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.

Some women clutch their momma stories close, the hows and wheres and whens of making another life. Lucy had told me how she’d started drinking water straight from the Atlantic Ocean when she was pregnant with Dora. She’d skimmed waves with her fingers and then cupped her hands to drink. My story was the ugliest one I could think of, vomiting on the highway and waiting to bleed in the desert, eating myself sick between the outsize dresses of another woman’s brokedown dreams.