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Wildflowers and Dirt Smudges and Sunshine

Link to this fic on AO3. Words: 1427 Date posted: November 9, 2020

Summary: “I was just thinking.”

She pulls the cup away from her mouth and you watch a single droplet of water trail down the side of the cup until it catches on her thumb. She doesn’t seem to notice. “About mommy?” She asks, and your breath catches in your chest. Just like her mother, she’s so smart. So observant. Too observant, you sometimes think, and too eager to observe. She wants to know everything about the world even though she is far too young to learn the answers to some questions. It’s been three years and you still don’t know what to tell her when she asks what happened to her mother, and redirecting her with toys and stories about other things isn’t really working anymore.

“Yeah, about mommy.”

She looks just like her.

Your breath still catches in your throat every time you look at your daughter. She’d looked just like her mother when she was born, but she’s only grown into the resemblance as she’s gotten older and it makes your chest ache.

You’re really fucking trying here.

She acts just like her mother, too, running in circles around your backyard and picking flowers and bringing every single one up to the patio to show you.

She trips on the last stair on her sixth trip back down to go pick another flower and all of the ones she has left in your lap fall onto the wood and get trampled as you scramble to go check on her, your heart pounding harder in your chest than is warranted. Your daughter is crying, big green eyes bubbling over with tears of pain and fear. She’s fallen a million times in her life, a consequence of always being in motion, but it still startles her every time.

When you look her over, her hands are lightly scraped up, but she’s otherwise uninjured-- or so you think, until you see the blood, stringy as it’s mixed with saliva, that trails down her chin from her mouth. You suppose she must have bitten her tongue when she fell.

Seeing her bleeding, even if you know that it is small and insignificant and she will likely be over it and playing again in a few minutes, activates every parental instinct in you that you hadn’t had before she was born and which had only quadrupled when her mother died. She’s bleeding and she’s crying and she’s saying your name over and over again (“Daddy! Daddy it hu-hurts!”) and you should calm her down from her hysterics rather than devolving into your own but you know that you’re far from a perfect father. You clutch her body to yours and run inside faster than you’ve had to run since you were a teenager but you don’t have time to be winded because you’re looking for paper towels and filling up a glass of water for her.

It’s the weirdest trigger for it but Jade’s last words to you are playing on repeat in your head. It’s weird because you didn’t get a dramatic dying speech from your wife. You hadn’t held her hand while she wasted away from a sickness and delivered a speech about how much she loved you and how you needed to be brave for your girl, nor had it been like the movies where she was in a car accident and they’d plucked her out of the car and she spoke to you through her strained breathing. Jade had died in a car accident, certainly, but you had been at the house with the baby and she was dead by the time they got her in the ambulance, let alone by the time that you finally got a phone call.

It was supposed to be her first day back at work. Her alarm had woken you up and you complained about the early hour and she had reassured you that she didn’t want to be up, either, and she was up until four in the morning with the baby, too. “There’s a lasagna in the freezer. Toss it in the oven around 4:30. I love you, Dave.” And then she’d been off.

And then she’d been gone.

That lasagna sat in your freezer for the next four months while you put off and put off and put off organizing her funeral, until finally John practically broke into your house and said that he understood that you’d lost your wife and that you had a new baby but he just lost his sister and he wanted to know if you were burning her or putting her in the ground, and you’d had a sobbing meltdown to your best friend for the first time in the entire time he’d known you because you didn’t know what she wanted. She’d been thirty years old, it wasn’t as though her death was at the front of either of your minds.

That was a little over three years ago. Your daughter, who by the time that you have zoned back into the present reality has stopped screaming and is instead staring at you with wide, watery eyes full of concern that you recognize from long before she was born, has grown from a colicky three and a half month old as she had been then to the most adventurous damn three-and-a-half-year-old you’ve ever met. You sometimes wonder if Jade’s ghost doesn’t haunt your house and whisper in her ear new ideas for exploring.

“Daddy?” She sniffs, and the paper towel in your hand is apparently useless as her mouth seems to have stopped bleeding so you use a pathetically small amount of it to wipe at her chin and clean the blood-spit-combo still there before you offer her the glass of water. When you were her age, you only drank apple juice and Kool-Aid, but she’s a lot chiller about it.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” you murmur as she holds the glass with both hands, and through the clear glass you can see her already-drying scrapes and the way the blood and dirt on them gets against the cup. Jade would have scolded you for not giving her one of her many colorful, plastic, much harder to drop and break sippy cups, you think, but it’s hard to guess since your daughter couldn’t exactly use a sippy cup the last time Jade was around to scold you for anything. “I was just thinking.”

She pulls the cup away from her mouth and you watch a single droplet of water trail down the side of the cup until it catches on her thumb. She doesn’t seem to notice. “About mommy?” She asks, and your breath catches in your chest. Just like her mother, she’s so smart. So observant. Too observant, you sometimes think, and too eager to observe. She wants to know everything about the world even though she is far too young to learn the answers to some questions. It’s been three years and you still don’t know what to tell her when she asks what happened to her mother, and redirecting her with toys and stories about other things isn’t really working anymore.

“Yeah, about mommy,” you answer after a second, because Jade wouldn’t want you to lie to your kid. She could be so naively honest sometimes, to the point of hurting others’ feelings and not realizing why they’d be hurt when all she’d ever said was the truth, and unlike apparently everyone else in the world you’d always loved that about her, loved that you could always count on Jade to be honest about everything. She never spared you a moment of pity, that woman.

“What was she like?” She asks, the same way that she has a million times before, and you think about it because your answer is almost always different. She was endlessly compassionate and curious. She saw the fucking wreck that would one day become your father and she decided to pick up all those pieces and see what order they were supposed to go in probably partially just because she wanted to see the complete picture and partially because she always hated seeing broken anything-- broken toys, broken machines, broken people. It had taken a long time and a lot more patience than you deserved, you know that. Jade deserved better than screaming matches at two in the morning because she got a little too close to the truth, the soft fleshy bits between your pieces of armor, your Achilles heel which was actually your Achilles entire body and you hoped just spinning the myths would be enough to discourage people and you’d never have to put the real work in to be indestructible. But boy did Jade make you put the work in and you know that you were infinitely better for it, that you’re still infinitely better for it. Everything that you are now you owe to her. She was a sculptor and you’re fucking Wonder Woman or some shit, forged by her delicate hands from clay and love.

“Your mom was a walking garden. Wildflowers and dirt smudges and sunshine. And everybody who ever saw her smiled.”

Your daughter pulls a face, clearly confused, and you lean in to press a kiss against her forehead.

“I’ll explain it when you’re older. C’mon, why don’t we go play outside some more?”