“Oh, I don’t know, Anne.”

“Just take him,” I said with urgency. “I can hear him, and he sounds pretty awful. I’m worried.”

I felt sick with myself when I hung up the phone.

She texted me in the morning to say they’d sent her home, after a four-hour wait, advising her to run a hot shower and hold him in the steam. He’d been fine.

The next week when I saw her at the mom group, she told me you had freaked out when she admitted to leaving Violet alone. I pictured you spitting mean words at her through clenched teeth, the way you did when you were truly enraged. I thought I could trust you with her. I thought you were a better mother than that.

“He’s right, Anne, I probably shouldn’t have done that. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“I’m so sorry—maybe I gave you the wrong advice. But you were doing what you thought was best.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” She was more quiet than usual that night, and I knew she was upset with me. I texted her as I waited for a taxi to go home.

Everything okay? You seemed down tonight.

Just one of those weeks—nothing personal, I promise!

She was too nice for confrontation. I felt ill at the thought that I’d betrayed her. She had slowly become the only person I needed.

70

I’ve left out an important part of our friendship. Perhaps the most important. When I was with Gemma, I was Sam’s mother. He came alive in me again in a way I never thought could happen. Being with Gemma was like playing pretend and my imaginary friend was the love of my life. My sweet son. My gap-toothed, chatty little boy who tore through the halls of my house in bare feet and his favorite stained baseball shirt. He loved measuring tapes and garbage day and collecting sugar packets from restaurants. He asked me every day about Mother Nature and how she made the weather the way she did. We swam on weekends and went for muffins in the morning on our way to preschool. His shoes always felt too tight. His mouth was always pursed. He loved to hear about the day he was born.

On Wednesdays, I let myself wonder all day what I’d say when I got to the moms’ group—that he’d been up in the night and I was exhausted, that he’d cried with the babysitter when I left. Maybe something the teacher had said about him when I’d picked him up from preschool that afternoon. Crafting the narrative around Sam was addictive—I cycled through story lines obsessively, thinking about what he’d be like and how I would care for him if he was alive. If Violet hadn’t killed him. Although I tried not to let her enter my mind on those days. They were sacred, just for him. And when Gemma sometimes brought her up in conversation, I bristled and listened, conflicted—I was eager for the open window to your life together, but hated that she existed in the periphery of Sam’s second chance.

I loved it when Gemma asked me questions about him. She once told me my eyes lit up when she said his name and I had no doubt she could see my insides glow. Nobody ever mentioned him, and here she was, giving him space and time and worth. She wanted to know about him. To Gemma, Sam mattered. And so she mattered to me, deeply.

I hadn’t thought about photos.

She asked me one day if I had a picture of Sam that she could see. She leaned over to look at the phone I held casually in my hand, expecting I could easily flick through hundreds of his pictures, like she had of Jet.

“You know what, I just cleared out my phone, actually. I was out of space again.” I tried to look annoyed by this technological fact. I tossed the phone in my bag and calmly changed the topic.

That night I poured a glass of red wine and went searching online for pictures of four-year-old boys who looked like Sam. I flipped through social media accounts of strangers with open profiles. I spent hours scanning the lives of happy, bubble-blowing, wagon-riding, ice-cream-covered kids. I’d nearly finished the bottle when I found the perfect child. Dark curls, gap-toothed grin, and the same huge blue eyes. Siobhan McAdams, mum to James by day, baker of cakes by night.

I traced her face on my screen. She looked very tired. She looked very happy.

I saved a dozen of James’s photos and placed one as the background on my phone—he was on a swing, hands above his head like he was on the crest of a roller coaster. Sam had loved the swings.

* * *

? ? ?

    I picked up baby items from secondhand stores and sometimes brought them to Gemma, pretending they were things Sam had grown out of—I could never have parted with his real clothes or toys, and besides, you or Violet might have recognized them. She always hugged whatever I brought her, as though she were hugging Sam. I loved to watch her do that. I loved to watch her think of him.

One week she brought me a beautiful set of Froebel building blocks that I knew were expensive.

“Actually, it was my husband who suggested I bring them for you—someone gave them to us as a gift, but we already have a big set.”

I realized she mustn’t have told you about my role in the emergency room incident. I held the box to my chest in gratitude the way she did with the things I had given her. People do that, don’t they, when they spend time together—take on each other’s subtle gestures, begin to act like each other. I wondered if she had ever mimicked me without knowing it, maybe the way I had begun touching the ends of my Wednesday night hair. Or the way I clucked my tongue sometimes when I was thinking; I wondered if I ever crossed your mind if she did this, the thought fleeting, ephemeral, gone as quickly as it came.