2014
The baby, a girl, comes too soon.
There’s supposed to be more calendar pictures to go.
The birth happens so quickly, Bea can’t even recall it in any specific detail. Her body is traumatized. She tore. She’s stitched up and sore. The blurred sights and sounds of the delivery room could not take form over the roar of blood rushing in Bea’s ears as it happened. Then that sudden, pronounced absence in her body and the flood of euphoria at what it signified: that she had brought something into being. Bea doesn’t know if she’ll ever feel so powerfully complete in her life again. She knew better than to wait for that first moment of skin-to-skin contact, but she waited for it anyway. All she wanted was her daughter pressed against her chest, to share heartbeats. She’s still waiting.
She remembers Mom and Dad telling her the NICU was a special place when Lo was born; It’s because she couldn’t wait to get here and see you. But it’s not a special place. It’s a special kind of hell where the waxen, devastated faces of new parents stand over incubators to witness firsthand the fragility and unfairness of life. (She can’t stand to think of the ones luckier than her.) To see a baby made more helpless by the universe than the universe has already made it is so profoundly wrong. The memories of Lo’s birth drive home to Bea how far away her family truly is. No one in the waiting room shares her blood or her name. She thinks of her mother, thinks of herself tucked against her mother’s breasts, her mother’s arms around her, and she craves it so badly she has to find a bathroom to cry in. She wants her mother. She is a mother. Her milk hasn’t come in.
* * *
Lev commands Foster to the hospital to help navigate the doctors and the nurses, the language they speak. Once Foster has talked to them, he privately pulls Bea aside and gives her his own diagnosis: the baby has to be his. No child of Lev Warren’s would arrive in this world with so many complications. No child of Lev Warren’s would enter life on the brink of death. What they did was poison, and it has poisoned the child. The baby needs to be cleansed of their sins or they will lose her forever.
Now that Bea has a daughter, she can’t bear the thought of a world without her.
We have to tell him, Foster says.
But Bea can’t bear the thought of that either.
* * *
What are you calling her? the nurse asks because no one should die without a name.
* * *
While Foster confesses to Lev, Bea goes to the hospital chapel where no one is, the journey comprised of one halting step in front of the other until it comes to an abrupt end. She collapses in front of the altar and the cross, pulled down by the weight of her grief, and she weeps. The last time she made an appeal to God, she was a child and now she is a mother. It’s a mother’s job to be strong for her child.
God, she begs with all the strength in her heart.
And then He appears.
When Bea raises her face, Lev’s is in shadows. Her betrayal radiates off of him and it breaks her heart because she loves him, there is no man she loves more than him, and what she did with Foster was out of love for and devotion to him but she knows beyond any doubt that Lev will never see it that way.
And she knows now, that she would do it all over again just to be Emmy’s mother.
Emmanuelle. French. God is with us.
Lust, Lev says moving to her, when it has conceived, bears sin. And the sin, when it is grown, produces death. He pauses, and he looks at her as though she is a stranger. I upheld you like no other. You have betrayed me like no other.
She bows her head.
I opened your eyes to glory, I brought your sister back from the dead, and in all that you have seen, in all that I have given you, you’ve still turned your back on me and now—now you have the audacity to ask me to sanctify this child that isn’t mine?
He crouches in front of Bea, brings his hand to her chin, makes her look him in the eyes.
I’m sorry, she whispers.
God loves you. But for whom God loves, He corrects.
Tears spill down her face.
Will you suffer your way back to me, Bea? To save your daughter?
I’ll do anything, she whispers.
He tells her to stand.
FEBRUARY 2018
There’s still time, Bea whispers as she crawls into my hospital bed. She reaches her hand out, and wraps it tightly around mine. I promise.
I wake with a small gasp, a hummingbird’s heart. I press my palm against my chest, trying to calm down. It takes me a moment to get my bearings.
Lev’s cabin.
I’d curled up on his bed and closed my eyes, the clean scent of him against the pillow sending me to sleep. He’s here in the room with me now, sitting at the desk, his hand against his chin as he works quietly on his laptop. It’s one of those strangely dissonant moments where it almost feels like the life inside is real, yours, and before you can decide how you feel about that, it all fades away. Lev exhales and rubs his eyes, then turns his head in my direction, sees that I’m awake. Behind him, the window over the sink lets in no light; it’s night. The fire crackles from the middle of the room.
It’s warm in this room.
“You’re very restless,” he says, his eyes trailing over his blankets twisted around my legs. “I can’t help but wonder if you ever wake up feeling like you slept at all.”
I sit up slowly, untangling the blankets. I pull my knees toward myself, wrapping my arms around them. No, I want to tell him. Never. At least not in the last six years. But my voice is somewhere beyond me now, tired of asking questions my heart doesn’t really want the answers to. I press my head against my legs, turning my face to him.
“Emmy’s been asking for you. She said you drew good circles,” he says. I close my eyes. So that was the only thing that stuck. Circles. He pauses. “I gave you no ground rules with her. That error was mine. I didn’t handle myself well, Lo. I apologize.” I open my eyes. “It’s hard for me too. Emmy isn’t the only one your sister left.”
“Even God wasn’t good enough for her,” I say, my voice rough and worn at the edges from sleep. “Do you hate her?”
“I only feel gratitude.”
“Gratitude.”
“She gave me a daughter.”
“Do you hate your mother?”
He shakes his head. “No. She made me what I am.”
It puts a certain shame in me. That Lev, a brutalized child, could grow into a man who has any forgiveness in his heart and here I am, made so bitter by my own losses and their aftermath, I can’t imagine what it would be like to offer forgiveness to anyone.
“How did she die?”
“She burned. A house fire. A lit cigarette.”
I think about the smattering of dotted scars across his torso, how poetic it makes her end, and how hollow a victory that really is.
“Emmy is your family,” he says. “And if you want to be here, as her family, to see her—your niece—I want you to know you’re welcome.”
I swallow hard, trying to maintain composure in the face of this offering. Your niece. This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone claim Emmy as any part of me and I can feel the true extent of how much I craved it, and feared it, and how much I still fear it, but want it—now that it’s been given. My heart can hardly make sense of finally being handed something I want and it’s too much. I bury my head in my knees, my shoulders shaking. Lev crosses the room and rests his hand at the base of my neck. I almost curl away from it, from the shame it inspires, the weakness it reveals.