Chapter 8: What Patricia Said to Mia
We found out three weeks later.
Mia had started seeing the therapist Dr.
Osei had referred us to — a woman named Dr.
Calloway who had a small office with a sand tray and a shelf of small figurines that children could arrange however they wanted.
Mia liked her immediately.
After the fourth session, Dr.
Calloway asked to speak with me alone for a few minutes while Daniel waited with Mia in the reception area.
"Mia is doing well," she said.
"She's processing it in a healthy way.
She has a strong sense of her own feelings, which is a good sign."
"But?"
Dr.
Calloway chose her words carefully.
"In our last session, Mia told me something that I think you should know.
She said that on the day of the parking garage, before the family went inside the shopping center, her grandmother spoke to her privately.
In the car.
Before anyone else got out."
I kept my hands still on my knees.
"Mia said her grandmother told her that some children are easy to love and some children are hard to love.
And that the easy ones are the ones who don't make trouble and don't need too much."
The room was very quiet.
"She told a six-year-old that," I said.
"Mia remembered it clearly.
She said she'd been thinking about it since that day.
She said she wasn't sure which kind she was."
I looked at the shelf of small figurines.
A tiny wooden family.
A small house.
A dog.
"She's been wondering," I said, "if she's the kind that's hard to love."
"Yes."
I sat with that for a moment.
The full weight of it.
"What did you tell her?"
"I asked her what she thought.
She said she thought she was probably easy to love because her mom and dad never left her anywhere." Dr.
Calloway's expression was careful and kind.
"She worked it out herself.
But she needed to say it out loud to be sure."
I drove home with Mia in the back seat, watching her in the rearview mirror.
She was drawing something in a small notebook she carried everywhere.
Completely absorbed.
Humming something tuneless and content.
She looked up and caught me watching.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing.
Just looking at you."
She went back to her drawing.
"You do that a lot."
"I know."
"It's okay," she said, very seriously.
"I don't mind."
That evening I told Daniel what Dr.
Calloway had said.
I watched his face move through several things in the space of about thirty seconds.
By the end of it he had stood up from the table and walked to the back door and stood there with his hand on the frame, looking out at the yard.
"She said that to her," he said.
"Before she left her."
"Yes."
"She told our daughter she might be hard to love.
And then she left her alone in a parking garage to make sure she felt it."
He stood there for a long time.
When he turned around, something had settled in his face.
Not anger.
Something past anger.
Something permanent.
"I'm going to call my mother," he said.
"Alone.
Tonight."
"Daniel—"
"Not to protect her.
Not to negotiate." He looked at me directly.
"She's going to hear from me what she did.
Not from a lawyer's letter.
From me.
And then I'm going to tell her what happens next."
I nodded.
He made the call from the back porch.
I stayed inside.
I didn't listen.
He came back in forty minutes later.
He sat down.
He looked like he'd set something down that he'd been carrying for a very long time.
"She cried," he said.
"She said she didn't mean it the way Mia took it."
"What did you say?"
"I said it doesn't matter how she meant it.
It matters how a six-year-old heard it alone in a parking garage for five hours." He folded his hands on the table.
"I told her she will not be alone with any of the grandchildren again.
Not ours.
Not Marcus's.
Not any of them.
I told her that if she contests that, the documentation goes to a family court and we let a judge decide her access."
"How did she respond?"
"She said I was being cruel."
"And?"
"I said, 'Mom, I love you.
May you like
But this conversation is over.'" He looked at his hands.
"And I hung up."
