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The Taylors had wanted you to name the baby Jackie, of course.
You hadn't even meant to tell them, so early. You weren't supposed to tell people too early, in case something happened, which is what it says in all the parenting books you read without buying at the Short Hills Mall Barnes & Noble. Jeff hadn't known either. But Mrs. Taylor - Nancy - Mrs. Taylor kept pressing the mimosa into your hand, well why not and oh come on just one and it had slipped out, easy as anything. Mrs. Taylor cried. Jeff had cried. Mr. Taylor had looked for an agonizing second like he might, too, before he slipped out, Jeff in tow.
"I'd just hate to think you were depriving yourself on our accounts," Mrs. Taylor had said. Pressing her hand against yours, glancing again and again at your stomach. "It would be natural and really, a lovely tribute -"
"She's always been a sour old bitch," Natalie said when you told her about it, not bothering to lower her voice. Taissa was mingling, thanking everyone for coming, so you were the one who had to hiss her name and tell her to keep it down.
Natalie rolled her eyes. "Why? She is, and it's fucked up you won't say it anymore."
"It's her house, Natalie!"
"Yeah," Natalie said, twisting around the arm of the loveseat she'd sprawled across. "That's sort of what I mean." She was a discordant note in the Taylor's pastel sunroom, pink balloons and ribbons everywhere. It was the perigee in her erratic movements after a long and silent absence. You hadn't even been sure where to send the invitation. She'd missed the wedding, of course. She'd been in Florida, they found out later; she returned sun-bleached and laughing at her own jokes about extradition to Cuba. She'd come back as eager to show what she'd found as ever.
"Look, I didn't come here to fight," she said, eventually. Looking at you with her eyes widened, so you'd know she wasn't kidding. "Come on, I went to that chi-chi place in town Tai told us to," which was news to you. "I paid in cash so they'd have something to tell their little friends about."
You'd hesitated, unwilling still to look like you might be stepping in. "I think we're waiting to do gifts still."
She stared at you for another long moment, mouth screwed up. "It's your funeral," she said, and smiled that new, ugly smile of hers.
*
Jeff was so excited he kept offering to go to the store for you, buy whatever outlandish junk food you wanted. You kept telling him it was too early for it to feel like anything but he went anyway. Came back with three different types of ice cream.
He came back with all the furniture, too, ready to start building his nest. It was all second hand, but he said he knew how to fix it up and he did, too. He spent a week taking apart the old rocking chair, sanding down the chipped slats and fitting it back together, painting on the glossy new stain in the garage so the fumes wouldn't reach you.
It really was a beautiful chair. You spent hours there, happily, reading and just thinking. Thinking this could all mean something, thinking it meant he really did understand you, after all, if he made something that pleased you so much. It was all going to work out.
He was so ready to be solicitous, wasn't he, so happy to be useful. It didn't always feel like you needed him, not like -
*
You named her Calliope, muse of eloquence and poetry. Well, one of you will have to be. You could still make up stories for her once she was a little older, anyway. How was it, after she was born?
You read more in the first six months of her little life than you had since high school, checking out six books at a time from the library. You sat with her all day, breathing the same milk-sweet air she exhaled, picturesque as anything. Jeff came home for lunch half the time and would just stand in the doorway, watching you. It was so sweet it could make you just puke.
You took walks, long even when the temperatures dipped and the sunlight went, listening to the quiet slap of your feet on the sidewalks, trying to make yourself at home again. There had been a time when you understood your body perfectly. In motion, in harmony with those other celestial bodies, you had the lean animal grace of youth to guide you. You'd left that behind, in the woods, but you could almost forget you weren't there anymore with the way your fingers went numb as the sun faded.
*
It's amazing how your world dwindled, after she was born. Weren't you going to get the hell out of small towns, once? No use in crying over spilled milk. Sometimes it was reassuring, knowing everyone already knew. People seem relieved, really, when they see you, or see you with her. Your happy little family provided a neat and happy bookend to everything that came before it.
You went to Taissa's baby shower, eventually. So many people you'd never met before, whole worlds of hers that you'd never touched - funny how that worked out, isn't it? Other teammates, a roommate from law school, her wife's family managing the arrangements. Sometimes you see her and you think you never really knew her at all.
Her registry was an archeological excavation, a litany of artifacts you'd half-forgotten. The onesies, the bottle warmers, the soft toys and books. They have cloth diapers, of all things - you'd seen them on her registry, twenty dollars a pop. You hadn't thought it would be possible to make more laundry.
