His eyes lifted sharply.
“What?”
“That’s what she’s been telling me, Ramón.
Every morning.
She says the bed feels too narrow.
She says something is pushing her.”
His face lost its color.
He leaned back as if I had struck him.
“I didn’t know.”
“She asked me whether someone was sleeping beside her.”
“I didn’t know she could feel me there.”
“How could she not?”
He had no answer.
For a while, only the refrigerator hummed between us.
Then Ramón spoke so quietly I almost missed it.
“I miss her.”
Three words.
That was all.
But his voice cracked on the last one.
I had spent the previous week imagining every terrible explanation a mother could invent.
An intruder.
A broken lock.
Someone hiding inside our home.
I had checked windows twice before sleeping.
I had walked through the hallway at midnight.
I had watched Mika’s face for signs that she was too afraid to explain something.
And all along, the person entering her room was her father.
“I miss her too when she’s at school,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean I climb into her bed without telling her.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He looked at the table.
Then he began talking.
He told me the first time had happened after an especially long shift.
He had come home after midnight.
On the refrigerator, he found a drawing Mika had made of the three of us holding hands.
I remembered that picture.
Mika had worked on it for almost an hour.
She had asked me to leave it where her father would see it.
Ramón had stood alone in the kitchen looking at the drawing while both of us slept.
Then he went to Mika’s room to kiss her good night.
“She was holding one of those storybooks,” he said.
“The blue one.”
“The folk tales?”
He nodded.
“She must have fallen asleep waiting for someone to read to her.”
I remembered that night too.
I had read to her, but Mika had wanted another story.
I had promised we would read it the next evening.
Ramón had not known that.
He thought she had been waiting for him.
“So I sat down,” he continued.
“I thought I’d stay for a minute.”
He had leaned against the headboard.
A minute became ten.
Exhaustion won.
