She holds the coat close. It smells of mothballs and blind faith

The coat is wedged under the piles of little girl clothes. She recognizes it by a small piece of cuff and pulls it out. One of the piles gives way.

Pink pajamas and little tops land at her feet, but she holds the old coat with reverent fingers.

“What’s that?” asks her daughter.

She can’t answer.

Her ten-year-old looks at her. Hands on hips, she demands, “Ma, are we Pesach cleaning this closet or not?”

She looks at her daughter like she’s an apparition. “Later,” she says, and the girl skips away. A freedom dance.

She holds the coat close. It smells of mothballs and blind faith.

She remembers that day like yesterday. The day she bought the coat. Plunked down $24.99 and her heart at the cash register.

It went back further than that day. Fifteen years back. The day her daughter, her first child, was born. She was a triumphant, hormonal, devasted new mom of a little girl with Down syndrome. She’d known something before; the medical team had told them of their suspicions.

There was also the matter of the baby’s heart. The left ventricle, which was meant to be larger and thicker than the right, appeared worryingly small. The information bewildered and scared her but didn’t quite feel real. Now the baby was here, and the tiny hope — she should just be normal, maybe everything will be fine — hope she hadn’t even know she was nurturing, was dashed and dead.

But later, at night, when she looked at the baby attached to the lifesaving machines, so small and vulnerable, tufts of blondish hair like hers, she melted to mother mush. It’s my child, I love her, we’ll raise her… she’s going to pull through whatever happens.

And she did, Bina Bee. Through a long hospitalization and her first operation. Through the slowly reached milestones of a child with Down syndrome. But there was also her grin, her pigtails, her delicious cuddles, the way she said her name.

She was two when her parents walked beside her as she was wheeled into the operating room again. Her father blessed her, Yevarechecha Hashem. Her mother whispered, a mixture of Hebrew and English and silence. What could she say? This was the make-it-or-break-it move for a tiny, struggling girl with a heart that couldn’t sustain her.

“The operation will be decisive, and it could be dangerous,” the consultant had said. “But it could also give her normal, steady breathing, a much better quality of life. She could be just like any other person,” he’d said. And then amended it with, “Aside from the syndrome…”

“Like any other person,” she’d repeated pointedly.

Somewhere — during hours and hours of appointments, in the medication they’d had to force down Bina Bee’s throat, through shutting out the looks in people’s eyes — she’d become strong. She was only in her early twenties, but she was a fierce advocate for her daughter. She had to be. Who else?