19. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
The beach at the bottom of the property is deserted at this hour.
Just Olivia and me, the way it often is now. She’s in the shallows, shrieking with joy every time a wave catches her ankles, absolutely feral with the simple pleasure of cold water and warm sun. Her shoulders are already starting to pink; I’ll need to reapply sunscreen soon.
I’m trying to be normal.
I’ve been trying to be normal for days - since the night in his bed, since the truths we traded, since I started counting and couldn’t stop.
Days old. Three days from signing to receiving.
Born on the seventeenth. My daughter was born on the seventeenth.
My daughter would have been six. Olivia just turned six.
It’s insane.
I keep telling myself it’s insane.
Thousands of babies are born on any given day. Coincidence is not evidence. Grief makes you a lunatic - I know this, I’ve lived it, I’ve sat in support group rooms with women who see their dead children in strangers at the grocery store. A birthday is just a date. A newborn is just a newborn.
I’ve spent four days building a wall out of every reasonable thing there is.
Mostly, it holds.
“Nichole!” Olivia is waving at me from the water. “Come look! I found a shell!”
I wade in to inspect the shell. It’s a scallop, pink and perfect, the kind of thing tourist shops sell for two dollars apiece. Olivia holds it up like she’s discovered treasure.
“It’s beautiful,” I tell her. “We should start a collection.”
“Can we? A shell collection? And we can put them in my room and I can show Daddy?”
“Of course we can.”
She beams and goes back to hunting, bent over the shallows with her dark hair falling around her face. I watch her, this child I love, this child I came here to take care of and somehow became essential to, and I try not to see what I keep seeing.
She looks like me.
Mrs. Fairfax said it, that first night. In this light, you could be hers. I laughed it off. Anyone would laugh it off. Lots of people look vaguely alike if you squint.
But now I can’t stop squinting.
The shape of her face. The set of her chin. The way her eyebrows draw together when she’s concentrating, the same way mine do. Coincidence. It’s all coincidence. People see patterns where there are none; it’s what human brains do.
I’m being crazy.
I’m being-
“Nichole!” Olivia comes running out of the water toward me, waving another shell. “This one has a hole in it! We could make it a necklace!”
“That’s perfect, baby. Come here, let me dry you off before you get too cold.”
She runs up the sand and I crouch down with the towel, wrapping it around her small, wriggling body. She’s all elbows and knees and barely contained energy, squirming as I try to get the water out of her hair.
The towel slips off one small shoulder.
And I see it.
A brown crescent at the top of her left shoulder blade. Small, maybe half an inch long. Curved like a fingernail. Like a thumbprint pressed into soft dough.
The world stops.
A memory I’ve kept in a locked room for six years walks straight through the wall.
My daughter. Four minutes old. Lying in my arms in a hospital bed, the small brown crescent on her shoulder, the same shoulder, the same shape, that I traced with one finger and thought: she’s perfect, she’s mine, I’ll know her anywhere.
I never described that mark to anyone.
I never told a single living soul.
I’ve bathed Olivia a hundred times. A hundred times, and I’ve seen this mark, and it never - I never let myself-
“Nichole?” Olivia’s voice is worried. “Your hands are shaking.”
I look down.
My hands are shaking. Violently. I’m holding the towel with fingers that have gone white at the knuckles, and I can feel myself starting to disconnect from my body, starting to float somewhere above this beach where the math doesn’t add up and the mark doesn’t exist and my daughter is still dead in a grave I’ve never seen.
“I’m cold, baby.” I don’t recognize my own voice. “Let’s get you inside.”
I wrap the towel back over her shoulders. Over the mark. Over the evidence.
It’s not evidence, I tell myself. Birthmarks are common. Crescent shapes are common. Half the babies in the world probably have something like that somewhere on their bodies. You are a grieving woman looking at a bare little back in the sun and building a ghost out of it.
The grief books warned about this.
They said it would happen.
They said there would be moments when you were so desperate to get them back that you’d start seeing them everywhere - in strangers’ children, in photographs, in the particular tilt of a head across a crowded room. They said it was normal. They said it would pass.
This isn’t real, I tell myself. This can’t be real.
Because the other thought is standing right there, right behind this one, enormous and patient. The other thought is waiting for me to turn and look at it, and I know - I know - that the moment I do, nothing in my life is ever the same again.
So I don’t turn around.
I take Olivia’s hand and we walk up the beach together, back toward the house, back toward the life I’m supposed to be living. I grip her small fingers a fraction too tight, and she looks up at me with those dark eyes - my eyes, my mother’s eyes - and she doesn’t complain.
Coincidence, I tell myself with every step.
Coincidence.
Thousands of babies.
Coincidence.
I almost believe it.
I have to almost believe it.
Because if I don’t - if this is true, if any of this is true - then someone told me my daughter was dead.
Someone looked me in the eye and lied.
Someone took a living, breathing, crying baby out of my arms and told me there was no body to bury.
And that means everything I’ve lived through for six years - every night I spent weeping, every morning I spent forcing myself to get out of bed, every moment I spent believing I would never be a mother-
That was all a lie too.
I hold Olivia’s hand all the way back to the house.
I don’t let go.