This is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life
He knew she recognised him. The day they took the breathing tube out she began to rouse, a weak spluttered attempt to pass the tracheal tube. She thrashed about for some time, disturbed from sleep and concerned. She saw her father and spoke just two words before she became violently agitated and had to be re-sedated.
“Dad, I…”
He’d seen the look on her face once before on a Serbian refugee in a World Press Photo magazine. It wasn’t quite the look of a killer, but wasn’t the expression of a victim either, somewhere impossible between the two, a world where human beings understand all possible manifestations of suffering without being either guilty of or falling victim to them.
She looked annoyed sleep had been forced on her, as did the police officers braced at her bedside with their notebooks at the ready, pencils licked. “She’s not ready yet” the doctors explained, whatever ‘ready’ meant, like she was a muffin. The whole experience was completely surreal to Dad anyway, seeing as he’d buried his daughter fifteen years ago. The police assured him from DNA tests that it was certainly her so he just went along with it.
He opened the door to the bare apartment, the walls stripped by the hopelessness of tragedy. Dad had lost the need to find joy in anything, so piece by piece he dismantled his old life - books, photos, clothes, nic-nacs - threw them all away. His life had stopped after Beauty went down the rabbit hole and never returned. His life between losing and finding her again was nothing but a gap in paragraphs - a line break. He ate to stay alive, took the pills that made him sleep, worked to maintain shelter. He didn’t suffer from depression - he just lived in a prolonged period of downtime. He wasn’t really there at all.
They told him to go home and get some rest. A symphony of summertime, hope and joy was ringing out through his empty hall like a choir. He put some coffee on and sat at his kitchen table. One chair. He drank coffee until he felt like he was vibrating. It was around 6pm, so the shops would still be open. He could at the very least pick up another chair.
Dad found himself mouthing words to himself as he walked - conversations he’d always meant to have with Beau, things he’d need to explain, like why the house was gone and why her mother wasn’t around anymore. How do you explain cancer to a child? He was a sensible man but could never let go that he felt it was the grief that killed Maude. Sat in her stomach like a rock and grown into something real and terrible. When the time came she didn’t want to fight it, just wanted to go away. And who could blame her? Dad thought about her - tiny as a child in soiled bedsheets, in too much pain to be changed - as he gazed upon racks of t-shirts with rockstars and monsters on. He should have asked at the hospital what size Beau took.
His last experience of buying clothes was for a seven year old and was worried that he was buying the wrong things. This was the most he had to think about anything for some time. He also bought four different kinds of yoghurt and two different kinds of bread because he didn’t know what sort of thing she’d like. He didn't know at this point it would be another two months before she left the hospital.
Dad tried to get a welcome party of people together to say hi to Beau when she came home, but didn’t really know anyone well enough to ask. He’d tried to contact a few of her childhood friends but was either ignored or asked not to contact them again. Beau’s grandparents were all just about at their sell by dates when she was born, let alone two decades on. His brother, Paul, kindly came over to help get the flat ready. He was a Methodist and asked some of his fellow congregation to have a little prayer for Dad and Beau.
“This is the first day of the rest of your life, Ray.”
“Come again?”
“It’s just a turn of phrase. First day of the rest of your life. Like it’s a new chapter for you and Beau”
“I suppose it is.” Dad tried his best to sound earnest.
Beau came over with her therapist, Karen. Dad had always imagined a huge crowd of press outside, interviewing Beau as she came through the door with lots of bodyguards, and she would speak eloquently to the camera with something like “Man is born into great suffering as sparks fly upward”. The press were mainly interested in the schoolteacher who had her locked in a cage for 15 years, as one would imagine.
She came through the door tentatively. Her shoulders were all bunched up but she softened when she saw her dad. He felt pretty good that he had that effect on her, and gave her a long hug. There were a few methodists in the reception room and they sung a soft hymn. It wasn’t anything special or cinematic or anything, but it was nice. A small brick of sunlight beamed through the window onto the floor. Beauty made her way over there and curled into a ball. Dad looked at her a little confused but Karen put a hand out to hold him back. She let out a deep sigh and closed her eyes, whisking herself away to a different world. She looked like a wilted flower, brown and broken and withered, finally let out into some sunshine. Hope hanging in the moment that perhaps yet she might still blossom.