Reade Saunders

I remember the birth because it was winter.

I remember the smell of disinfectant, and Peter’s hands, warm and steady, holding mine.

I remember feeling nothing and thinking that must be what peace was.

They said she was small, fragile.

He called her perfect.

I told myself I’d given him a gift. I said it so many times it became true.

The truth is elastic, it stretches to fit the shape of need.

My father died that same December. No one told me.

Perhaps they thought I was too busy being reborn.

Perhaps they thought I’d stopped being his daughter the day I became a mother again.

I buried both events in the same place.

The house filled up after that – girls, toys, soft noises, the sound of Peter humming when he thought no one could hear.

I was working again, always working. The office, the travel, the phone pressed to my ear like a rosary bead. I prayed in schedules.

I told myself I was building a life, but it felt more like covering a crack with wallpaper.

There was another baby, easier, quieter, softer on the edges.

And yet every new life made the older one blur.

Tommy was out there somewhere, growing, flying, living, while I rehearsed maternal competence like a language I could never quite master.

He would come back to visit sometimes, and I’d tell him how proud I was.

I’d say, “You’re everything I couldn’t be.”

He’d smile politely, as if the line were part of an old play we both agreed to keep performing.

I had daughters now. I had degrees. I had a new vocabulary for purpose.

The world saw a woman ascending, studying, learning, earning.

But inside, the old world kept whispering.

The baby I lied for.

The boy I failed.

The father who left without goodbye.

Sometimes I’d dream of the house in Dormansland and all the doors were open.

I’d walk through each one and find a different version of myself;

the mother, the student, the barrister, the child.

Each one busy, each one certain.

None of them looking up.

I told myself memory was unreliable.

I told myself love could survive distortion.

I told myself I had done the right thing.

But time, it turns out, is a poor ally.

It keeps folding back on itself, pressing yesterday against tomorrow until I can’t tell which side I’m living on.

Sometimes I’m still in that delivery room, naming her as Peter’s.

Sometimes I’m already old, telling the story to people who don’t exist.

I say: I had three children.

Then I say: I had four.

Then: I had one, once.

Then none at all.

The sentences keep rearranging themselves when I’m not looking.

Perhaps that’s what truth is –

not the fixed point I once believed,

but the way a life rearranges itself

so that its fractures still resemble a whole.