I had nearly bled to death. I had lost my uterus at thirty-four years old. Every single one of those sentences fits.
I heard all of them as condolence for my daughter.
Nobody corrected me because nobody knew there was anything to correct. And I didn’t ask questions, because you don’t interrogate people about the worst fact of your life. You lie there and let it be true.
I came home on the twentieth of May.
There’s a photograph somewhere on my mother’s phone of me being helped out of the car, and I look like a woman who has been dug up.
The nursery door stayed shut. Grant closed it before we got home and I did not open it for twenty-four days.
I spent most of two weeks in our bedroom. I got up for the bathroom and for Elias and that’s about all. My mother moved into the guest room and did the cooking and the school runs and every night at about nine she’d knock and come sit on the end of the bed and not say anything, which is the only useful thing anybody did for me that fortnight.
Grant was gone a lot. He said work.
Which is a strange thing for me to have accepted, because Grant had been laid off from Tallow Ridge Millworks on the fourteenth of March.
I knew that. I knew it the way you know things through a wall. He said “work” and I thought “he’s picking up hours somewhere” and I did not follow the thought any further, because following thoughts was not something I could do that month.
Elias went quiet too.
That’s what I noticed first, and I want to be honest that I noticed it in the way you notice weather. He stopped narrating. He stopped coming in and lying on the bed and telling me things. He’d come and stand in the doorway of my room and look at me, and I’d say hey bud, and he’d say hey, and then he’d go.
He stopped sleeping properly. My mother told me he was up at two, three in the morning, sitting on the stairs.
I thought: he’s grieving. He’s eight and he lost his sister and he’s grieving in his own way.
That is what I thought for two and a half weeks.
Around the twenty-eighth of May I noticed the jar.
It was on his dresser. An old pickle jar with the label soaked off, and there was money in it. Coins, mostly. A few crumpled ones. A five.
I noticed it and I thought, that’s sweet, he’s saving for something, and I went back to bed.
Three days later there was more in it. And then on the third of June — a Tuesday — I walked past his door at about four in the afternoon and he was standing at the dresser feeding a folded twenty-dollar bill through the slot he’d cut in the lid.
I knew that twenty. My mother had given it to him for his birthday on the ninth of April and he had been guarding it like a dragon for eight weeks.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you saving up for?”
And he stopped. He actually froze, with his fingers still in the jar.
Then he said, “My sister.”
My chest went tight in a way I didn’t have any defense against.
I came in and sat down on his bed and pulled him in, and I said the thing you’re supposed to say. I’d been given a leaflet. I’d been told to be concrete with children, not to use vague language.
I said, “Eli. I know you miss her so much. But we can’t get her back, sweetheart. She’s gone.”
And he pulled out of my arms.
He stepped back from me and he looked at me with an expression I had never seen on my child’s face, which I can only describe as the look of somebody realizing they’ve been talking to a person who is not receiving.
“No, Mom.”
Something in his voice put every hair on my arms up.
“If I save enough, we can get her back.”
“Honey — that’s not — people don’t work like that. You can’t—”
And he said:
“Then why did Daddy use money?”
I stopped.
I remember the exact quality of the light in that room. Late afternoon, through the blinds, in stripes on his rug.
