The Haircut That Saved My Daughter

I was still in my scrubs when I heard my older daughter scream, and I have worked the overnight shift at Hartwell Regional for eleven years, long enough to know every register a scream can hit. This one was new. This one did not sound like pain. It sounded like the floor had opened under her.

I came off the couch so fast I knocked my coffee onto the rug and did not stop to wipe it up. I took the stairs two at a time in sock feet, slid into the doorframe of the hall bathroom with my shoulder, and found my seventeen year old, Ava, standing in front of the mirror with both hands pressed flat against her skull.

There was almost nothing under her hands.

Her hair, dark blond, nearly to her waist since she was twelve years old, the hair she had been growing out for this exact night for three years because she wanted an updo with enough length to braid through it, was gone. Not trimmed. Not uneven. Gone, in rough clumps, down to patches of scalp in places, like someone had run clippers over her head with no guard and no plan beyond speed.

She was not crying yet. She was past crying. She was looking at the mirror the way you look at a stranger who has somehow gotten into your house.

“Mom.” Her voice came out flat. “Mom, what happened to my head.”

I did not have an answer. I had been asleep for four hours after a sixteen hour shift in the ER, and the house, as far as I knew, had been quiet. Prom was that night. Ava had talked about nothing else since February. The dress was a pale green thing we had driven ninety minutes to find, hanging right now from her closet door in its plastic sleeve. Her shoes, little silver flats because her date was barely her height, were lined up on the floor beneath it like the whole evening was still waiting patiently for a girl who no longer had the hair to go with any of it.

I turned around in the hallway and called for my younger daughter. Lucy is eight. Lucy was sitting on the edge of her own bed in her nightgown with a pair of my boyfriend Brad’s hair clippers resting in her lap, the cord wound neatly around her hand like she had done this before and wanted to leave things tidy.

“Lucy.” I kept my voice level because I did not trust what would come out if I didn’t. “Did you do that to your sister’s hair.”