Loving You by Simon Ashton

They hadn’t touched her daughter, the crowd outside. They had wept at her in holy resignation and punched fists of beads at the air, hostile with certainty, but Bec had drawn herself wider and taller, a linen sailcloth harnessing the crackle of hostile air, propelling them forwards to the safety of the car.

Bec made no eye contact with the furious and pleading glares on either side, as the car dragged and shoved itself free of the parking lot. She pushed the pedal harder, accelerating beyond their orbit into the chaos and obscurity of traffic.

Daisy, unmoored, floating, reached for the comfort of her phone as the city dissipated around them. Bec turned on the radio. She thumbed buttons on the steering wheel, searching for an oldies station, the comfort of the familiar. The songs that had always been, their listen-to-me newness weathered and depleted.

Bec’s skin pricked urgent parental warnings as the radio sang about babies who were missed, loved, and begged to come home, but Daisy still said nothing. She expressed no relief either, as the radio stuttered and failed as they passed through the tunnel. She held her breath, a child underwater, until the echoes and lights yielded to the green belt beyond and the music began again.

Bec knew the song. It had been old even when she was young, her parent’s music. Despite its intentional blandness, she could recall the CD cover immediately, picture it sitting on the dash of her mom’s car. ‘Love Songs of the 70s’. A couple, hair shaggy and appealing, walking oceanside hand in hand. A greatest hits of sentimentality.

She remembered borrowing the car, barely old enough to drive herself. Trying to get Daisy, newly upright in her car seat, to sleep with soothing songs of love; endless, keeping us together, lifting higher and higher. But Daisy had resisted, stubborn even in the face of overwhelming tiredness, fighting her need to sleep,

And even now, hearing it for a hundredth time, Bec’s mind raced back. Daisy’s toddler face, cheeks red and eyes weary with exhaustion, framed in the mirror. She watched as the song drew the child in with its nursery rhyme la la la’s and do do do’s but then, that bridge, that top note – so impossibly high, almost a whistle, a scream – and Bec saw Daisy, for the first time, love something so much it became part of who she was.

It was her song now. For months afterwards Daisy, headstrong and sure, had insisted they hear it just once more. So, Bec played it again, and they sang it together again, mother and daughter, reveling in the simplicity. They sang how they loved each other, easily, because they were beautiful. Each time Daisy remained awed, anticipating, as the highest note neared. Bec would wind down the window and, unable to sing so high, they would scream their love for each other into the rushing wind.

Bec didn’t know how it had stopped, it was so long ago now. A lifetime. She supposed the gaps between listens had grown further apart. Or the CD had gotten lost. Or Daisy, finally bored, had discovered a new song. Looking over at her – after these years and years filled with schools, and playdates, and birthdays, and Girl Scouts, and vacations, and Christmases, and dance classes, and sleepovers, and proms, and boyfriends, and doctors – Bec wondered if the memory was now hers alone.

She wound down the window, turned her face to the onrushing air, and screamed as high and as loud as she could. Daisy looked up from her phone and cried.

Simon Ashton

Image: Pixabay.com – rainbow coloured wave surrounded by music and a treble clef