• • •

Cal wouldn’t let me spend the night alone, trudged after me up the cracked sidewalk to my apartment building, even when I told him I was fine (a lie so pathetic, neither one of us acknowledged it), that I wanted to be alone, to please go home. Most of the outside lights on my building had long since burned out, and repeated calls to the manager hadn’t produced anything other than half-hearted promises to come check it out. The only illumination was from the lone streetlight in the parking lot, but it was enough for me to spy a plate of something left on my front doormat. Word traveled fast around here. Heart-shaped cookies, it turned out, each one frosted in pale pink. More appropriate for the birth of a daughter than the death of one. I kicked the plate out of the way, cookies sailing out onto the cigarette-butt-littered concrete.

“Hey,” Cal said, and then seemed to think better of it, his voice trailing off into silence.

The apartment looked the same as when I’d walked out this morning, and completely forever changed at the same time. It had always been the apartment of a family who only escaped true poverty through sheer stubbornness and the generosity of others. Others being Cal, who bought my groceries half the time and made sure the electricity was never shut off. But the shabbiness felt new to me. The lumpy brown sofa and nicked dining table. The thin curtains and scuffed paint. Had it always looked this threadbare and colorless? This empty? Of course it hasn’t, my mind whispered. Because Junie used to be here. Filling it up with her sound and her voice and her smells. Junie, who was never going to be here again.

Cal made a noise behind me, something deep and guttural, and I spun, my heart hammering in my throat. He’d slid down onto the floor, his back against the now-closed front door, hands held out in front of him, cupping something invisible.

“Remember when she was born?” he asked. He didn’t take his eyes from his hands, couldn’t see me nod. Of course I do, I wanted to shout. How could I ever forget? But I reminded myself that he was grieving, too. That although the loss of Junie was something I wanted to clutch tight in my palm, whisper mine through bared teeth, such selfishness would be unfair. She loved Cal, and he loved her. He had a right to his sorrow, but I couldn’t find room inside myself to care about his pain. Not now. Not yet. “She fit right here,” he said, lifting his palms. “She was tiny. I mean, I’d seen babies before, but not like that. Not so new and small and fragile.”

I’d had the same thoughts the first time I’d held her. I’d wanted to roll her into a ball and pop her into my mouth, swallow her back down into my belly, where she’d been protected. Keep her there, where I could stand between her and the world’s shadows. Maybe somehow I’d known, even then, what was waiting for her. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to hope for the best. God knows I’d never been taught.