Just Like the clouds

“Mama…Where’s daddy?”
         Eiva looked up at her mother it tears in her eyes. Tears that crowded the corners of her eyes. Not like her mother’s. Not like the one’s that had fallen from her mother’s now stressed and tired eyes. Mye had started looking a lot older than she was and the tears she had been crying for the few hours that had started the day put wrinkles and bags under her eyes. Mye looked down at her daughter and searched for the words to tell her.
“I…don’t know anymore,” she said. As her tears fell harder she began to realize that this had more truth to it than she had wanted it to.
“But Mama…,” Eiva’s own tears started to fall. She had never seen her mother look this way and it truly scared her. “Is…is he…gonna come back this time?”
         Mye picked up her five year old and sat her on her lap. She could feel the words coming up. The harder she tried to stop them, the faster they came up. She felt the red coming on around her light brown eyes as she put her head down. She could feel the picture of her pain coming to depict itself upon her face. The pain she was trying so hard to keep from her child. And this pain, that became so heavy on her own body, now began to give a thousand stabs at her heart.
“He’s not coming back. He’s gone.”
“No he’s not!” Eiva looked up at the table and picked something up. “See? Look. He left his watch. He never leaves it for long.”
“Eiva…”
“And he always gives me a kiss before he leaves for work.” She hops down from Mye’s lap.
“Eiva.”
         Eiva starts to cry harder, letting those held up tears fall. She walked around the kitchen, which light had not found yet, yelling her painful words.
“See?! He wouldn’t leave us behind!! He loves us,” She cried and yelled louder. “He loves us Mama! He loves us!!”
“Eiva!!! Hush!”
         Eiva fell to the floor and yelled again in streams of tears. She stood up and yelled at everything she saw that reminded her of her father. For a moment, Mye had forgotten the fact that her husband had just walked out of their lives. And for that moment, she watched her baby girl. Their baby girl. She couldn’t believe that she’d brought someone so smart into the world. That this little girl, who now had crawled back onto her lap and set the watch on the floor, could understands the fact that she lost someone. Someone special. And that she could be angry at something, anything and not be angry at her mother. Just as Eiva stopped yelling, it rained on the outside, and Mye remembered their reasons for tears.
“Mama?” Eiva looked up at Mye still crying. “Why’d he leave?”
“Well…,” Mye hugged her daughter close, with the feeling that it was all she could do. All she could do to keep Eiva from leaving her too, “he wasn’t exactly…happy here.”
“But he said he’d always be there for me. Because I’m his baby girl. And he wouldn’t lie to me. He promised.” Eiva lay her head down on her mother’s chest and listened to her heartbeat. She watched the rain and wiped her cheeks. “He wouldn’t lie to me. Would he?
Mye could hear the pain in Eiva’s voice. She looked out of the window and watched the sky’s tears fall around their fortress.
“I don’t know sweetie.” She felt angry that she couldn’t answer Eiva’s question. That she couldn’t tell her if she could trust her own father because she wasn’t sure if she could trust him herself. She was angry because she couldn’t bring herself to say anything more.
“Why wasn’t he happy?”
“I don’t know. I guess he just…had to find something.”
“But…what?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I don’t think he does either.”
         She picked up the watch from the floor and glared at it. She hoped it would give her some reason to forgive Matt for hurting them. She hoped it would give her some kind of answer for Eiva. Mye, herself, didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know why he left them alone in that dark house to cry. Why he would hurt them so much. Mye looked down at the crown of her daughter’s head.
“Hey…He left this for you though.” She handed her the watch.
“Really?!” She looked at it with sad eyes. Sad eyes that made her mother even angrier.
“Yeah. Look. He had it engraved.”
“What’s that?”
“When you have some words carved into something.”
“Oh! Like those ‘Made in China’ toys?” She looked at her mother with a confused face that cheered up Mye just enough to help her smile back in response.
“Yes sweetie. Just like the toys.”
         They stared at the gold watch in little Eiva’s hands and finally opened it when it had seemed as though the rain outside had let up just a little. Mye read the inside.
“It says, ‘To my baby girl and to my love, I will always love you. No matter what. It may seem like I’ve left forever, But I hope and pray never to leave your hearts.’
“What did he mean Mama?”
“Well, he meant that even though it feels like he’s gone forever, he doesn’t want us to forget him.”
“But…I can’t forget him.”
“Why not?” Mye smiled at her daughter and the idea of what her response might be.
“Because…he said he owes me a shopping spree when I turn sixteen.”
         Mye laughed remembering that day he made the promise. As she felt a little better, she hugged Eiva close.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what Mama?” She held her mother’s arms around her.
“You always cheer me up.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well however you do it, you’re very good at it.”
“Thanks. I learned from you. Whatever it is I learned. Hey Mama?”
“Yeah?”
“How come we cry like the rain?”
“What do you mean?”
“I was wiping my cheek and I saw a drop roll down my hand and it looked like the rain.”
“That’s a good question. Maybe it’s because we’re like the clouds.”
“So…we’re big and puffy?”
“No.” She smiled at Eiva. “Not big and puffy. We hold things. Like the clouds hold the water. And sometimes we get too full so we have to cry it out. Just like when the rain falls when the clouds can’t hold anymore water. Sometimes it’s bad and it looks like this.” She pointed to the window. “But other times, when it’s sunny and raining it looks pretty and isn’t cold.”
“It isn’t?”
“Nope. You know how it rains in the summer and it feels warm?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how happy tears feel.”
“Oh. So it feels like you wet yourself? Because that’s how warm rain feels for me sometimes and that doesn’t feel too good.”
“I don’t even know what to say to that.” They both laughed as the rain slowly stopped outside.
“Mama? Can it rain on the inside?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well…is it bad when it rains on the inside?”
“Yeah, really bad. But that won’t happen to us. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because we have each other.”
         Eiva looked up at her mother and wiped her face with her free hand.
         “Yep!” she said smiling, “and daddy’s car.” They both looked out the window into the driveway at the red sports car soaked and ready for driving.