Eric Taylor sat down softly on the bed, careful not to wake his slumbering daughter. Gracie stirred ever so slightly against her pillow, murmured, and fell still. He watched her sleep, her soft, clear child's skin aglow with an innocence time must one day erase. Julie had been like this once, too, safe in her own bed, cocooned in blankets, under her father's protective roof, ignorant of all the little and big ways a daughter could fray and slice the vulnerable threads of a father's hope.
He had heard once that having a child was like making the decision to allow, for the rest of your life, your heart to walk around outside of your body. He hadn't known what that meant the first time he had heard it, but Julie had taught him. Gracie would teach him too. There was no protection for that muscle once it was freed from the cage of your chest; you couldn't do anything to prevent all the punctures that would tear it open over the years. People tossed parenting books at you the first time you had a child, "how to" books, as if a human being were a machine that required a manual, as if you were an engineer: if only you could grasp the formula, if only you worked hard enough, if only you remembered to carry the two, you could ensure the outcome. Tami had made him read those books; he had consented to please her, but they had been a lie, every single one of them. The truth was much simpler: he was powerless.
He knew as a coach that he had to lead by example and that he had to encourage his team captains to lead by example. He had been told the same was true of parenting. Yet what difference had any of it made? He'd never set Julie an example of infidelity; he'd never shown her how to betray. Another woman's husband. She had slept with another woman's husband. His Julie, who had once crawled into his lap and hugged him, and had said, "Tell me the story about the princess. The one who waits for her one true prince. And waits and waits and waits. The one where they live happily ever after."
He reached out a hand toward Gracie, but he did not touch her. His fingers fell lightly atop the blanket. The cloth felt cool to the touch. He could fold down the blankets, take Gracie up, draw her into his arms, hold her close, and it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter because, in the end, he was powerless. All the parenting books, all the father-daughter talks, all the hugs, all the cheering at school events, all the bedtime stories, all the prayers, all the sitting up at night and waiting…one day, none of it would matter. His heart wasn't his own anymore, not really. It could walk outside his body now; it could roam anywhere it wanted, risk itself anyway it wanted, hurt itself and hurt others, and there was nothing he could do. Nothing.
If someone had told him eighteen years ago that this was what it meant to be a father, would he still have chosen it? But who could have told him? Who could have put into words this kind of hope, this kind of disillusionment, this kind of joy, this kind of pain, this kind of love that cannot be described but only lived? And for him, not to have chosen it would have meant to remain a child himself. For it wasn't only Julie who had lost her innocence. Oh, he had been a grown man before he was a father. Yet nothing in his life had ever matured him faster than fatherhood. Nothing in his life, not even his failures as a coach, had taught him the depths of his limitations. Nothing in his life, not even his marriage to Tami, had taught him how to love sacrificially. It was one thing to love a woman; it was another thing entirely to love a child. It was a kind of love you could never suspect existed until you had experienced it. It was unlike anything he had ever imagined it would be. It was more violent than any force that had ever swept over him, and he had been powerless to resist it, powerless from the beginning, powerless from the moment Julie's soft, tiny hand first grasped his finger.
He was a man. A husband, a lover, a teacher, a coach, a leader of young men. He was brave and self-disciplined and assertive and masculine and…powerless. Utterly powerless.
He felt a presence in the doorway. He drew his eyes from Gracie to the figure in the frame. "I'm sorry I disappointed you," came Julie's soft voice. She was holding back the tears that threatened to overflow from the soft pools of her eyes. He knew the tears were there. He knew she was holding them back. He knew because he was looking into the mirror of his own heart, there outside his body, there in the chipping frame of the door of Gracie's childhood home. His heart, standing six feet away from him, raw and beating and cut and bleeding, beyond his own body, beyond his reach, beyond his power to heal.
Julie turned and walked away.