Fiction | Short Story

The New Grandma

Good mothers don’t lose composure, she thought, even if an asteroid is heading at them, they don’t loosen screen time limits or miss piano lessons.

Their new grandma died in early June, before summer turned up the heat to a toxic high. Nora found her face up in bed, on top of the blanket. Grandma was cold to the touch, her eyes were open, and her nightgown had twisted around her waist. The room was quiet, like every sound stood outside holding its breath. Nora wanted to call Mark, or better yet, wait for him to find the body. Now and then, her memory would slip and slide, and she’d forget that he had moved out six months ago. “This isn’t what I want anymore,” was what he told her. He didn’t ask her what she wanted because, evidently, he found that question irrelevant after twelve years of marriage and a child.

Nora pulled down grandma’s nightgown and covered the body with the blanket. She would handle this, and she wouldn’t cry, like she cried yesterday at the supermarket when she thought the seabass had Mark’s reproachful eyes. She would take Jonah to school, schedule the body removal, plan a small farewell ceremony, and, after school, help Jonah with his social sciences project. Kids had to create models of their own utopian societies.

Jonah would be upset. But this grandma only lived with them for eight months. Their first grandma had been with them from the time Jonah was two months old and when she died, he was inconsolable. Jonah had no natural grandparents. Mark’s mother had died before Jonah was born and his father had never materialized. Nora was a late child, and her parents had succumbed to different types of cancer when she was in her early twenties. When Nora became pregnant with Jonah, she decided they would adopt. A child needed as much love as possible, and what if she couldn’t love him enough? There were plenty of suitable grandparents in the elderly resource centers, with amicable temperaments and moderate cognitive disorders.

Their first grandma worked out well. Even Mark came around and developed a nightly habit of drinking Scotch with grandma on the back porch. Nora never asked what they laughed about— maybe the stars. Mark was pretty upset when she died. Nora understood that he had formed some attachments, but they had gotten the grandma for Jonah and had to focus on their son’s grief. Nora spent hours researching strategies on how to help children stay death-positive. She found a great book, titled Circle Time for Death. The book compared time to a merry-go-around, and all the living creatures hopped on and off, but it never stopped spinning. She did breathe-through-grief exercises with Jonah and consulted the school psychologist before bringing a new grandma into their home.

*

Mark flipped out when she told him that she had made an appointment at the Oak Park Elderly Center. “You’re being callous,” he said. “And a sheep.”

She was offended, and didn’t understand. “Jonah is prone to anxiety,” she told him. “We need to keep his family structure intact. Good parents are supposed to make their children feel secure—like the world can’t fall to pieces under their feet.”

“The world can,” Mark said, “and this is cruel. You’re repurposing human beings. You’re taking away their memories, and their past, and calling it a family. Some sick sense of normal you have.”

He always had been a bit idealistic. They ended up having one of those fights that soak deep into the bones, never forgotten even when they are forgotten. Mark walked off muttering something about morality and pluralism, in his quiet voice that lowered the sky on her.

He drove them to the appointment, and when he pulled into the parking lot the tires screeched a lifetime of forced apologies. He walked a few steps behind during the tour, snapped at Jonah in the cafeteria for wiping his mouth with his nice button-down shirt, and then scoffed at her for asking him not to make a scene. When he leaned over her shoulder to read the Health Certificates of the available elderly, she felt his breath on her neck, warm, moist and disapproving.

They chose a grandma, eventually. She was petite, like their previous one. Barely over five feet tall, delicate and thin, with pale skin, and short white hair. This grandma seemed almost translucent. She was sitting by the window in the entertainment room, cuddling in her lap a white ceramic fruit bowl with a pair of fuzzy slippers inside it. Three other grandmas were playing some card game, each holding her cards so that picture sides faced the opponent. “Why don’t they let her play?” Jonah asked. The grandma saw them, smiled, but didn’t look up. Then she put down the fruit bowl and began to walk across the room, sideways, like a bird on a parapet.

According to her Health Certificate, this new grandma had no major physical ailments. A handwritten note in the file indicated that she had mild dementia, but their caseworker assured them that this was fine. She even argued that mild dementia could be advantageous. The condition loosened the grip grandma had on her memories, and it could be easier for her to accept her new circumstances, because she was no longer so attached to the old. In the elderly adoption industry, this was called cognitive flexibility. It could facilitate family absorption, and, for the child, the transition would feel more organic.

Nora repeated the term cognitive flexibility to Mark when they drove the new grandma home. Mark became a bit anxious when they were buckling grandma in the backseat and grandma started to fuss. She began to hum, shake her head, and tried to peel the seatbelt off her body.

“This is for your own safety,” Jonah said. It was hilarious how he puffed his cheeks. He could be such a hoot. Their new grandma calmed down when he spoke to her.

Mark, on the other hand, couldn’t calm down. He wanted to drive to Target, to buy this grandma new clothes, bedding, and even replace the furniture in the room Jonah called grandma’s. Nora understood her husband’s yearning to be generous, but they had taken a trip to St. Martin for Jonah’s spring break where they shamelessly overspent. “We have to be cautious with our budget,” she said, “don’t we still want a house upstate?” Mark said nothing and gripped the steering wheel. Nora thought it would be wasteful to throw away what they had and buy everything new. This grandma was relatively the same size as their previous one.

