Caring for Makayla

Christobel’s caring face twists in a grimace of pain as she watches me from above, squeezing me tight in her embrace. It’s as if she feels my pain beyond rote sympathy.

I’ve seen this expression before when I was a child.

Of course, it wasn’t directed at me but at one of my classmates at the pack school. After a rough game during recess, a little girl fell to her knees and skinned them on the hot asphalt. Her mother, one of the teachers at the school, scooped her up and soothed her immediately.

The little girl recovered quickly, but her mother was still shaken for some time, refusing to let her child go once the skinned knees were treated, and she was ready to resume playing. The pain on her face… as she wept with her hurt child, even harder than the little girl. A strange sight for me, the outcast without a mother. The tainted child whose own father treated her like scum on the bottom of his boot.

I knew better than to expect a display of affection and care like that. But I always wo