Chapter 36

36

I felt down with my hand as his head came through the hot ring of my cervix. The release was euphoric. You watched me guide him from my body’s opening and then lift him quietly, carefully, onto the place he’d filled for 283 days. You’re here. He looked for me and arched his back and then he began to slink up my stomach, like an inchworm covered in vernix and blood. His mouth was open and his glassy eyes were still black. His twitching, wrinkled hands looked covered in far too much skin. They found my breast and his little chin shook. He was my miracle. I pulled him to my nipple and tapped its nub on his bottom lip with arms that still shook from the oxytocin. There you go, sweet boy. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

“He looks just like Violet,” you said, peering over my shoulder.

But he didn’t look a thing like her to me. He was seven pounds of something so pure, so blissful, that it felt as though he might float away above me, a dream, something I would never deserve for as long as I lived. I held him for hours, my skin stuck to his, until they made me get up for the bathroom. The blood poured from me into the toilet and when I looked down at the mess, for some reason I thought of our daughter again. And then I stepped slowly back to my son in the glass bassinet outside the bathroom door.

I remember so little else about how he came into this world.

I remember everything about how he left it.