Two Daughters

by Melissa Febos

I decided to have the baby, knowing it was a girl. I kept her, knowing that her father was a baby himself, and that I would leave him within a year of pushing her out of me into the warm bathtub, two brown women holding my hands.  I drove away from the soft sweetness of his face, the creased forehead of his Indian granddad, his father and brothers.

At the preschool in Springfield I traced her three-year-old body on a bed sheet and held her hand inside mine as we wrote her name in purple marker under the foot.
We drove the square blue car with her spit-up stains on the back seat through Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and I told her that was where her people were from.  You're my people, she said. My person.

At twelve, she drew black around her dreamy eyes, cheap and common as the shower curtains in all of our homes. Her body behind those moldy curtains was also obscured, a blurred pink outline, though when I closed my own dreamy eyes I could still see her as clearly as I had when her heart beat inside me and I would lay in the tub and hold my enormous belly.

She came home smelling of boys —less sweet than salt—and I couldn't stop wondering about the ones she'd let inside of her, until one of them stuck, and she ballooned as I had.  Her body became too big to hide, and she no longer belonged to them, or to me, but to the nascent dab of pink that swam inside of her. 

The next four years she spent away from me, and when a stranger called to say she’d spent them dying, I found I wasn’t surprised—how could she live without me?   I hung up the phone, and forgot how to speak for a week.  At the funeral, I watched clods of dirt break over the box that held her shape and buried my face in the sweet of her baby’s hair.

That summer I held her little girl's hand inside of mine, and while her cousins ran and screamed through the sprinkler, we stared at a Parcheesi board, she spinning my old wedding band with her chubby fingers.

I think you've beaten me again, she said, in her little woman's voice.

It looks as though I have, I said.

We might as well finish, she said.

You never know what might happen, I answered.

You never know, she said.