I don’t know what I remember and what I’m imagining, but there’s so much in my mind that feels new, like a movie I watched when I was fighting to stay awake. One scene jumps into the middle of the next.

There’s Carly driving us up to the hospital doors, screaming for help, and so many hands on my body. There’s the way it hurt to be lifted, how everything inside me was shifting, and I could feel Max, all elbows and feet, fighting to free himself like a raccoon in a pillowcase. Someone cut away my clothes and there were too many people touching too many parts of me.

He’s breech! someone said.

Get scrubs for her partner! someone said.

Count backwards. Count backwards. No, backwards, someone said, so I started at Z and Carly laughed even though she was crying.

A woman with a baby blue mask on her face stretched my arms out on a big white cross and the room was cold like the walk-in fridge at Ollie’s, but Carly’s fingers were sweaty between mine. Just as clearly, I remember the surgeon was a grizzly bear in a white coat and the room we were in was full of laughing salmon hanging from the ceiling on meat hooks. So how am I supposed to know if any of my memories are real?

I stare at Max through the clear plastic sides of his bassinette and hope with all my heart that I’m not stuck in some kind of dream. He’s already my favorite thing that ever happened to me. He reminds me of Justin in the shape of his nose, and his dark eyelashes, and I think that’s okay because Justin was someone I used to love to see. He was smart and sometimes he could be very sweet and maybe I can teach Max to be sweet even more of the time. I’ll always look at Max and think about shouting into the waves at night and how the sand was still warm from soaking up the heat from the day and it felt like the world was a wild beast who allowed us to walk on her back. That was a good moment, and it’s where Max came from, so it’s even better as a memory than what I knew at the time. I wonder if maybe when Max meets the sea, he will understand how it’s his oldest friend. He’ll think, Oh, I know you, and he’ll feel like he belongs. I’m going to take him soon, I think. As soon as I can. Maybe Margo will come with us, maybe even Carly, and I’ll sing songs for my own baby on the beach.

Max fusses and I don’t know what to do. My stomach is full of stitches. It hurts to move. I’m scared I’ll drop him.