Chapter 9: The Birthday

I woke before dawn on her birthday, while she was still asleep, her face pressed into the pillow, her hair spread across the sheets like a copper fan, her breathing slow and even. I lay there for a moment, just watching her, memorizing the way she looked in the gray morning light, young and peaceful and mine. She was nineteen today. Nineteen years since I had screamed her into this world, since they had torn her from my arms, since I had begun waiting for this moment without even knowing what I was waiting for.

I slipped out of bed carefully, not wanting to wake her. I had spent the week preparing in secret, buying things with cash, hiding them in the trunk of the Honda, in the back of the closet, anywhere she wouldn’t think to look. I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted her to feel, for one day, like she was the only person in the world who mattered, because to me, she was.

I decorated the apartment while she still slept, stringing fairy lights across the windows, the cheap battery-powered kind that flickered like stars against the gray apartment walls. I blew up balloons, red and gold, and taped them to the walls in clusters, hiding the water stains and the cracks in the plaster.

I had bought a cake from the grocery store bakery, chocolate with vanilla frosting. When I heard her start the shower, I knew I had to be quick, so I wrote “Happy Birthday Amelia” on it myself with a tube of icing, my handwriting shaky, my hands trembling with the weight of what I was planning, what I was feeling, what I was about to give her.

She emerged from the bathroom in a towel, her skin pink and steaming, droplets of water still clinging to her collarbone, her throat, her thighs. She stopped in the doorway, her eyes wide, taking in the lights, the balloons, the cake with its nineteen candles casting a warm glow across the room.

“You remembered,” she whispered, and her voice broke on the second word, cracking open with a vulnerability that made my chest ache. I realized in that moment that no one had ever remembered before, not Darlene, not Earl, not anyone in her whole life. She had probably never had a birthday cake, never had balloons, never had anyone who cared enough to wake up early and make the world beautiful just for her.

“Of course I remembered,” I said, crossing to her, taking her face in my hands, my thumbs brushing her cheekbones, kissing her forehead, her eyelids, her lips, tasting the shower water on her skin. “You’re my everything. How could I forget?”

We ate cake for breakfast, sitting on the floor because I had covered the couch with a white sheet and scattered rose petals there, saving it for later, for the gift, for the moment I had been planning for weeks. She licked frosting from her fingers, laughing, her eyes bright with a happiness I had never seen in her before, and I watched her, memorizing her like this, young and joyful and mine, storing the image away like the precious thing it was.

“Tell me what you wished for,” I said, feeding her another bite of cake from my fork, watching her lips close around the tines.

She chewed, swallowed, her eyes meeting mine with a seriousness that made my breath catch. “I can’t tell you. Then it won’t come true.”