Chapter 6 When the Dam Broke

Alisha drifted back into the bedroom she had woken in only hours earlier. She shut the door gently behind her and for a long moment she simply stood there, arms wrapped around herself as she moved around the room as if she were a stranger. Because technically she was.

She stopped in the middle of the room and looked around the vast space that looked like something out of an imaginary dream. She could not even begin to process the fact that something could be this beautiful, almost like a paradise.

Nothing about the room felt real. The wide bed with its expensive sheets, the tall windows letting in soft afternoon light, the absolute luxury of it all. She felt as if everything was pressing in on her.

She folded her arms across her stomach without meaning to, because she felt small here. She gave the room one last look and sniffed because she was absolutely sure she could never get used to living in a place like this.

She walked toward the far corner of the room, then sat down quietly on the bare floor and drew her knees up. Her arms wrapped around her legs. Her cheek rested on her knee and then she closed her eyes.

And that was when the dam broke.

The memories came flooding in. She fought against those bitter memories because right until now she was still living in denial.

Her papa was fine. Her old man was not dead.

Never.

But shutting her eyes did not stop those memories from being real.

Because take it or leave it, that was her current reality.

Her old man was gone.

Her old man.

Her precious old man.

The only thing she had ever truly owned in this world.

Tears slid down her cheeks in silent lines, and she did not bother to wipe them. What was the point? There was no one here who cared to see it anyway. After all, she had no one else.

Behind her closed lids she saw fragments of him. His weathered hands guiding hers through the soil of their small garden. The way he always saved the softest part of the bread for her. The pride in his eyes whenever she laughed.

He had been in his sixties by the time the accident took him, and she had been the late, unexpected light of his life.

He had been forty-something when she was born, when most men his age were bouncing grandchildren on their knees.

And that was one of the reasons why she would always joke and call him her old man.

He had lived a long, lonely life before her. She used to think she had been born just to keep him company.

She had been the only bright thing he had in heaven and earth.

And her old man, her sweet, worn-out old man, would have handed her the whole world on a breakfast tray if he could. But the world had never been kind enough to give him that much. He fought life for every crumb and struggled through every single day.

And Alisha, she had hated watching it. Hated to see her old man aging as each day passed by.

From his shoulders slacking, to his knees losing strength, and then his weak tired face.

Every passing year she wished the world could just stop counting, so that her old man could at least stay with her longer.

Her precious father.

How could he be gone? she thought. Just like that? Just like that?

The last few days played through her mind against her will.

The day before the accident, her old man had complained of aches and a heaviness in his chest and a dizziness that came and went. He had mentioned wanting to see the doctor. So Alisha had gone with him the very next morning.

He had told her to wait outside and she had simply obeyed.

But when her father came out, his face was wrong. His eyes would not meet hers properly.

And she began wondering what the doctor had said to him behind that door.

She felt even more suspicious because he did more strange things on that day.

He took her hands and pressed them to his cheeks, and for a second she thought he might have been crying into her palms. She asked him what the doctor had said. He smiled that thin, tired smile of his and told her the man only wanted him to walk more in the mornings. Exercise and nothing serious.

She had believed him and had not pushed. Perhaps she should have pushed.

Because when they got home on that very same evening, he began talking about strange things.

About what should happen after he was gone. He showed her the quiet patch of earth behind the house, beneath the mango tree he loved, and told her that was where he wanted to be laid down. He said it plainly, the way one talks about the weather. He made her promise she would not wait, that she would lay him to rest the moment his heart stopped. She had laughed it off, told him he was being dramatic.

She had thought he was just talking. The way old men talk.

Now, sitting curled on the floor of a stranger's beautiful room, she understood. He had known. Somehow, some way, her old man had known. And something in him had already started saying goodbye.

She should have suspected.

He had been strange ever since that hospital visit, as though he were memorizing her.

And then, that same evening, he had done something he had never done in her eighteen years of life.

He had told her about her mother.

For as long as Alisha could remember, she had asked and asked and asked, and her father had always looked away, changed the subject, laughed and said, "Another day, my child. Another day." So many another days had piled up between them that she had stopped believing one would ever come.

But that night, he had sat her down on the low bench outside their little house, and under a sky full of stars he had told her everything.

She had gone to bed with her mind burning.

She had lain there for hours, staring at the wooden beams above her, turning her father's words over and over like coins she was afraid to spend. She had promised herself she would ask him more in the morning. She had so many questions. So many.

And the following morning she had suggested they take a walk together, just the two of them, because she had wanted more. She had wanted every scrap of the story he still had not told her.

Only for that man to slam into their lives with the front of his car.

She could still see his blurry face floating right before her as he checked her pulse. The last thing her eyes had recorded before the world went black.

When she woke up, she was alone in a hospital ward, and her old man was nowhere beside her.

And when she had stumbled her way into his room and seen that man standing there, well-dressed, unharmed, alive, she had known.

She had known, in that instant, that he was the one who had taken everything from her.

She had wanted to jump at him. Claw at his face. Break something over his head. Tear at him, scream. To make him feel even a fraction of the loss clawing through her chest. To force him to pause time and erase that accident from their lives.

And in those small tiny seconds between them, she had imagined a hundred violent things.

But her body would not move.

She had only stood there, staring at him without finding her voice, because the fear inside her was bigger than the rage. Fear of the unknown.

That was what held her still. Everything she had ever had in this world, every scrap of safety, every piece of love, was lying in that hospital bed. If her old man left her, there would be nothing left.

If anything happened to her old man, if anything, anything at all happened to him, that would be her very end, because now she would be lonely and would have nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Her old man was her heaven and her earth.

And he had given up so much to become that for her.

Because the story he had told her that night, the one she had gone to bed replaying, was not the kind of story a village girl expects to inherit.

It had been a story about her mother.