miracle | tayley

think of the future, think of a new life

As Taylor unloads the dishwasher the following morning he relives the night before. He puts away three plates; two full-sized, ceramic ones and one smaller, plastic one that he'd managed to fish from the back of his kitchen cabinet. He runs his finger along the edge of the small plate before placing it on top of the stack of ceramic dishes near the front of the cabinet.

He'd ended up serving Hayley and Rowan a home cooked meal, and they'd shared his previously unused dining room table like an actual family. His eyes had stayed glued to his daughter and her mother the entire time.

Hayley had held Rowan on her lap, since he obviously didn't own a high chair or booster seat of any kind. She'd managed to feed both herself and their daughter like a pro, with minimal effort and surprisingly little mess. Rowan had babbled happily, seemingly unfazed by his sudden appearance in her life.

He'd managed to understand a large portion of her chatter, and Hayley had interpreted most of what he'd been unable to decipher on his own. He'd felt guilty at first about those few instances where he couldn't understand her words, but less so after twice witnessing Hayley merely shrug her shoulders and shake her head as if to say, who knows?

After dinner they'd moved back into the living room, and Taylor had managed to coax Rowan into playing with him by producing an empty laundry basket, a large metal pot, and two drum sticks. He'd needed to improvise due to his complete lack of any type of toddler-friendly toys or games.

And so, a very loud round of "drums" had erupted and then morphed into a wild game of Red-Light-Green-Light as Hayley gave the color-coded traffic commands and Taylor slid Rowan around the living room floor at breakneck speeds, pretending to "drive" her in the empty laundry basket.

Taylor's portion of the game was complete with outrageous impressions of revving motors, honking horns, squealing brakes, and occasional police sirens. Hayley protested the last, halfheartedly, telling him that he was teaching their daughter bad habits by letting her speed and attract law enforcement.

To this, he'd raised a brow, as they both know she is the one most likely to speed, between the two of them. She nodded her acceptance of this truth, but reminded him that she usually has a tiny passenger with her these days that keeps her obeying traffic laws a little more diligently than she once had.

Taylor had looked down at Rowan then, and she'd looked up at him, expectantly, and smiled. Totally charmed, he'd grinned at Hayley and torn off for another lap around the sectional sofa. Rowan had shrieked in delight, tipping backwards slightly in the basket with the forward momentum. Her little hands had clung to the basket's edges, and her baby-fine hair had lifted in the manufactured breeze.

Taylor had been forced to stop momentarily, when her sweet little chuckles had turned into a deep belly laugh that had her body bouncing, uncontrollably with glee.

"That's the laugh," Hayley had said, smiling widely and pointing at Rowan. "The one I was telling you about. Pretty great, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he'd breathed, both delighted and moved in a way he couldn't have articulated if he'd tried. He felt like his soul had broken open in response to that deliriously happy sound emanating from his baby girl.

Something from his childhood came back to him as he'd sat listening to her gleeful peals of laughter. A line from a storybook;

When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.

He'd pictured the empty bedroom upstairs then, the one just down the hall from his own, with the window seat and the built-in bookshelves. In his mind, a tiny canopied bed appeared in the center of the far wall, the walls themselves began to glow a pale pink and were, suddenly, inexplicably adorned with framed pictures of fairies.