For nineteen years, Myra Summers had signed the same word on every school form. Guardian. That was how the pediatrician’s office knew her.
That was how the school district knew her. That was the word on every camp waiver and field trip permission slip and allergy sheet and scholarship packet, the word that identified the person who got up at night, packed the lunches, sat in the waiting rooms, drove to the appointments, and returned the calls. Guardian was a small word for a life that size.
Myra had never tried to replace it with something larger, and Dylan had never asked her to. The word sat on all the paperwork for nineteen years, and the paperwork was never the point. When Dylan was six, he had a fever that climbed to one-oh-four over the course of an afternoon.
Myra had been checking it every hour, bringing cool cloths, sitting on the edge of his mattress in the dim light while he drifted in and out of the feverish half-sleep that children fall into when their bodies are working hard. Late in the night, with the apartment quiet and the damp washcloth cooling in her hand, she stood to go refill the water glass. Dylan reached for her wrist without fully waking.
“Mom,” he said, still mostly asleep. “Don’t go.”
She stood in the doorway for a long time after that. She did not move.
She did not know what to do with the word, where to put it, what it meant that it had arrived like that, in the dark, from a child who had said it before he could think about what he was saying. She went back and sat on the edge of the mattress until his breathing settled, and in the morning neither of them mentioned it. That was how they moved through the painful things.
Carefully, and without making them larger than they needed to be. Dylan was three weeks old when Vanessa left him. Myra was twenty-two, which sounds young until you understand that twenty-two is old enough to have plans.
She had an acceptance letter to a graduate program in social work, a full scholarship, a part-time job lined up, and a studio apartment she had chosen because it was two blocks from the library and had good afternoon light. She had imagined herself the way young people imagine themselves when they are finally about to begin the life they chose rather than the one they were born into: studying late, complaining about exams, becoming competent and independent and free. Then Vanessa came home from the hospital.
What happened next changed everything… continues on the next page.
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