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It holds a few of her sweetest, tiniest clothes—all unworn. It holds every sonogram picture, her hospital bracelet. And then there are the letters. Letters I wrote her every single week, waiting for her to be born. I pull them out, knowing I shouldn’t read them.
Knowing I’m going to do it anyway.
Dear Hannah,
Today I am thirty-one weeks along, and I’m already planning ten years out. When you’re old enough, we’re going to hike out to Shelter Cove. Someone told me about it once. We will camp on the black sand beach, and I’ll teach you how to bake a cake in a fire using an empty orange peel. I bought you a dress for Christmas today and told your father he didn’t want to know how much it cost. He said, “I’ve got another eighteen years of hearing that, don’t I?”
Love,
Mommy
Dear Hannah,
You are due in five weeks. That means five weeks from now you’ll be here, in this rocking chair with me. Five weeks from now, your tiny fist will grab my pinkie. I don’t know how it’s even possible to love someone as much as I love you, but it’s the realest thing I’ve ever felt.
Love,
Mommy
I read through every last letter, full of details I’d have forgotten if they weren’t written down. That Caleb had insisted he could install the car seat himself and it flipped over the first time we drove anywhere. That I’d promised to take her to Park City, where we’d learn to ski together, and that I’d teach her what every fork was for at a fancy dinner so she wouldn’t get ridiculed in grad school. One letter is just a list of names Caleb liked that I’d vetoed. “You owe me one,”I told her.“His top choice was Clementine.”
I don’t cry, reading the letters, because I won’t stop if I let myself start. But the ache in my chest as I put the box away feels like more than I can bear, the kind of ache that could send me to a dark place, though I suspect I’m already in one. I wish I could tell Beck, but it sounds too crazy.
“You’re not gonna eat?” he asks over dinner, nodding at my largely untouched plate.
“I’m not all that hungry. Do you want it?” He’s already had seconds, but there are no limits to how much food he can put away.
“No,” he says. “I wantyouto eat it. You skipped lunch too. Are you sick?”
I shake my head. “I’m just not hungry.”
I try to force down another bite, but it’s stuck in my throat. Three years ago tonight, I sat with Caleb eating a Cobb salad. I’d asked for it without blue cheese—one of a thousand foods you can’t eat while pregnant—but it came with it anyway. I picked most of it out, but I wondered afterward ifthatwas the culprit, those traces I’d left behind.
The things I might have done differently, the things that might have saved my daughter, are endless. Maybe if I’d deserved her in the first place, I’d have done them.
Beck holds me close that night. He places his hand on my forehead to check my temperature and I insist that I’m just tired.
I’m scared that if I tell him all the things I could have done to prevent what happened, he’ll agree. I couldn’t survive hearing him agree.
When I wake in the morning, there’s a sick thud in my stomach. He presses a hand to my forehead again, a deep groove forming between his brows. “Stay home and rest,” he insists.
It’s probably the last thing I should agree to, especially as I have no intention of remaining at home. The minute he leaves for work, I’m out the door too.
I reach the graveyard quickly and walk the overgrown path.
Hannah Lowell
September 28, 2020
I take a seat in the grass, remembering her first thin, reedy cry, a miracle I’d waited forty-one weeks to hear.
I held her and marveled at her perfect mouth and fingers and her wide-open eyes, so alert for a newborn. Caleb’s eyes. She looked up at me in a way I’d never expected, as if she were already trying to figure things out.
“Hannah,” I whispered, slipping a pinky into her tiny fist, “you’re already smarter than me and your dad put together, aren’t you?”
The nurse fussed over me, pitying me for my husband’s absence. I’d been mad before, that Caleb had gone down to San Diego for a meeting, but it no longer mattered. I had my daughter, and I didn’t need anything else.
The nurse offered to take Hannah to the nursery and give her formula so I could rest, but I insisted on keeping her with me. I marveled at her tiny hands, at her perfect toes, at the way her mouth began to root at the air, wanting to be fed.
