Daddy


I’ll always be there.


You lied, thought Olivia, Where are you when I need you the most?


Readjusting her mourning gown, Olivia stuffed the faded photo of her beloved father in her fist. Without her father, Olivia had never felt so alone, so hurt.


Her father had always promised he’d fight and win his internal battle. And he was known for keeping his promises. Except this time.


Olivia hiccupped, stumbling over her black flats as she walked into her bedroom. She locked her brass doorknob, tears blurring her vision. Olivia crept into her covers and granted the dam that held her melancholy liberty. She sobbed into her pillow, for the umpteenth time that week. Unfolding the crumpled picture in her hands, Olivia stared at her father. He had the same stubborn set of chin as her, the same high cheek bones. But that’s where the similarities stopped.


Her father had had the most peculiar smile, eyebrows arched in a comical fashion with the crooked set of jaw that Olivia knew so well. His hazel eyes were like two burning coals that illuminate the darkest in everyone’s hearts. Olivia had grown to worship her father, sworn to be exactly like him.


Silent drops of grief and pain splashed onto the thin, colored paper that held a lifetime worth of memories of her father. Olivia sniffled.


You promised, Daddy, thought Olivia, you promised you’d always be here. Where are you now? How can you just leave me like this?


Unanswered questions swirled in her head, each more meaningless than the last. Olivia could still remember the love of her father’s embrace before he’d entered the surgery room, pale and winded, yet with the same brightness in his eyes. Her father’s grimacing smile was permanently etched on the back of Olivia’s eyelids. The last words he’d spoken were words of affection and comfort: “I’ll be right back, don’t worry.”


That was how selfless her father had been. Even on the cusp of death, he’d chosen to reassure Olivia, rather than leave his final farewell. Olivia wiped her tears, and choked for closure.


It was later when the doctors told Olivia of how slim the chances were of her father making it. “He’d wanted it done anyways,” they said, eyes cast down with personal guilt, “He wanted to outside again with his daughter. To have his life back, those were his exact words.”


Olivia flashbacked to the terminal moments before the leukemia that took away the lives of so many decided her father was its next victim.


“I’ll be fine, Olivia”, said her father, clasping her hands in his own frail ones. They are so brittle, thought Olivia, I feel like I can snap them in half even with the gentlest touch. “It’s just a simple surgery. It seems like Daddy needs a little extra help.”


Olivia sniffled and held out her right pinky, “You promise you’ll always be here?”


“Of course I will, sweetheart. When have I ever broken a promise before, huh?” said her father, inter-locking his finger with Olivia’s. His rubbery, translucent skin held such hope and comfort for Olivia, when they’d looped around hers.


“I love you, Daddy,” said Olivia, crushing her father in a smothering bear-tackle.


If it pained him, Olivia’s father didn’t express it, instead wrapped his bony arms around her. “I love you, too, sweetheart,” said her father, kissing his daughter’s temple. “After this, we’re going to Ben and Jerry’s. I want to try the chocolate fudge.”


Olivia laughed and snuggled into the crook of her father’s neck, “But Daddy, you had the chocolate fudge last time. You should try their berry flavors.”


“I’ll think about it,” murmured her father, slightly breathless. Olivia could hear the faint thud, thud of his heartbeats—the almost-empty hourglass that counted his last moments on earth.


They had stood like that for a few minutes, Olivia memorizing the familiar soap scent of her beloved parent, mingled by the smell of chemicals and death, with her father patting her long locks with the delicacy of a hurt butterfly, as if she was the one in the hospital linen.


“Ahem,” a nurse said, “Mr. Tates, the doctors are ready whenever you are.”


Her father smiled his unique grin, albeit with faint dread, “I’ve got to go now, Olivia.”


Turning to the nurse by the doorway, he said, “Could my daughter please accompany me to the surgery room?”


“Uh, of course, but she’ll have to go once the lights are on though,” said the nurse, pulling up a wheelchair by the seat of his bed. He couldn’t walk steadily anymore, without assistance, because his legs were just too skinny and frail. Olivia jabbered about nonsense all the way until the surgery room, clasping her father’s pale-white hands. She could see the muted blue of his veins. What happened to the sturdy and burly man her father was three months ago?


“You promise you’ll always be here, for me, right?” said Olivia, with solemn tears leaving clear tracks of woe and despair behind. Heart hammering in her ribcage, Olivia embraced her father one last time, sniffling in his ears. “I don’t want you to go, Daddy,” whispered Olivia.


Her father chuckled, and used his thumb to wipe away her escaping liquid grief, and murmured, “I’ll be right back. Don’t worry.”


Then her father had untangled her arms from himself with a pained expression. Pressing a soft kiss onto her temple, her father smiled one last time, and then the nurse rolled the wheelchair into the gates of death. The lights of the surgery room turned on.


“I LOVE YOU, DADDY!” wailed Olivia, knowing fully well that he couldn’t have heard her. Sobbing with raw anguish, Olivia knelt to all fours, her non-stopping tears wetting the marble floors of the cursed hospital.


Olivia wept with the same heartache as before, magnified with the certainty of death. How could he break his promise? Olivia thought, gasping for air.


Her heart was shattered into a million, gnarled pieces, each tinted with human agony. To say she missed her father was an understatement, Olivia burned with the universal longing of something she couldn’t have. There was no alternative or distraction. She yearned to feel her father’s touch again, bony or strong, see his grins, and hear his throaty, booming laughter that would’ve filled the sombre house. Olivia wanted her father’s infectious flames to shine again, brighter than ever, kindling hers and everyone else’s souls. She wanted everything to be back to normal.


No, Olivia didn’t just miss his presence. She needed her father, like she needed air.


Olivia sobbed harder, limbs twisted in an impossible position, stiff with locked muscles. Her father had been the gravity that kept Olivia happy and smiling. Without him, Olivia was miserable, to the say the least. She was suffocating with the pain that overweighed her fragile, young body. It couldn’t be contaminated, or masked with a stoic face. She’d metamorphosed from an airy, bubbly blossom, into a wilted, bleak darkness.


Because when her father died, he’d taken Olivia with him.