I had a terrible feeling in my gut, a stitch in my side like the kind you get from running. I was fabric somebody had ripped. There was a throbbing between my hips, and that’s where I’d been torn. The hurt place was the same place my baby was growing. I drank a little more champagne—last time, promised myself—and then I found a bottle of gin. I got so drunk I wasn’t walking straight. I banged my hip against Fiona’s card table. One leg buckled, and all the food toppled onto the carpet. My hip was ringing like a funny bone. I lifted up my shirt and touched under my belly. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”

I found the rest of the coffee cake, gouged where our fingers had been at it, and the leftover chicken. The ribs were mossy from carpet fuzz. I threw them away and took the gin into the hallway closet. I shut the door. Fiona wouldn’t wake up, but just in case she did. I crouched underneath a row of dresses she kept from younger days, gowns that showed flashes of color in the dark: orange and green, a cocktail number in teal that she’d worn to nightclubs. I wiped my fingers on the carpet so I wouldn’t get oil and crumbs on their fabric. They were one of the things she loved best.

I took steady sips. Kept swallowing. A stain bled across my whole life and I was glad for it, like someone had covered every memory with a blanket. I remember the swallowing getting stronger—that regular rhythm, like a clock—letting the spit pool and then pushing it back to swallow again: swallowing until there wasn’t any room left inside me; swallowing until it got to feel like breathing. I drank until my throat hurt, and then I drank some more. I lost my edges. I wanted to throw up but I had this fear that if I threw up too hard I’d startle the baby, shake its bag or rip it open from heaving. I know you’re not supposed to call it a baby—the little it, the absolute tiniest—but I felt that way about my son from the beginning.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’d imagined having a baby, painting a big room in a big house with blue stripes or flowers and hushing it—sshh, sshh—every night to sleep. And now this: no room to decorate, only a box built onto the side of Fiona’s taken-roots trailer. I’d been with men while it was inside me, nothing more than a wad of clots and vinegar, I knew that, but all the same it wasn’t fair. I’d messed up before I even knew I was messing up. I wanted to do this one thing right.