like that, that the treatments had stopped working. Amara was young, but she understood enough. That evening, sitting up in her hospital bed with her stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm, she asked the one question neither Andre nor I had an answer for, and then, without waiting for us to find one, she told us what she wanted instead.
She wanted to see Princess Elara’s castle. She wanted to put her feet in the ocean.
We had almost nothing saved. Andre picked up every extra shift the plant would give him for six straight weeks, coming home some nights so tired he fell asleep still in his work boots. I sold the gold bracelet my mother left me when she passed, the one with the tiny charm shaped like a magnolia blossom, to a pawn shop two towns over so nobody at church would see it in a window and ask questions. Somehow, between the two of us, we scraped together enough to get all three of us to Coral Bend, out on the Floravista coast, for five days.
Looking back now, there were things I should have noticed. Small things, easy to explain away when you’re not looking for anything wrong.
Andre had lost weight over those last few months — not a lot, but enough that his work shirts had started hanging different on him. I chalked it up to stress, to the double shifts, to a man worrying himself thin over a daughter who wasn’t even his by blood but had somehow become the center of his whole world. He started taking calls outside more, phone pressed tight to his ear, voice low. When I asked, he said it was the insurance company, arguing over what the treatments would and wouldn’t cover. I believed him, because I had no reason not to.
There was a folded brochure I found once in his jacket pocket while doing laundry, some kind of pamphlet with a soft blue cover, and when I asked about it he said it was something the hospital gave him about hospice resources, “just in case, down the road, for Amara.” I put it back without reading it closely. I didn’t want to.
But for those five days in Coral Bend, none of that mattered. Amara laughed more than she had in the entire year before it, laughed the way she used to before the word leukemia ever entered our house. We rode the teacups at Wondermere Kingdom until we were all a little sick to our stomachs. We ate ice cream for breakfast one morning because Andre said rules were for people who weren’t on vacation. We waded into the ocean at sunset with her mouse ears still on her head, and for whole stretches of time, her illness stopped being the only thing anyone in our family could think about.
I noticed, without really registering it, that our hotel room was nicer than what we’d paid for — a suite, really, with a pull-out couch and a little kitchenette, when we’d only booked a standard double. When I mentioned it to the woman at the front desk that first night, she just smiled and said something about “a system upgrade” and moved on to the next question. A professional photographer showed up on our second day, unannounced, and spent two hours following us around the park taking pictures we never asked for and never got billed for. Andre had insisted, when we were still planning the trip, that we “try to get some real photos done” while we were there, more firmly than seemed like him. I remember thinking it was sweet. I didn’t think much past that.
There were other families at the resort pool wearing the same pale green wristbands we’d been given at check-in, families with kids in wheelchairs or wearing headscarves where hair used to be, and once I saw the front desk manager stop and hug one of the fathers like she’d known him for years, though we’d only checked in the day before. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. You don’t, when you’re that tired and that grateful just to watch your child laugh.
On our final morning, Amara was still asleep upstairs, her mouse ears resting on the pillow beside her the way she’d started keeping them every night like a stuffed animal. Andre went down to start loading the car while I stopped by the front desk to check out.
The manager, a woman with warm eyes and a name tag that read Bettina, typed our room number into her computer, then glanced past me through the glass doors toward the parking lot, where Andre was wrestling our suitcases into the trunk.
Her face changed so fast I felt my stomach drop before she even said a word.
She slid a sealed envelope across the counter toward me.
