She was in the bathroom, doubled over with cramps. At first she was sure she had done something wrong, because there hadn’t been any blood at all. Now, it wouldn’t stop. And it wasn’t just blood, it was clots, great dark, thick masses that terrified her. That was why she had come to sit on the toilet. She could reach behind her and flush. She was terrified of looking down between her legs and seeing tiny arms and legs; a sad, minuscule face.

She felt her insides twist again, as if someone had attached a thousand strings to the inside of her belly and groin and yanked them. Beth drew her knees up even higher to her chin, the only thing that brought relief, but to do that she couldn’t sit. She got off the toilet and rolled to her side, sweating, groaning. Her breath shortened, stuttered links on a chain.

The thing that slipped between her legs was the size of a clenched fist. Beth cried out, seeing it on the linoleum, pink and unfinished, its translucent skin showing dark patches of future eyes and organs. Between its legs was a question mark of umbilical cord.

Shaking, she grabbed a hand towel and wrapped the thing up (it wasn’t a baby, it wasn’t a baby, it wasn’t a baby) and stuffed it into the bottom of the trash, arranging tissues and makeup wipes and wrappers on top of it, as if out of sight would be out of mind.

She was starting to see stars, and she thought maybe she was dying, but that didn’t make sense because there was no way she was going to Heaven anymore. Maybe she could just close her eyes for a minute, and when she woke up, this would never have happened.

She heard a pounding, and for one terrified moment she thought it was coming from the trash can. But then it got louder, and she realized someone was calling her name.

Beth wanted to answer, she did. But she was so, so tired.

When the door broke open, the lock shattered by her father, she used all the energy she had left to speak. “Don’t get mad, Daddy,” she whispered, and then everything went black.

—

GEORGE LEFT THE TRUCK RUNNING, parked illegally in a fire zone. He dashed to the passenger side and lifted his unconscious daughter into his arms, carrying her through the automatic doors of the emergency room. She was bleeding through the blanket he had wrapped around her. “Please help my daughter,” he cried, and he was surrounded immediately.

They took her away, setting her on a gurney and rushing her into the back as he followed. A nurse put her hand on his arm. “Mr.… ?”

“Goddard,” he said. “That’s my girl.”

“What happened to her?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” He gulped. “I found her like this in the bathroom. She’s bleeding from … from down there …”

“Vaginally?”

He nodded. He tried to see what the doctors were doing, but there were so many of them, and they moved around her, blocking his view.

“What’s your daughter’s name?” the nurse asked.

When she was little, and couldn’t pronounce her name, she called herself Lil Bit. That stuck for the longest time. As she grew up, he had dropped the second half of that term of endearment. But he was the only one to call her Lil; everyone else used a different nickname.

“Elizabeth Goddard,” George said. “She goes by Beth.”

—

LAST NIGHT, BEX HAD DREAMED of a piece of art that was still inside her mind. It was a pixilated fetus curled on its side. In the white space, though, carved out by the absence of arms and legs and umbilicus, you would see the optical illusion of a profile. And if you looked closely, you’d know it was hers.

She was not surprised that today, of all days, she would find inspiration. Just yesterday she had finished her last commission. It was time to start fresh.

She had already called Hugh to wish him a happy birthday and she had finished a cup of tea. Her body was humming with anticipation, like a child waiting for the sun to rise on Christmas. She was going to savor every second of this morning, pluck it like a violin string, let it sing through her.

In the closet of her studio where she kept her paints and her turpentine and her brushes there was a tiny panel that, with the press of a finger, would bounce free to reveal a hiding spot. It had come with the house. She had no idea what it had been used for by the previous owners—a safe, maybe, or hidden love letters. Bex kept a shoe box inside, one that she pulled out now and set on her workbench.

Inside was an impossibly small blue cotton hat, and a hospital bracelet: BABY BOY MCELROY. And then, best of all, the photograph—fading now, into rusts and yellows and greens that she associated with the seventies. It was 1978, and there was Bex in the hospital bed, fourteen years old and holding a newborn Hugh.

