Roslyn is at my house every Sunday. She and I have a relationship now that neither of us had before and it is one of the strangest and best things to come out of this. She was lied to as thoroughly as I was, and by the same person, and there is a specific kind of solidarity in that.
She was also the reason my daughter is alive. That is not a small thing to have to hold at the same time as everything else, and we hold it.
The hospital did a review. Ardenholt Memorial has changed something in their process about who is recorded as having been given information about a transfer, and about documenting that the birth parent was informed directly. Wendeline Marsh told me the change is on paper with a date on it. She said it in the way people say things when they want you to know it wasn't nothing.
Elias saw a therapist through the autumn — a man named Devin who does play-based work with kids — and the thing Devin told me that reorganized my whole head was this:
Eli hadn't been grieving, those two and a half weeks. He'd been trying to solve it. He was the only person in the house who knew a true thing, and he was eight, and nobody would take it from him.
He tried to tell me twice, apparently. Once in the hospital, on the seventeenth, when he said "she's at the other one" and I thought he meant heaven. Once at home, when he asked me why she didn't have a funeral.
I don't remember either. I want to be honest about that. I have no memory of my son saying those things to me.
He gave up on being listened to and started saving money instead.
The jar's still on his dresser.
He wouldn't spend it. For weeks after she came home I kept saying, Eli, take it to the store, buy whatever you want, and he'd say no.
Then in September he came down one morning and said he'd figured out what it was for.
Sixty-one dollars and forty cents got a mirror that clips onto the back seat so that the person in the rear-facing car seat can see the person sitting next to them, and a stack of the cloth books with the crinkly pages, and a night light shaped like a moon that he installed himself with a screwdriver he was not supposed to have.
There was four dollars left over. He put it back in the jar. He says it's for the next thing.
Orla is eleven months old now. She has dark hair that stands straight up and a scar on the back of her hand from an IV and an absolutely unhinged laugh.
She has never once slept without that gray rabbit.
And every single night, my son lies on the floor next to her crib and gives her the weather, and the school report, and whatever he's been reading about, which lately is the deep ocean.
