Heather by Caitlin Mullen
For my mother, Kimberly
In the minutes after the baby is born the doctor bends low to your ear.
A first-degree tear, she tells you. You won’t need stitches. Though I noticed an older scar. She cuts her eyes across the room to Ben, who is on the phone with his sister, then back to you. You don’t dare acknowledge her and what she knows, though you had thought about this, during those sleepless nights of the last few months when pain shot through your hips every time you shifted and your stomach rounded so much it seemed like the skin might split down the faint gray line that divided you in half. You had wondered what record your body might keep. The mind is one thing, the little black box of Before locked tight. But the body, as you well know, is a traitor. The body undoes and reveals, has an agenda all its own.
“Such a fast labor for a first-time mother,” the labor nurse remarks, now that the chuck pads have been shucked into the garbage, the epidural drip removed, the mess of birth—blood and amniotic fluid, shit and vernix—wiped away from your body’s and the baby’s. The air smells of rubbing alcohol, sharp and punishing. The labor nurse wears tie-dyed scrubs and rubber clogs printed with black-eyed Susans. You force yourself to smile while counting the petals on one of the flowers. Ben beams at you and you can sense his thoughts. You’re already such a good mother. Your generous, happy husband, eager to attribute good qualities to you, whether you’ve earned them or not.
Ben has suggested a name for this child, one that belonged to his grandmother, who used to drive him to swim lessons, who taught him to shape blueberry scones, whose pearl earrings your mother-in-law loaned you for your courthouse wedding two years ago. Blair. You never knew your own grandmother, had only seen one photo of her. A woman already white-haired and raisin-wrinkled at fifty, squinting out from her farm stand beside a heap of zucchini. The right name, you think, could give your daughter an inheritance, one so different from what you have to offer—a history of women who run, who disappear. And your own past, too dangerous to look at squarely. Better to pretend it doesn’t exist at all.
You turn your gaze to the baby on your chest. Her fingers, the joints inside so small and intricate they must be like jewelry findings, curl around yours, claiming you, and you have to remind yourself to breathe. Her skin is so soft, the finest velvet under your fingertips. You cup the tender curve of her skull with your palm, putting yourself between her and this room filled with hard surfaces, blunt, sharp corners. You hadn’t noticed it before but now you can’t help but see it, how everything around you teems with danger. The pen in the doctor’s jacket pocket. The floor tiles, with their sickly yellow hue. The ledge of the whiteboard where the nurse made notes during your labor, circled numbers to indicate how dilated you were. You had thought of the chart from the birth book Ben brought home. Five centimeters, the size of a mandarin orange. Six, the top of a soda can. Ten, a donut.
You try your best to cover the back of her head with one hand, her spine with the other, the spine you grew inside of you, taking your folic acid like a kind of communion all those months so it would form true and straight. In the light streaming through the hospital windows you make out the fine coating of down along the baby’s small body, even along the ridges of her earlobes.
That downy hair, in the bright light, is a miracle. This is not a word you’ve had occasion to use before, and one that feels weighty and overwrought in your mind. But today, it feels right. You hold her tight, her skin against yours, and think Oh. Oh, oh, oh.
Downy white hair on the ridges of her earlobes.
It had been so dark, before. How could you have known?
Part I
CALLIE
September 2023
Callie’s uniform chafes, even after six weeks of filling in on patrol. She can’t stop scratching at the place where her collar hits the back of her neck. She thinks of the suits she amassed while she was working her way up as a narcotics detective in North Jersey. Dark fabrics and crisp lines, garments that helped her feel neat and orderly and in control in the face of whatever came her way on any given week. Seizing tens of thousands of dollars of Mexican heroin from a warehouse outside of Newark. Prepping an undercover unit for a buy-and-bust on a big mafia-run cocaine operation. Now, in her patrol car parked along a sandy stretch of shoulder on Route 206 in the Jersey Pine Barrens, rashes blooming at her wrist and collar, she longs for those suits, the cool, silky linings of the jackets and the way they slipped along her skin.
Frank told her it was a good idea to wear her uniform every day, a gesture to show the guys she considered herself one of them. And she’s needed on patrol: The Pine Lakes squad is down an officer now that Sergeant Jimmy Nichols resigned when Callie was named Chief of Police. According to Jimmy the job should have been his. Callie had been out of the area too long, only got the job because she’s in with Frank Caputo, her best friend’s father-in-law who served as chief until he retired in 2011. On her bad days she’s not sure Jimmy is wrong.
But, until she hires a new guy, every Monday she takes the oldest patrol vehicle with the shrieking brakes and spends her hours answering calls, completing her reports from parking lots between traffic stops, doing her best to enforce order among the endless trees, the circuits of dirt roads, in a place that she knows from her girlhood has a secretive, untamable heart.