I didn’t wait for Daniel.
I turned and ran.
I still remember the sound of my shoes against the hospital floor and how badly my chest hurt as I reached the elevator. I kept thinking about Sophie stretching her arms toward me and calling “Mama” while I sat at that table with a pen in my hand.
When the elevator doors opened, I almost collided with another nurse.
Then I saw Daniel’s empty chair outside Sophie’s room.And through the doorway, I saw my daughter.
She was sitting in the first nurse’s lap, holding the little pink cardigan between her fingers.
The moment Sophie saw me, she smiled.
That smile is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
She reached both arms toward me.
“Mama.”
I picked her up and held her so tightly that she protested with a little sound.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into her hair. “I’m so sorry. Mommy got scared.”
A few moments later, Daniel entered the room.
He stopped several feet away from us.
Sophie looked at him and immediately reached one hand toward him too.
“Dada.”
Daniel covered his mouth.
Then he came over, wrapped both arms around us, and the three of us cried together.
The paperwork was stopped that afternoon.We took Sophie home.
I wish I could say that after that day everything became easy, but it didn’t.
Progeria did not disappear because we loved her.
There were specialists, medications, physical therapy, frightening appointments and nights when Daniel and I lay awake listening to Sophie breathe because neither of us wanted to admit how scared we were.
As she grew older, her body changed faster than other children’s bodies did, and eventually she began noticing that people looked at her differently.
When Sophie was seven, she came home from school unusually quiet.
I asked what was wrong, and after a long silence she told me that a boy had asked why she looked like “a little old lady.”
I went into the bathroom later and cried where she couldn’t see me.
Daniel handled it differently.
He sat beside her on the couch and showed her one of his own childhood photographs.
“You know what I see when I look at you?” he asked.Sophie shrugged.
“My daughter.”
She smiled.
“That’s it?”
Daniel kissed the top of her head.
“That’s everything.”
As Sophie grew older, we told her more about her condition. We never wanted her to discover the truth from another child or from something she found online.
By thirteen, she understood that her life might be shorter than most people’s.
One evening, she asked us the question Daniel had feared since the day of her diagnosis.
“Am I going to die young?”
Daniel’s hand tightened around mine.
I wanted to lie.
I wanted to tell her she would be eighty years old someday and complain about her grandchildren being too loud.
Instead, we told her that nobody could know exactly how much time they had, but that her illness could make her life shorter.
Sophie sat quietly for a while.
Then she asked:
“Are you sad you got me?”
I felt as though someone had punched me in the chest.
“No.”
