The Room I Could Not Enter

I have not stood in my daughter’s room in eleven months. I have watched it almost every day. Both statements are true, and neither makes the other acceptable.

I put a camera in a three-year-old’s bedroom. There is no careful way to arrange those words. I have tried for eleven months, and every version sounds like what it was: a frightened mother making a choice she knew she would have to explain.

When the marriage ended, I left with a gym bag at eleven at night. Six weeks later, I was given one hour to collect my things. Lauren, who had moved into my house five weeks earlier, stood in the hall with her arms folded. She did not speak to me.

I spent nine of my forty minutes in Sofia’s room. Cream walls. A white bookcase. On the high shelf: an elephant, a rabbit, a cream bunny with blue ears, two bears, and blocks. The bunny had been the first gift anyone brought us in the hospital. Sofia had held it in the photograph I carried in my bag.

The camera was a black dome, no bigger than a walnut. I fixed it behind the third bear. The cable disappeared behind the bookcase. I had watched the installation video twice in a Panera before sunrise. Then I deleted it, which is how I know I understood what I was doing.

I placed the framed photograph on the shelf, facing the room. Me in a hospital bed, hair everywhere, Sofia tucked against my chest. A bad picture, except that nobody was telling me to sit up in it.

Lauren was on the stairs. I had ninety seconds. I crouched in front of my daughter and said, “Keep this where I can see you.”

I meant the camera. Sofia heard the photograph. She believed the picture could see her. I understood that within days. I never corrected her.