Because I couldn't save her. I couldn't save her. A single mother, a warrior, some kind of angel sent down from heaven itself and I couldn't reattach her wings.
She was pale as she laid there, the blinds were drawn in effort to save her one last headache, casting a gloomy shadow over the entire room. But it wasn't her, really, that my heart ached for. It was the child beside her bed, the little girl that clutched her mother's weak hand with all of her strength.
"It's going to be okay, Annabelle," the mother whispered, stroking the girl's red brown hair with a wan smile. The girl nodded with wide eyes and pursed lips, and I knew she didn't believe it. An 8 year old girl, staring at her mother in her deathbed, and she knew the difference between the white lies and the bleeding truth. "Promise me, baby. Promise mama that whatever happens, you'll be strong. You have to be strong, because one day you're going to change the world."
The girl nodded again, but this time I could see the tears well up in her navy blue eyes as she tightened her little hands around her mother's.
"I love you, Annabelle. And I am so, so sorry." the mother gasped out with tears streaming down her face. The girl simply nodded again, her bottom lip quivering as she tried to hold back the tears that screamed to stream down her face like her mother's. "I'm sorry."
The words hung in the air for a long, silent moment after the woman let her eyes fall shut and her hand fall limp in her child's. I watched the girl through this silent moment, watched her choke back the sob that threatened to shatter the quiet as the tears poured down her face and clutch the pale hand until her own knuckles were white. Desperation crept into the little girl's wide eyes and she started to shake her head, finally letting her face fall into the sheets and let the sobs break free.
I slowly walked to her, my heart breaking with every step, to lay my hand on her small quivering back as I knelt next to her. We sat like that for a while, and I let her cry, because there was nothing else to do but that.
"Does anybody hear us when we pray?" she asked into the mattress and I was slightly startled by the nature of her question. Out of all the days I had seen her she had never spoken a word, not to anyone. Not even to her mother.
"What?" I asked, and wished I hadn't, my male voice sounded shockingly harsh even in a whisper among the soft voices of innocence and death.
"Do they hear us when we pray?" She asked again, this time looking at me with her lost tear stained face. "Because I haven't stopped praying since mama got sick, and they didn't save her. They didn't save her." She collapsed into me then, her little arms wrapping around my neck and her tiny body crumpling into mine as the sobs racked through her.
I stroked her hair softly as I let the question soak into my bones, because I didn't know what to tell an 8 year old. I didn't know if the answer was another white lie or the terrifying reality that I had accepted as the truth.
"You don't have to answer," she mumbled after a few minutes of my contemplated silence, "I know."
And in that moment my world shifted with perspective. Because we were all born with innocence, but was it really a choice for us to lose it? Was it something that was just stolen from us as time grew old and we matured to see the horrors? Or was it something that we had to give up in order for us to be strong? Something we needed to lose in order to protect the ones who still had it?
I held the girl's hand as we walked out of the room, and as I looked at her I still didn't know the answer. Because I was holding an 8 year old's hand, but I was looking into the eyes of a woman who knew that her mother needed to be protected from the truth that she in fact was the one who stole her innocence in the first place. A girl who knew the horrors of this world and realized that there was no amount of praying that would protect her from it. That no one could protect her from it.
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