While my sister was in the hospital having her baby, I stayed home with her 7-year-old daughter. That night, when it was time for a bath, my niece suddenly went quiet and would not take off her clothes. I gently told her it was okay and said we could bathe together so she would not feel scared. Then she looked at me with shaking eyes and whispered, Auntie… you are not going to hit me, are you? The second I saw her back, my whole body went cold.
While my sister was in the hospital having her baby, I stayed home with her 7-year-old daughter. That night, when it was time for a bath, my niece suddenly went quiet and would not take off her clothes. I gently told her it was okay and said we could bathe together so she would not feel scared. Then she looked at me with shaking eyes and whispered, Auntie… you are not going to hit me, are you? The second I saw her back, my whole body went cold.
The moment my niece asked if I was going to hit her, the room seemed to lose all sound.
My sister, Lauren, was in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, giving birth to her second child. I had picked up her seven-year-old daughter, Emma, from school that afternoon and brought her back to my townhouse with a backpack, a stuffed rabbit, and the kind of exhausted quiet children get when their routines have been stretched too far. Lauren had sounded rushed but grateful on the phone. Just one night, Ava. Maybe two. Mark is running back and forth between the hospital and the house, and Emma will do better with you.
That part should have warned me. Mark had always insisted Emma stay close to home. He hated sleepovers, hated her spending too much time at friends’ houses, hated anything he called disruption. Lauren used to laugh it off and say he was overprotective. I never liked the way Emma went silent whenever his name came up.