Bex could have gotten an abortion—it was legal—but her mother, a devout Catholic, talked her out of it. She came up instead with the solution that became a secret. From the moment Bex left the hospital, she was no longer Hugh’s mother, but his sister. Her father got a job in a different state and they moved there, plastering over the subterfuge until sometimes Bex even forgot the reality. There had been a point when her mother died that Bex had considered telling Hugh, but she was afraid he might be so angry that he’d hate her. This she couldn’t risk.

Bex still got to watch Hugh grow up, have a baby of his own. So did the labels really matter?

It had taken her forty years of careful practice, but she allowed herself regrets only one day a year—this one, Hugh’s birthday. She took out this shoe box, and she pictured the parallel universes of her life. In one, she was Hugh’s mother, Wren’s grandmother. In another, she had fallen in love again, married, and had a child she could gather into her arms any time she wished. In a third, she went to art school and moved to Florence and became a sculptor, instead of staying in Mississippi to watch over Hugh after her father had died and her mom became an alcoholic.

Bex, who had not terminated her pregnancy, had still lost a potential life that day—her own. But when she started to grieve for what she had missed, she redirected her attention to the lives that had been saved, literally, by her son—the battered wives, the suicide jumpers. The teenager Hugh had pulled from the freezing river last year. Wren.

No. She would not have changed a thing. Or this is what she told herself, anyway, when she let the question rise high in her throat, when she felt like she was choking.

Bex carefully put the photo in the bottom of the shoe box and placed the bracelet and the hat inside. She carried it back to the closet and slipped it into its hiding place. Then she pulled the trapdoor into place again, sealing the crypt of this memory.

Occasionally she wondered if, after she died, someone would find the shoe box. Maybe whoever bought her house. She wondered if they would create a mythology around the artifacts, if it would be a tragedy or a love story. It could, Bex knew, be both at once.

She shut the closet and then opened the curtains in her studio. Sunshine spilled onto the wooden floor, like golden grain from a silo. The sky was clear, as blue as her son’s eyes. It was why she had named him as she did—her only hint. Even at fourteen, Bex had already pictured the world as an artist did, cast in shadows and light. Even then, what mattered most was hue.

Hugh.

Bex smiled, reaching for the stretcher bars and unprimed canvas. Today, she thought, is a good day to be born.

Epilogue

Six p.m.

NONE OF US CHOOSE OUR PARENTS. BUT SOME OF US GET LUCKY.

One minute Wren felt her father’s arm close around her. She could smell him—bay rum aftershave and starch. “It’s okay,” he whispered, his breath moving the hair at her temple. “Everything is okay now.”

She believed him. She always had. She believed him when he swore to her that there was no reason to be afraid of the dark, and taught her how to read the stars, so she would never feel lost in it. She believed him when he printed out articles about Internet predators and catfishing and left them taped to her bathroom mirror. She believed him when he ate a spider to prove that it wasn’t so scary after all.

He gently pushed her back, his eyes catching on their clasped hands. “Wren, go on now,” he said.

She couldn’t make herself step away. Wren, who had gotten herself into this mess because she couldn’t wait to grow up, wanted nothing more than for her father to rock her on his lap and never let her go.

“Let me finish this,” he murmured.

She took an unsteady step toward the white canopy of the tent. There were cops there, motioning to her, but no one came forward to grab her.

Once, there had been a tornado in Jackson. Wren remembered how the sky turned the yellow of a jaundiced eye, and how the atmosphere felt pregnant. The moments before the wind slammed into the city, the air had gone so still that Wren thought the world had stopped spinning, that time had started to move backward. That’s how it felt just then, and it was why Wren turned around halfway to the command tent.

She heard her father’s voice, as he spoke to George Goddard. “Think of your daughter.”

“She’ll never look at me the same after this. You don’t get it.”

“Then make me understand.”

Wren was staring at the shooter when he pulled the trigger.

—