He Said Grief Flows Into a Sea of Tears

While our daughter was being resuscitated, I called my husband twelve times.

Every call, he cut off.

Because that day, he was ringing the opening bell at the IPO, standing beside his business partner.

I begged him through my tears. The doctor says she might not make it through the night. Come back and see her one last time.

He warned me, out of patience.

"Stop using our kid to pressure me. There are hundreds of people here waiting on me. I'll come back in half an hour."

But our daughter couldn't wait even that half hour.

The moment she stopped breathing, on the livestream my husband was embracing his business partner, thanking her for standing by him through the hardest ten years of his life.

When he finally reached the hospital, he grabbed me and told me to calm down.

"The child is already gone. Do you want to destroy this family too?"

I shook his hand off and threw the divorce papers at him.

"The one who destroyed this family was never me."

...

Percival James looked down at the pages scattered across the floor, his face terrifyingly dark.

"Kirsten Sullivan, do you know what you're doing?"

"I do."

I crouched down and picked up the divorce papers one by one, putting them back in order.

On the last page, I'd already signed my name.

The date was three months ago.

Percival stared at that date, and the anger in his eyes turned to shock.

"Three months ago?"

He snatched the papers from me and flipped to the page on dividing our assets.

I hadn't asked for his company, or for the big apartment downtown. I was only taking the savings I'd had before the marriage, and my own things.

The section on Nina's custody arrangements had once been written out in careful detail.

It was useless now.

Percival stared at it for a long time, his fingers slowly tightening.

"You've wanted to take Nina and leave me all along?"

I didn't answer.

The nurse pushed the door open, carrying the clothes Nina had been changed out of before the resuscitation.

A pink jacket, a white sweater, and one sneaker with its lace come undone.

When Nina left the house that morning, she'd complained that I'd bundled her up in too much.

She'd wrinkled her nose and bargained with me, saying that when her dad came home, she'd make him settle it.

But she'd never get to wait for that.

I reached out to take them, but Percival got there first and clutched the clothes to himself.

It was as though only in this moment did he finally understand that Nina was really gone.

"Before she went, did she say anything?"

His voice was badly hoarse.

I looked at him and didn't answer for Nina.

The last time Nina was awake, she had asked about her dad.

But she'd waited seven years, and been disappointed for seven years.

The last words she left behind shouldn't be used to ease Percival's guilt.

"Kirsten, I'm asking you a question."

"Didn't you hate it most when I used our kid to pressure you?"

I pulled the clothes out of his arms.

"It won't happen again."

Percival's body went rigid.

From the other end of the hallway came the rapid click of high heels.

Beulah Fox rushed in with Percival's assistant, still wearing the white suit from the bell-ringing.

The IPO commemorative badge was pinned to her chest, and in her hand she carried the coat Percival had left behind at the venue.

When she saw the clothes in my arms, she stopped dead.

"Nina, she..."

Percival closed his eyes and forced out the words.

"She's gone."

The color drained from Beulah's face in an instant.

She looked at me, her lips moving a few times before she managed to get out a sentence. "I'm sorry. I didn't know it was this serious. Percival only said the child was in the hospital again."

So it wasn't that he hadn't heard me.

He'd simply never taken anything I said seriously.

Beulah moved to steady me. I turned aside and let her hand close on nothing.

It froze there in the air.

"Kirsten, I know you blame us right now. But that bell-ringing today involved too many people. Percival couldn't just walk out."

"So I didn't ask him to."

I held Nina's clothes against me and looked at her, calm.

"From today on, who he wants to be with, where he wants to go, none of it has anything to do with me."

Beulah started to explain again, and Percival cut in with a low growl. "Enough!"

His eyes were red as they turned to me.

"Nina just died. Do you really have to say all this here, now?"

Something in it struck me as almost funny.

When our daughter was alive, every time I brought her up, he called it me making a scene.

Now she was dead, and even ending our marriage, I was supposed to nurse his grief first.

"Then when am I supposed to say it?"

"After your IPO celebration wraps up? Or after you and Beulah finish giving your interviews?"

Beulah's face went stiff.

But Percival flinched as if I'd hit a raw nerve, and his voice shot up.

"Beulah and I are only partners! Today was the company going public, not me out on some date with her!"

"I know."

I had never once doubted whether they'd slept together.

What truly drove me to despair had never been an affair I could catch with evidence.

It was that every time a choice had to be made, he walked straight to Beulah and the company, then took it for granted that Nina and I would wait right where we were.

Beulah got his time, his trust, his explanations, his thanks.

Nina and I only ever got one line: "Wait a little longer."

Percival opened his mouth, and before he made a sound his phone rang.

The caller ID was the head of things over at the exchange.

He looked at the flashing screen and didn't answer.

Before, any work call, he never let it ring past three seconds.

But now, it was already too late.

"Answer it," I said.

Percival's head snapped toward me.

"Kirsten, I'm not as cold-blooded as you think."

"Aren't you?"

I took out my own phone and put those twelve rejected calls in front of him.

The shortest lasted only two seconds.

The longest was me crying, telling him the doctor said the family should prepare themselves.

