15. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
There is one day a year when I am not a person.
I have spent six of them in a dark room with the door locked. I have spent six of them with my hand on my own stomach, remembering a weight that isn’t there. The curve of it. The way she kicked at three in the morning like she was already impatient to meet the world.
She never got to meet the world.
This year, the date has balloons on it.
I find out standing in the kitchen, holding a party planner’s checklist, the morning light streaming through windows that cost more than my first apartment. The planner is a small, efficient woman who talks very fast and smells like vanilla.
“So we’re looking at a lawnful of children,” she’s saying. “The ponies arrive at eleven, the magician at noon, cake at one. Mrs. Lippitt - the elder Mrs. Lippitt - has requested a specific color scheme, but Mr. Lippitt said you had final approval on everything.”
“What’s the date?” My voice sounds strange. Far away.
“The seventeenth.” The planner checks her tablet. “Olivia’s birthday. She’s turning six, is that right?”
The floor tilts.
I put a hand on the counter because I have to put a hand on something. The seventeenth. The seventeenth of this month. The same day. The exact same day.
“Mrs. Lippitt? Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I hear myself say it. I watch myself straighten up, square my shoulders, become a person who can function. “What time do the ponies come?”
The rest of the day passes in a blur of preparation.
I blow up balloons. Pink and purple, Olivia’s favorites. I blow them up until my head spins and my lungs ache, and every exhale is a small betrayal of the baby I buried without a body.
I write name cards in careful cursive. So many of them. So many children who will come to this party and eat cake and laugh and go home to mothers who get to keep them.
Ribbons go onto the chairs. My hands shake. They won’t stop shaking. Every ribbon is a reminder of a hospital room and a blanket they wrapped her in - pink, it was pink - and the four minutes I got to hold her before they took her away.
They never brought her back.
They said it would only make it harder, seeing the body.
They said she was already gone, that there was no point, that I should try to rest and let them handle everything.
They said a lot of things, and I believed them, because I was twenty-two and alone and so hollowed out by loss that I couldn’t fight anymore.
I didn’t even get to bury her.
I don’t know where she is.
I don’t know if there’s a grave somewhere with her name on it - and what name would they even use?
I never got to name her. I had a name picked out, had it ready, had it written on the wall of the nursery I was building in my head, but I never got to say it out loud to someone who would write it down.
She was my daughter, and I don’t even know where she’s buried.
“Nichole?”
I look up.
Olivia is cross-legged on the floor, watching me with those dark, serious eyes. She’s holding a ribbon I haven’t tied yet, running it through her fingers like water.
“Are you sad?” she asks.
“No, baby.”
“You’re doing the smiling that isn’t smiling.”
I didn’t know she could see that. I didn’t know anyone could see that.
“Sometimes grown-ups have hard days,” I say. “It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.”
“Is today a hard day?”
“Yes.”
She considers this, small and solemn. Then she gets up, walks over to me, and very seriously wraps her arms around my waist.
“I’m sorry you’re having a hard day,” she says into my stomach. “I hope tomorrow is better.”
I close my eyes.
I hold her.
And I don’t tell her that tomorrow won’t be better, that tomorrow I’ll wake up like I always do on the day after, emptied out and raw and wondering how I’m supposed to keep living in a world where my daughter doesn’t exist.
I hold her, and I try to pretend she isn’t almost exactly the age my daughter would have been, and I fail.
By late afternoon, the party preparations are nearly done. The balloons are tied. The ribbons are perfect. The magician has confirmed, the ponies have confirmed, the caterer has confirmed.
I am holding myself together with both hands.
I make it to the pantry before I break.
It’s a small room off the kitchen, lined with shelves of things the cook uses, lit by a single high window that lets in gray afternoon light.
I don’t choose it consciously. I just need to be somewhere no one will find me, somewhere I can fall apart without a crowd of party guests arriving to witness it.
I sit down on the floor.
My back goes against the shelves.
I press my hand hard over my mouth.
And I cry.
Not prettily. Not quietly. I cry the way I cried in that hospital bed six years ago, great heaving sobs that tear themselves out of my chest like they’re trying to escape.
My whole body shakes with it. My vision blurs.
I can’t breathe and I can’t stop and I am going to drown in this grief, I have been drowning in it for six years, and today the water finally closed over my head.
She would have been six.
My daughter would have been six years old today.
And instead I am here, in a pantry, in a rich man’s house, preparing a birthday party for a little girl who isn’t mine, who will never be mine, who is alive and breathing and turning six while my daughter is nowhere and nothing and-
“Nichole.”
I jerk.
Callum is in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’s been there. I don’t know what he’s seen. I only know that he’s here now, in the threshold of this small dark room, looking at me with an expression I can’t read through the blur of tears.
“Go away,” I manage. “Please. Just - go away.”
He doesn’t go away.
He comes in. He sits down on the floor beside me, his back against the opposite shelf, his long legs stretched out in the narrow space between us.
He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t tell me it will be fine. He just sits there.
“What is it?” he asks finally.
“It’s nothing.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand. Useless. The tears keep coming. “It’s a bad day. Everyone gets one.”
“Nichole.”
“Please.” My voice cracks. “Please don’t be kind to me today. I’ll come apart, and I have a houseful of children arriving tomorrow at noon.”
Silence.
He sits there in his expensive clothes on the dusty pantry floor, and he doesn’t ask again, and he doesn’t leave.
The crying slows eventually. It always does. The human body can only produce so many tears before it has to stop and rest. I lean my head back against the shelf and stare at the ceiling and try to remember how to be a person.
“My daughter,” I say.
I don’t plan to say it. It just comes out.
“She would have been six today.”
The silence changes. I feel it shift, feel Callum go very still beside me.
“I didn’t know you had-”
“I don’t.” I close my eyes. “Not anymore.”
More silence. The kind that asks questions without speaking them.
“She died,” I say. “The day she was born. They told me - they said there was nothing they could do. They wouldn’t even let me hold her afterward. They said it would only make it harder.”
“Nichole-”
“I never got a body.” The words are coming now, unstoppable, pouring out of the locked room I’ve kept them in for six years.
“I never got a funeral. I don’t even know where she is.
Somewhere out there, there’s a grave or an urn or a nothing with my daughter in it, and I don’t know where. I’ve never known.”
I open my eyes.
Callum is looking at me like I’ve just handed him something fragile and he doesn’t know how to hold it.
“Tomorrow is Olivia’s birthday,” I say. “The same day. The exact same day my daughter was born and died. And I’m going to smile and serve cake and watch a little girl turn six, and the whole time I’m going to be remembering the one who didn’t.”
He doesn’t say anything.
There’s nothing to say.
After a long moment, he stands. He offers me his hand - just that, just an offered hand - and I take it. He pulls me to my feet.
“Whatever you need tomorrow,” he says. “Tell me. And if you can’t do it - if it’s too much-”
“I’ll do it.” I let go of his hand. “Olivia deserves a birthday. She shouldn’t have to pay for my grief.”
“She wouldn’t see it that way.”
“I know. That’s why I’ll do it.”
I walk past him, out of the pantry, back into the bright kitchen where the balloons are waiting and the ribbons are perfect and tomorrow a little girl who isn’t mine will turn six.
Behind me, I feel him watching.
I don’t look back.