Mark is not a man who explodes.
When he gets quiet, something serious is coming.
On Saturday, he asked me for a favor.
“Can you make a video?” he said.
“Lily’s hospital visits.
Her hair.
Leo’s promise.
Everything.
want everyone to see exactly what she cut.”
I sat down with my phone and opened a folder I had avoided for months.
Lily was seven, and the year before had hollowed all of us out.
She’d been diagnosed with leukemia in the spring.
Before the diagnosis, she had thick honey-brown hair that she wore in loose braids to school.
After the second round of chemo, I found strands of it on her pillow, on her sweater, in the bathtub drain.
One night she stood in the bathroom staring at the clump in her brush and asked me, in a voice so small I still hear it in my sleep, “Am I going to look scary?”
