But nothing happened.
No calls.
No message.
Total silence.
I thought that meant they’d found another solution. Maybe they’d found another donor. Maybe the doctors were trying new treatments. Maybe my husband was too busy at the hospital to worry about me.
Two weeks passed before guilt finally compelled me to return home.
I told myself I was just going to see how they were.
I just wanted to know how things were developing.
But as soon as I crossed the threshold of the house, I had a bad feeling.
The walls of the living room were covered in drawings.
Dozens of them.
Perhaps hundreds.
Clumsy, irregular sketches, held together with pieces of white medical tape. Pencil strokes covered the paper like storms of color.
Stick figures with giant heads.
A tall man.
A younger child.
And next to them, a woman with long hair.
Above each drawing, written in trembling letters, appeared the same word:
“Mother”.
A lump formed in my throat.
I approached, noticing that the drawings varied slightly from one another. In some, the boy held the woman’s hand. In others, they stood in front of a house. One showed the three figures under a huge yellow sun.
They were all labeled the same way.
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