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A rose bush.
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My swelled-up belly, my hands compulsively stroking it, wishing its inhabitant into existence.
I have just turned 38, and I am folded over into sixteen pieces, like that game you play as a child where you have to keep folding the paper until you can’t anymore.
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What if a piece of white paper were to sail overhead right now; what would I write on it? Would I write the name of the daughter I see, the flesh and blood three-year-old who is running through the labyrinth of hedges in the botanic garden with the San Gabriels in the background? She is running with her friend and she wears a pink dress and she has strawberry hair and her bangs are straight and her teeth are straight and perhaps if I write her name on this paper from the sky she will be enough; perhaps I will not need to rub my belly and wish for her sister to be born alive.
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It is noon, and the rose bush I have collapsed next to smells like raspberries. I do not have morning sickness but the smell nevertheless calls up bile, and I am tasting salt on my tongue, brooks and streams and creeks and rivers of salt water flowing not into the ocean but into my open mouth, and I do not want to imagine myself on the balcony of my small apartment, my hand limp in my husband’s as the doctor’s tinny voice through the phone tells us what we already know, and schedules a time for us to come to the hospital that night, and schedules a time for us to come back the next night, and between those two times my baby will die quietly, and it doesn’t matter how many years elapse: every time I think about today, I will shatter.
It is night.
We have let our three-year-old watch Finding Dory. The movie is over and it’s time to tell her that her sister will not be coming home. My mother is there, and later she will tell me that she wouldn’t have believed a little girl could understand so completely what I told her unless she saw it herself. My daughter’s face collapses. The tears come and she sits in her father’s lap and will not look at me.
Her father holds her, but no one holds me. I am alone, and not alone, because the baby inside me is still alive. I touch my stomach.
We go to the hospital, all of us: the mother, the father, the grandmother, the daughter who is alive, and the one who is about to die. (Avert your eyes: this is the part where we kill her. It’s not gory, but perhaps that makes it worse. It is clean, like the killer in the movie who lays down plastic sheeting so his white carpets won’t be stained.)
Late that night, I wake in my own bed with a start. Can you imagine what it feels like, knowing there is a person inside you and that person is dead and you are the cause, when what you want—what you would give your life for—is for that person to live? My husband and our three-year-old breathe shallow, sleeping breaths next to me. We have fallen asleep together, the three of us, so no one would be alone. I am alone, and not alone.
I give birth the next night. Does it look like there’s something wrong with her? I ask my husband. No, he says, his voice quiet. She just looks small.
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The white paper, the what-if paper, alights next to me as I sit in a heap by the rose bush. I write a name on it, the name of the baby who will never be. I tear up the paper, I burn it and blow on the ash, and the smoke rises into the sky. The charred smell dissipates and I am left with the sweet scent of raspberry on the wind. I rise and walk towards my daughter, in her pink dress.
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Rose. Her name would be Rose.

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