We had no phone at all by then. I wasn’t old enough to get my own cell phone, and my mother wouldn’t get one for herself. She didn’t want to be tracked. The landline had been shut off years before that.

It was the middle of the night in her bedroom, in November, and my mother stripped herself naked in front of me, her body blooming itself inside out like some kind of weird night flower, reds and purples and things I’d never ever seen before, and wouldn’t again. Her belly moved from the inside like she was possessed. She was sweating, her deep-red hair down around her shoulders and stuck to her face. For a while she got down on her hands and knees and lowed like a cow, rocking back and forth, her head hanging down.

I could see her muscles working. Could watch the contractions as they tightened her lower back, the scar from her surgery like a dark seam in her skin, writhing. They came quicker and quicker. And then it got so painful she couldn’t speak.

I had been born at Mercy Hospital when my mother was seventeen, and Park was signing paperwork when the nurse came out and told him he had a son.

When Birdie came, my mother had candles lit, and sage and sweet grass burning, and bowls of salt water in the corners of the room.

“Come here,” she said, and I got down on my knees in front of her and held her hands and she pressed her sweaty forehead to mine, her shoulders round and slick with perspiration, her breasts already milk-engorged and standing out from her rib cage.

“Mother Mary,” she muttered and stopped. Breathed and stopped, like something strangled her from within.

Then she told me she needed to be alone.

The baby was fat and gray skinned until my mother toweled her off, rubbing her to get her blood going, to turn her skin to a pinkish brown. My mother put on a loose nightgown that was black and covered in stars and made her look like a fortune teller. She wound her hair up on top of her head and stuck the baby on her nipple. When the baby was done drinking, my mother handed her to me, wrapped tight in a pink towel.

She was heavier than I thought, and smaller, like a dense little bean. I rubbed at her hair because it looked bloody, and I thought it was still caked from birth, but that’s just the color it was. My mother wafted sweet grass around the room and then rubbed a small spot of sandalwood oil on the baby’s head.

“Sparrow Annie Jenkins,” she said. Her face was beaded with sweat, and her eyes had a glaze that I’d come to know. She’d loaded up on oxys after the birth. I couldn’t really blame her—I’m sure she hurt like hell—but I wondered if she could do what she needed to take care of the baby.