The nurse goes ahead of her and opens the door, as if it was locked, and stands in the doorway while Kateri goes in to the girl’s bedside. She sleeps sound, small in the bed, tucked in, her hair around her like a halo. The nurse waits. In the hall, a clattering cart goes by, but the girl doesn’t stir. Kateri lays her hand on the girl’s head, her skin cool, her hairline damp, and then leans in to peck her forehead.
“Try to remember,” she says.
FOUR: SHANNON
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
I tried to remember when it was better, when anything was normal. I longed to live somewhere where no one knew who we were. Where no one made jokes about the tiny homemade tattoo on my mother’s face, a blue crescent moon where her widow’s peak met her forehead. Where the cops didn’t come question me about a barn set on fire.
“Arson’s my father’s crime,” I’d tell them. “Look it up.” And when they finally accepted that I’d been where I’d said I’d been, at work, at home, or nowhere near whatever it was that had burned, they’d give me that flat look of unwilling acceptance. Just checking.
Everything changed with the baby. My mother didn’t tell me, and I didn’t know for a long time. But when I started to notice, it was unmistakable. The swell of her belly. The way she walked like her hips were unhinged.
“Listen,” she said to me on the porch.
“Have you been to a doctor?” I asked. I was fourteen. I thought I knew everything important, and honestly, her body grossed me out, the way it was blossoming, the shape of her hands and feet as she changed.
“No,” she said. I watched her twirl a long lock of hair around her fingers. “He can never know,” she said to me.
“Who?”
“Your dad.”
“How would he know?” I said. “I can’t even remember what he looks like. It’s not like I go see him on the weekend,” I snipped.
She pressed her lips together. I thought she was trying. She had seemed less high most days. But I didn’t know what she did while I was at school.
“I’m sorry it’s your burden,” she said then.
“Yeah, me too,” I answered.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
I didn’t have to tell anyone. Everyone in this town already knew who we were. That my dad was in prison for trying to kill us. Sometimes I told people he was dead, that he’d died in prison years ago instead of living on, cared for with meals and books to read and card games while we had to figure everything out on our own.
My mother rubbed her belly in a circle, and the light caught her tattoo, and I thought she looked like some kind of medieval witch sitting there in a long hippie skirt.
“Are you going to keep it?” I asked.
“Her,” she said. “And yes.”
“How do you know if you haven’t been to a doctor?” I asked.
“Don’t question things you’ll never understand,” she said.
* * *
I never knew what kind of agony she went through in deciding to keep her, because she never told me. We accepted each other as who we were and didn’t ask questions. She assumed I wasn’t interested in women having babies or why or how, and she was right.
I was already taller than her. She put her hands on my arms and gripped her fingernails into my skin while she squeezed her eyes shut with pain. We had lived all this time like adults, even when I was little, like equals. We didn’t have shit. She was terrified of Park getting out of prison. Every week, she counted out cash for me so I could pay the bills in town, riding my bike to the grocery store service counter. And whatever was left was for food.
“I need you to help me right now,” she said through her teeth. She stopped breathing for a moment, holding her breath, gripping my arms. And then it seemed like a wave passed and she started again. “Help me,” she said.
She had me get towels and water. She had me place a cold cloth on her head.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked, stupid, but I didn’t know. It seemed like we needed a doctor. Or maybe a wise woman, but my mother was the wise woman. I guessed if anyone could do it on her own, my mother could.
We had no phone at all by then. I wasn’t old enough to get my own cell phone, and my mother wouldn’t get one for herself. She didn’t want to be tracked. The landline had been shut off years before that.
It was the middle of the night in her bedroom, in November, and my mother stripped herself naked in front of me, her body blooming itself inside out like some kind of weird night flower, reds and purples and things I’d never ever seen before, and wouldn’t again. Her belly moved from the inside like she was possessed. She was sweating, her deep-red hair down around her shoulders and stuck to her face. For a while she got down on her hands and knees and lowed like a cow, rocking back and forth, her head hanging down.
I could see her muscles working. Could watch the contractions as they tightened her lower back, the scar from her surgery like a dark seam in her skin, writhing. They came quicker and quicker. And then it got so painful she couldn’t speak.
I had been born at Mercy Hospital when my mother was seventeen, and Park was signing paperwork when the nurse came out and told him he had a son.
When Birdie came, my mother had candles lit, and sage and sweet grass burning, and bowls of salt water in the corners of the room.
“Come here,” she said, and I got down on my knees in front of her and held her hands and she pressed her sweaty forehead to mine, her shoulders round and slick with perspiration, her breasts already milk-engorged and standing out from her rib cage.
“Mother Mary,” she muttered and stopped. Breathed and stopped, like something strangled her from within.
Then she told me she needed to be alone.
* * *
The baby was fat and gray skinned until my mother toweled her off, rubbing her to get her blood going, to turn her skin to a pinkish brown. My mother put on a loose nightgown that was black and covered in stars and made her look like a fortune teller. She wound her hair up on top of her head and stuck the baby on her nipple. When the baby was done drinking, my mother handed her to me, wrapped tight in a pink towel.
She was heavier than I thought, and smaller, like a dense little bean. I rubbed at her hair because it looked bloody, and I thought it was still caked from birth, but that’s just the color it was. My mother wafted sweet grass around the room and then rubbed a small spot of sandalwood oil on the baby’s head.
“Sparrow Annie Jenkins,” she said. Her face was beaded with sweat, and her eyes had a glaze that I’d come to know. She’d loaded up on oxys after the birth. I couldn’t really blame her—I’m sure she hurt like hell—but I wondered if she could do what she needed to take care of the baby.
“I can’t promise you that we won’t just run,” she said to me.
“Run?” I said. The baby made a gurgling sound, and I jostled her in my arms. “What about me?” I asked her.
“You’re his,” she said. “She’s mine. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.”
“What if I don’t want to be his?” I asked.
“You don’t have to be,” my mother said. “You just have to be you.” She closed her eyes and swayed on her feet. She’d stay the next week in her bed with the baby, sweaty and under with fever and so much blood, the baby just nestled into her, drinking when she wanted.