I got home at ten past seven with the gift still in its box. The first thing I saw when I walked in from the living room was my daughter in the corner.
Sophie was sitting on a folding chair two feet away from the table, holding a plastic lunchbox. She was six. She was still wearing the yellow dress she had picked out for the party, and the cake I had ordered from the bakery on Beacon Street was sitting in the middle of the table, untouched, with a number six candle not yet lit.
Karen was standing by the table with a dish towel over her shoulder. Mia was in my daughter’s chair.
“Why’s Sophie over there?” I said.
Karen didn’t turn around right away. When she did, she smiled the way she smiles when she’s about to explain something to me that I should already understand.
“She was fussy about the food. I thought she’d eat better on her own.”
Sophie didn’t say anything to me. She just looked at the cake.
I put the box down on the sideboard and walked over to her. I have big hands. I know that. I took hers anyway and felt how cold they were.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s eat.”
Karen stood up when I moved the birthday chair back. I don’t remember exactly what she said because I wasn’t really listening to her. I remember she said my name twice, and I remember that Mia got very still.
I put Sophie in her seat. I lit the candle. We sang. Sophie blew it out on the third try.
After the cake was cut, after the plates were cleared, after I’d carried the presents up to her room and read her two pages out of the chapter book we were in the middle of, Sophie looked up at me from her pillow and asked me a question that I wasn’t ready for.
“Daddy,” she said. “Did you get my card?”
I smiled at her because you smile at six-year-olds when they ask you things, and I told her the truth, which was that I hadn’t received any card.
Her face didn’t do anything. That was the part that bothered me later. She didn’t look disappointed. She looked like someone crossing off the last name on a list.
“Okay,” she said. “Good night.”
I sat on the edge of her bed for a minute after she fell asleep. Then I went downstairs, said good night to Karen and Mia, took a shower, and went into the study because I had two invoices I wanted to clear before Monday.
I did the invoices. Then I opened the top drawer of my desk for a pen, and I noticed something taped to the underside of the drawer above it.
The drawer above it is where I keep my checkbook. I hadn’t opened it in weeks.
The envelope was small and yellow and it had Sophie’s handwriting on it. Just my first name, printed in pink marker, and a heart that had been drawn three times so you could see the outline of the pen through the paper.
The postmark was three weeks old. The return address printed in the corner was the children’s hospital where Elena had died.
I sat down in the chair and I didn’t move for a long time.
My daughter had written me a card. My daughter had mailed me a card. Somebody had taped that card to the underside of my own desk drawer, where I’d find it eventually, or where I’d never find it at all, and I don’t think I have to explain to you which of those two was the point.
I didn’t open it that night. I couldn’t. I put it in my coat pocket, and I went to bed, and I lay there listening to the house and I asked myself the only question I could ask: how many more of these are there.
