That night, after Poppy was asleep, I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down everything I remembered about the hospital, about the form, and about Veronica's message, in the order it had happened. Oliver had asked me to do it while it was still fresh, and I did it carefully, in my own hand, because I knew I would have to tell the same story again in court, and I wanted to tell it the same way every time. The truth did not need dressing up. It only needed to be told clearly, from the beginning, without leaving anything out.
Chapter 23
— Hair, Slowly
Poppy's hair began to grow back slowly, the way grass comes back after a hard winter, a little at a time, so slowly that you almost did not notice it until one morning you looked and realised it was there. At first it was only a soft fuzz, so fine that it caught the light when she turned her head, and then it grew into short, uneven strands that curled at the ends no matter how we combed them. Dolores said that was a good sign. She said curls came back the way they wanted to come back, and no one could rush them, and the best thing we could do was to be patient and gentle and let them grow.
Every morning, Dolores sat Poppy down at the kitchen table and brushed what was left of her hair with a soft brush, and then she braided the longer pieces at the front into two small braids that tied with ribbon. Poppy liked the braids. She liked choosing the ribbon, and she liked looking in the mirror afterward and turning her head from side to side to see how they looked. Some mornings she chose a blue ribbon, and some mornings she chose a yellow one, and once she chose a green one because she said it matched the leaves on our tree. I watched her make those small choices, and I thought about how much they mattered. They were her choices, about her own hair, made by her, and no one else.
One morning, while Dolores was braiding, Poppy asked about her mother. She asked it in the quiet, matter-of-fact way children ask the hardest questions, as if she were asking what was for lunch. She wanted to know if her mother had liked her curls. Dolores stopped brushing for a moment, and then she went on, gentle and steady, and she said yes, her mother had loved her curls. She had loved to brush them and to tie them back with ribbon and to watch them bounce when Poppy ran across the garden. Poppy nodded, as if that was the answer she had expected, and then she asked if her mother would like her hair now, even though it was short. Dolores said yes again, without hesitating, because it was true. Her mother would have loved her hair at any length, because her mother had loved Poppy herself, not her hair.
I was standing in the doorway, and I had to turn away for a moment, because my eyes were stinging. Meredith had loved Poppy's curls, that was true, but she had loved them the way you love a freckle or a laugh, as a small part of a person you love whole. She had never once told Poppy that her hair made her more or less lovable. She had never once made Poppy feel that she had to look a certain way to be loved. That was the difference, and it was a difference Poppy was beginning to understand, even at six, in her own way.
Later that day, Poppy asked me to read her one of her mother's stories. We sat under the tree in the garden, and I read to her from the book Meredith had made, and Poppy leaned against my shoulder and played with the end of one of her braids while she listened. When the story was finished, she looked up at me and said she wished her hair would grow fast, so it could be long again. I told her it would grow, and that we would wait for it together, and that she was beautiful now, with short hair and with long hair and with any hair at all. She thought about that for a moment, and then she smiled, and she said she knew that, but she still liked her curls. I smiled back, because that was fair enough. She was allowed to like her curls. She was allowed to miss them. Liking them was not the same as believing she was only worth something because of them.
In the days that followed, the braids got a little longer, and the curls at the ends got a little tighter, and Poppy began to ask Dolores to try new ways of tying them. One day it was a single braid down the back. Another day it was two small bunches at the sides. Another day she asked for no braid at all, just the soft brush and a ribbon at the front, because she wanted to feel the wind in her hair when she ran. Dolores did whatever she asked, and I watched, and I thought about how healing looked less like a sudden change and more like this, like small choices made day after day, until a child felt like herself again.