Rosebush by Michele Jaffe Page A

each day becoming paler, smaller, washed out, more ephemeral, until only their outline and one trait—a nose, the way the shoulders slope—remained. And one day you looked at the photo and even that frail residue had vanished.
    The last time my father left the house, he was gone for hours. We were frantic—he barely had the strength to get himself into and out of the shower at that point, so the idea that he was somewhere, driving, made my mother crazy. But when we rushed into the garage after hearing the door open, he was getting out of the car, beaming. He was clearly weak, but he seemed better, more alive, than he’d been in weeks.
    “Where the hell have you been?” my mother demanded. Even then she had to yell at him.
    When he told her he’d been to the mall, she stared at him, aghast. “How could you have been so stupid? You’ll tire yourself out and—”
    “What? Get sick and die? Oh, Rosalind, my darling, that’s going to happen anyway.”
    He’d gone to a toy store to buy one of those stuffed animals with a voice chip in it that you give to people saying “Happy birthday” or “Merry Christmas.” This one was a dog with floppy ears, and he’d rigged it to record the whole of him reading “Road Not Taken.”
    “All you have to do, anytime you miss me,” he said, holding the dog out to me with a shaking hand, “is push his left foot and you’ll hear my voice.” He tried to push it, but by then his fingers were too weak, so I did it and we listened, together, to him reciting my favorite poem.
    It was our last shared moment. After that he went to the hospital. “I’ll come back good as new,” he said. “I won’t ever leave you, Janie girl, that I promise.”
    He never came back. He broke his promise. He disappeared forever. He left me alone and I didn’t want to be alone. I changed—everything changed after that. He’d been wrong, I saw. The road less traveled led to heartache and loneliness.
    I’d shoved the dog in the back of my closet after he died and forgotten about it, or tried to, but apparently Annie hadn’t. She was holding it toward me now. “I know maybe it’s not your favorite poem anymore but, well, I figured maybe it could still keep you company.”
    No, I wanted to say. Get it away from me. I can’t stand it. He lied. He knew he wasn’t coming back. He abandoned us and then Bonnie—
    “Do you want to hear it?”
    I couldn’t blink twice fast enough. NO!
    Annie nodded but slipped it in the bed next to me. If I could have, I would have pushed it away, but I couldn’t and now I was trapped. I tried to turn my face away from it but managed only to avert my eyes.
    “Please, Jane,” Annie said, standing at the side of the bed, her voice so soft and small sounding. “You have to get all better. You have to come home.”
    She smelled like Bonne Bell lip gloss and raspberry fruit leather. Behind her red-framed glasses her eyes were huge. She looked wise beyond her years and like a very scared little girl all at the same time. Fear and love and hope stared out at me. I had trouble swallowing. “Promise?” she squeaked.
    I blinked once. Yes.
    The bathroom door opened and my mother and Joe emerged. Her eyes were pink, but she’d washed her face and, of course, reapplied her lipstick.
    “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she said, coming to take my hand for the second time. How ironic that this was more than she’d touched me in months and I couldn’t even feel it. Her voice trembled. “I don’t know what came over me. I—we—have been so terrified. So afraid you wouldn’t wake up or when you did—” She broke off. “I couldn’t imagine losing you. And when the doctor said you would be okay, when you woke up, I guess I just—” She swallowed, dried her eyes on her sleeve. Her sleeve! “The pressure just exploded. I didn’t mean what I said. I know this was just an accident, that you didn’t—didn’t want this to happen. But the way things have been between