Tai came around to introduce you to everyone, her colleagues with their sleek haircuts, and made a big show about seeing pictures of Callie. Simone couldn't believe how old she was, how young you must have been when she was born. "Shauna and Jeff were high school sweethearts, you remember," Taissa had said, without looking at you.
"Now that makes me feel old," you'd said, and everyone had laughed.
*
It had been easy, in the end.
Your back had hurt, all afternoon and into one of those long winter nights. It would feel better and then worse again, better and worse. If you'd let yourself think about it you would have known what was happening. Instead you woke up sore and confused, the sheets wet around your legs. At first you'd thought you'd wet the bed, until you sat up and saw the sheets . You wound the whole mess together and took it outside to burn it. Too cold to do anything else. You lay back down in someone else's sweatshirt and woke up soaked through with sweat, sour and cold.
Seven years later you had your legs propped up in those stirrups and a stranger's fingers pressed against your cervix when you tried to ask about it.
She was a little younger than you, but she's from around and you'd been going to her for years, so she probably knows. You were both carefully not looking at the missing digits on your left foot, the ones you lost that first winter, when you asked about scarring. She didn't look away from where her hand pressed into you as she started to tell you some kind of oil. You waited until she'd pulled off her gloves to ask again.
She heard you that time and came back with those big sympathetic eyes you hate, and as soon as she started talking you tuned her out. She couldn't tell, but I could. You never learned how to hide it, Shauna, not really.
*
Late one spring night Natalie appeared on your stoop. She sounded terrible and looked worse, and you sat with her out there until Tai's car finally came to take her wherever Tai's cars took people.
She wouldn't come in the whole time you were sitting out there, ass freezing on the cold cement while you let her ramble. Callie knew her a little bit now, her Aunt Nat, but not enough to sit through the thick fog of this moment.
She was usually funny, even like this, but not this time. She seemed sad, in a way you - not that subtly - assumed was about Travis leaving again. Taissa had a rule about talking about it, not that it ever bothered Nat.
You were telling a story about something, the new computer Callie wanted and how you could possibly afford it for her birthday. Who might help you with it,
"Don't you think Jackie would have something to say about that?"
You were surprised, but that was only because you hadn't been looking at Natalie. Hadn't seen what she'd been staring at for the last minute, looking lost. Even if you had looked up you wouldn't have seen them, standing out behind the trees.
You'd frowned, finally looking at her. looking away from her face. "Jackie's not coming back," you said.
She'd looked down at her own hands again, twisting her fingers over and over until the knuckles popped. I know that, she'd said back, and she didn't look up again.
*
How was it, after?
The delivery nurse saw the scratches on your hands and neck and told you it was normal. Baby's nails are too soft to cut but too sharp to ignore, so she told you to just bite them down in a day or two. There wouldn't be enough blood flow to make them grow much for months, she'd said, and by then they'd be firmed up enough for scissors.
You got a blocked milk duct in the second month and a different nurse advised you, laughing, to let your husband help you take care of it if it didn't resolve itself in a day or two. Jeff thought it was funny, of course. You were still making him sleep in the spare room half the time because the smell of his sweat turned your stomach. That and scrambled eggs.
Everyone kept asking you about the cravings, smirking, until you wanted to put someone's face through the dirt.
*
Callie was thirteen the first time you looked at her face and saw someone else looking back at you.
You were going out to - did it really matter? - and you'd paused in the hallway, making a minute adjustment to your hair. No grays yet, still a point of vanity. Standing before the mirror you caught the moment she'd glanced over from where she'd paused in the kitchen, picking through a cupboard with her phone pressed intently against her ear. She gave you a onceover and scrunched up one whole side of her face, and you saw it, just for a second. She didn't manage any more before her attention was pulled back to the phone, laughing, and she was herself again.
You could have called her out on it, but you couldn't quite make yourself do it. It's not like you've ever tried that hard to check her before now. Something about that expression sat under your skin all night, though, kept you quieter than you would have been.
That night you watch him out of the corner of your eye, just like you used to. He was happy enough at the bar, laughing with his buddies, arms slung around shoulders and against his own chest as he laughed. He didn't change as he grew up, really, still the same gregarious energy, happy to make friends with a beer in his hand. Not great at the details, but it's not like anyone ever asked him to be. Not me, anyway.
Do you ever think it's funny we never compared notes? You only ever looked at him twice because of me, but I wouldn't have told you to if you'd asked.
It makes me wonder if there's still any of me left on his hands when he touches you, after all this time.