Page 97 of Heather
Margot unwraps the roses.
Your fingers meet Margot’s as you take two of the flowers from her, and with the easy intimacy of that touch you think of something she told you when the rest of the world was calling you a monster. Margot—someone who had more right to hate you than anyone else—wrapped her hands firm around yours.
There is nothing that happens to a child that a mother does not feel. Even when the thing that happens to them is you.
Margot told you something else, too, something that helped her after the stillbirth. She said that scientists had found that a child’s cells remain in the mother’s body, even after a miscarriage, evendecades after pregnancy, after the mother dies. The cells rove around the first few years after pregnancy. Sometimes they collect in places that need healing. Repairing tissues, fixing wounds.
But, you read later, sometimes, the cells find darker places to collect. If the mother has a tumor, the fetal cells can encourage the cancer to fester. A case-by-case scenario, whether these cells rush in to heal or destroy. Both of you marking another, shaping another, at one another’s mercy, for all time.
You put thefirst rose on Sabrina’s plot. Can’t help but think of the bones below your feet, the same length and shape as the ones under your skin. The scar on your arm prickles as the breeze shifts between the trees.
You turn to the second grave. When they asked what name to carve into the stone it came to you in an instant, unlocked from the black box of your mind. As if it had always been there, waiting to be known.
Heather.
Like the Pine Barrens heather your own mother revered. Rare in so many other places but thick and dense in the understory in these woods.
Resilient in the acidic, inhospitable soil, with yellow flowers that burst forth in the spring. You—I—kneel in front of the stones, bury the amber bead I’ve held onto for so long in the earth between them.