That call ran forty-seven seconds.

He heard me out and answered with one line: "I don't have time for your hysterics right now."

Then he hung up.

Percival stared at the call log, the color draining from his face bit by bit.

"I thought... you just wanted me to come home."

"Yes. I just wanted you to come home."

My tears finally spilled over.

"Because your daughter was dying, and she wanted to see her father."

"But in your eyes, I didn't even have the right to make you come back and see our child one last time."

The hallway went completely silent.

Percival reached out to touch me. I stepped back and let his hand miss.

A nurse called me over to handle the paperwork.

I turned and followed her, and never looked back.

Percival's mother reached the hospital before dawn.

By the time she came rushing in, I had already finished the paperwork and was sitting alone on the bench, sorting through Nina's things.

A little cup, a hair clip, an unfinished workbook, and a crumpled brochure for a trip to the coast.

Nina had folded that flyer so many times the corners had gone soft.

She had always wanted to see the ocean.

Percival had promised her he'd take her once the company went public.

Nina held on to that promise more firmly than to any of her doctor's orders.

Every time a treatment left her hurting, she'd count on her fingers and ask me how much longer until Daddy's company went public.

I always told her, soon.

Later the company really did go public.

And she died that very day.

"Where's my Nina?"

Her grandmother grabbed my shoulder, sobbing so hard she could barely stand.

I handed Nina's things to her.

The moment she saw the cup, her crying swelled, and she turned and slapped Percival hard across the face.

"Why didn't you come back? That was your own daughter!"

Percival didn't dodge.

He just stood there, one side of his face reddening fast.

His mother lifted her hand again, then stopped when she saw the divorce papers on the floor.

She picked them up, glanced at them, and jerked her head toward me.

"Kirsten, what is this?"

"Divorce papers."

"Nina's just gone, and now you're asking Percival for a divorce?"

Her grief hardened at once into something guarded.

"The two of you only have each other now. This is exactly when you have to hold the family together."

That line again.

As if the moment I refused to keep enduring, I'd be the one tearing the family apart.

"This family fell apart a long time ago."

"Nonsense!" Her grandmother cut me off, eyes red. "All these years Percival worked himself to the bone to make money, and wasn't it all for you and Nina? The house you live in, the money for the child's treatment, which of it didn't come from him?"

I looked at Percival.

His eyes were lowered. He didn't argue.

Maybe in his own mind he felt the same, that money had already fulfilled every duty of a husband and a father for him.

"Nina's first hospital stay, I was the only one with her, for twenty-one days."

"The first time she was rushed into the emergency room, he was out of town at a funding meeting."

"The first full sentence she learned to write was 'When is Daddy coming home.'"

"For the past three years, every test result, every hospital stay, every hard night, I was the one beside her. Beyond paying, what did Percival ever do?"

His mother had nothing to say.

Percival finally raised his head.

"If I didn't earn the money, what would you have paid for Nina's treatment with?"

His voice was shaking, as if he were trying to convince me, and himself too.

"And what could I have done if I'd come back? I'm not a doctor. I couldn't have saved her!"

I looked at him for a long time.

"She never asked you to save her."

"She only wanted to look at her father's face before she died."

Every last bit of color drained from Percival's face.

Nina's memorial was a small thing.

No flower stands from the company, no press, none of the fanfare. And none of the commemorative plaque Percival had brought back from the IPO.

He wanted to set the plaque beside her photo. He said it was the gift he'd promised to bring home for her.

I took it down.

"What Nina wanted was you."

"She has no use for that plaque."

Percival stood there holding it for a long time, and in the end he said nothing.

Beulah came too.

She stayed at the very back of the crowd, laid down a bunch of white flowers, and turned to go.

But my mother-in-law called after her, told her to come and stay by Percival's side.

Beulah's eyes went to me without thinking.

I was straightening Nina's photos and I didn't stop her.

That seemed to make Percival angrier.

When the service was over, he blocked me at the door.

"What is it you actually want?"

"A divorce."

"And besides the divorce?"

"Nothing else."

He stared at me, hard, like he was searching my face for some trace of a bluff.

Before, every time we fought, I was the one who backed down first.

He missed Nina's birthday, and I made his excuses about being buried in work.

He promised to take Nina to her follow-up, then dropped everything and flew out of town over one call from Beulah, and I took our daughter and stood in line for six hours alone, and still came home and set aside a plate for him.

He knew I'd be angry, and he knew I would never really leave.

That was why he dared to make me wait, over and over.

"Kirsten, you're just grieving too hard right now."

His voice softened.

"Once we've both calmed down, we'll talk about the papers. Nina's things are still at home. Where would you even go?"

"I have somewhere to go."

Percival frowned.

"When did you find a place?"

I didn't answer. I stepped around him and headed out.

He caught my wrist.

"You signed those divorce papers three months ago, and now you've already found an apartment. Kirsten, how much have you been hiding from me?"

"What I've hidden from you is nothing next to what you missed."

I pulled my hand free.

"Percival. Don't ever touch me again."

He froze where he stood.

Ten years of marriage, and it was the first time I had ever spoken to him like that.