CHAPTER 6

SOPHIA

“He’s going to be here, right?” Malik asks for the third time, standing on his tiptoes to see out the front window, his small palms pressed flat against the glass.

“He promised, baby,” I say it with more confidence than I feel, sliding the sweet potatoes into the oven. Tarik called this morning, actually called instead of texting, and told me he’d cleared his afternoon. I’ll be there by four. I promise, Sophia. This one I mean.

I check the clock. Four-thirty.

By five, Malik has stopped standing at the window and started asking me every ten minutes if Daddy’s car is the one pulling up outside. It never is.

By six, we sit down to eat without him. My mother says grace, and when she gets to the part about family, I watch Malik glance at the empty chair beside me and then quickly look down at his plate, like he’s embarrassed for noticing it too.

“He’s just working,” Malik says quietly, to no one in particular, pushing a piece of turkey around his plate. “He lives at work.”

My mother catches my eye across the table and doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

After dinner, Malik curls up on the couch with his dinosaur, more subdued than usual, rubbing at his nose. I think it’s just tiredness—the big meal, the late afternoon, the disappointment sitting heavy on a three-year-old who doesn’t have the words for it yet.

Then I hear the cough.

Small at first, a single dry bark, and I don’t think much of it until it happens again, and then again, closer together, and something in the back of my mind—the part of me that’s spent two years learning the difference between an ordinary cough and a warning—goes very still.

“Malik?” I’m off the couch and kneeling in front of him before I’ve finished saying his name.

His face is doing something I recognize immediately and never stop being afraid of. His little chest is pulling in hard with each breath, the skin dipping beneath his ribs, and there’s a sound coming from him now, high and thin and desperate, like air being dragged through something too narrow to let it pass.

“Mom, get the nebulizer,” I say, already scooping him into my lap, my hands shaking as I try to keep my voice calm for him even though nothing in me feels calm. “Now, please.”

My mother is moving before I finish the sentence. I get the mask over Malik’s face, flip the machine on, and the mist starts, and for a few seconds I let myself believe this is going to be like every other time—scary, but manageable, something we ride out together on the living room floor.

It isn’t.

His lips are starting to go the wrong color. Pale around the edges, then something closer to gray, and his eyes have gone wide and glassy in a way that makes my whole body go cold.

“Mom, call 911.” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to, but there’s no room left for softness. “Now. Now, Mom.”

She’s already dialing.

I hold Malik against my chest, feel how hard his little body is working just to pull in air that won’t come, and I press my lips to the top of his head and I don’t know what I’m saying anymore, just words, just sound, just I’m here, baby, I’m here, Mommy’s here, over and over, because I don’t know what else there is to give him.

I reach for my phone with my free hand and call Tarik. It rings. And rings. Goes to voicemail.

I call again. Voicemail.

I text—MALIK CAN’T BREATHE CALL ME NOW—and I watch the screen, willing the three dots to appear, willing anything to appear, and nothing does.

The sirens reach the house before he does.

The paramedics move fast, faster than I can process. There’s a blur of terms I only half hear—sats are low, air entry poor, we need to move. Malik is on a stretcher too big for him, an oxygen mask over his tiny face. 

I’m climbing into the back of the ambulance still in my Thanksgiving apron, my mother’s voice fading behind me telling me she’ll follow in the car.

I hold Malik’s hand the entire ride. It’s the only thing I can do. His fingers are so small around mine, and I watch the numbers on the monitor, a language I’ve taught myself to read out of necessity, and I pray to a god I haven’t spoken to in years that those numbers climb instead of fall.

I call Tarik four more times before we reach the hospital. Voicemail. Voicemail. Voicemail. Voicemail.

The waiting room lights are too bright, the kind of fluorescent white that makes everything feel more clinical, more urgent, more real. I sit with my hands pressed together so hard my knuckles have gone white, my mother beside me with her arm around my shoulders, neither of us saying anything because there’s nothing to say that would make the next ten minutes go faster.

When the doctor finally comes through the double doors, I’m on my feet before she reaches me.

“Mrs. Bennett.” She has kind eyes, tired eyes, the eyes of someone who’s had this exact conversation more times than she wants to count. “He’s stable. We got him breathing on his own again, but it was close. His oxygen saturation was critically low when he came in. Another few minutes without intervention and we would have been having a very different conversation.”

The room tilts slightly. My mother’s hand tightens on my arm, the only thing keeping me upright.

“Can I see him?”

“Soon. He’s resting, and we want to keep him on monitoring overnight, run some tests on his lung function once he’s more stable.” She pauses, softens her voice further. “You did everything right getting him here as fast as you did. That’s what saved him tonight.”

You. Not you both. Just me. She doesn’t know it’s an accurate word choice. I don’t correct her.

I sink back into the chair, my legs no longer willing to hold me, and I put my face in my hands and finally let myself shake.

Tarik arrives forty minutes later, still in his coat, hair disheveled like he ran from the parking garage, his face white with a fear that’s two hours too late to matter the way it should.

“Sophia.” He’s in front of me, reaching for my shoulders. “Is he—where is he, is he okay, I got here as fast as I—”

“Where were you?” I ask. My voice comes out flat. Not a scream. I don’t have a scream left in me tonight.

“I was in a meeting, my phone was on silent, I didn’t see—” He stops himself, sees my face, and whatever he was about to say next dies in his throat.

I stand up slowly. My mother steps back, giving us space she probably shouldn’t have to give.

“He almost died tonight, Tarik.” I say it quietly, and somehow that’s worse than yelling would have been. “While you were somewhere I couldn’t reach, our son turned gray in my arms. I called you eight times. Eight. And every single time, it went to voicemail.”

“Sophia, I’m sorry, I—”

“I spent years begging you to be a husband.” My voice doesn’t shake anymore. It’s gone somewhere past shaking, somewhere flat and certain and finished. “I spent months begging you to be a father. Tonight, while our son was fighting for his life, you chose your work again.”

He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

“I’m done.”

The words hang in the fluorescent light between us, and for the first time in two years, I don’t take them back. I don’t soften them. I don’t find a reason to excuse him one more time.

I turn and walk down the hallway toward Malik’s room, and I don’t look back to see whether Tarik follows.