*

Mostly, the new grandma had been adjusting well at home. She joined them for family dinners. She ate in small bites, at times forgetting that there was food on her fork and trying to stab the next piece before eating what was already there. Once, she came down to the table wearing the sweatshirt their first grandma loved to wear, picturing a dog in swim trunks holding a pineapple, with the caption Resting Beach Face. Mark flinched and didn’t talk during the entire meal.

In the evenings, the new grandma sat in front of a vanity mirror in her room and brushed at long hair she didn’t have, pulling her fingers through her nonexistent strands. Often, she would begin to sing. Mark would go into her room and listen, sitting on the floor and leaning against the back of grandma’s chair. Nora wasn’t sure why—grandma’s song had no beginning, no end, and possibly no words. Maybe these were words with consonants forgotten, and the remaining long vowels were only obstructed by abrupt and unexpected pauses for breath. “She sounds like a waterfall having hiccups,” Jonah once said.

Nora bought grandma a spiral notebook and a box of pencils. There was an article in the Atlantic that likened journaling, at any age, to building scaffolding inside the mind. Grandma took to the journal. In the evenings, she’d sit on her bed and scribble in it, tapping her bare feet on the carpet. In the mornings, Nora would find chewed up pencils in the trash. She wasn’t concerned, until her sister told a story that happened to someone she knew.

She would handle this, and she wouldn’t cry, like she cried yesterday at the supermarket when she thought the seabass had Mark’s reproachful eyes.

The family had brought home a grandpa. Seemed a happy fellow, showed no signs of distress, liked to build Legos with the two boys, though he had some trouble following the instructions. After a few months, he began to write little four stanza poems on the walls of his room. Seemed benign—mostly about migrations of birds. One weekend, the boys woke up early and went to play in the backyard and found their grandpa hanging from the nearest tree. Poor kids were traumatized. They had nightmares, temper tantrums, and couldn’t focus in school. Therapy wasn’t helping. When the mother caught them trying to hang their family cat from the floor lamp, they had to sell the house and move away.

Nora decided to be more proactive. Good parents shouldn’t assume everything is fine. She checked grandma’s journal and found pages and pages filled with tiny round letters, no spaces, no punctuation, syllables hinged onto more and more syllables, and not a breath in between.

Nora had to admit this grandma was a little aloof. Their first grandma used to tell Jonah stories about growing up in Nebraska during the Great Depression. This grandma didn’t speak much, mostly smiled. But Jonah seemed calmer around her, so Nora decided to monitor the situation and not worry too much. Of course, when Mark left, her focus became Jonah. She was still diligent about feeding grandma and doing her laundry but couldn’t remember if grandma had stopped going outside. “We do the best we can,” she told herself. She asked Mark if he was interested in taking grandma with them on the weekends he had Jonah. It would give their son a sense of continuity, she said. Mark shook his head and said, “Finders, keepers.”

*

Now it was Nora’s job to deal with the body and plan grandma’s farewell ceremony for Jonah, same as it was her duty to keep steady the life the three of them once had for the two of them that remained. Good mothers don’t lose composure, she thought, even if an asteroid is heading at them, they don’t loosen screen time limits or miss piano lessons.

When their first grandma died, another mom in Jonah’s class recommended easy-passages.com. Nora had a positive experience with their service overall. Their farewell package included a body pickup within three hours, a flower patch, and a commemorative display—some arrangement of plastic figurines with grandma as a centerpiece.

Nora logged onto easy-passages and was pleased to see that the intake form was already prefilled with the selections she had made for the first grandma’s ceremony. She considered downgrading the commemorative display to compact, which was about a third smaller than the deluxe one they had installed for their first grandma. She’d save a hundred dollars. This grandma didn’t even live with them for a full year, but Jonah would notice the discrepancy in size, and she couldn’t show favoritism in the grieving process. She kept the deluxe option but downgraded the flowers—Jonah wouldn’t care about the absence of miniature carnations in the arrangement.

The recommended memorial play-park was small but close to the city. It had an onsite grief consultant, swing sets, monkey bars, and those sprinklers kids could run through when the weather was warm. Grandma’s ashes would be blended into the flower patch soil where the commemorative display was installed, and pizza and soft drinks would be delivered. There was an open slot this Saturday, at three in the afternoon. Perfect, because Jonah wouldn’t have to miss his swimming lesson. She kept the guestlist small, and, after deciding that this was a co-parenting matter, added Mark to it.

She thought about calling Mark and crying a little. With him, a few tears could go a long way. Maybe he’d say: “We’ll handle this,” like he said that time before Jonah was born, when they drove to New Hampshire for the weekend and she hit a deer. She was hysterical. He put his hand on her lap and stroked her thigh as he said it. They waited for the state troopers sitting on the trunk of their car. She asked him to check out the damage, and he turned pale and wouldn’t go, but she still felt like they were a we. Like when she’d fill out a medical form and list Mark as her emergency contact. If something happened to her, like lung cancer, or a boating accident, or that rare disease that turned muscle and ligaments into bone, until the whole body became a skeleton, on the outside as well as inside, he wouldn’t leave. He’d stay by her hospital bed and watch her become completely ossified.

The day he moved out, she told him that she would’ve stayed, even if all the liquids in his body turned into solids.

And he asked: “Is that all?”

Once, when they were having one of those fights that felt like every word dragged them deeper and deeper into a pool of wet cement, Mark told her that she was the one with a cognitive flexibility problem. Because of her, he said, he had become complacent and she was to blame for his, he called it, moral stagnation. He said it, and pointed his index finger at the sky in the most idiotic manner.

She truly hated him then, though she couldn’t understand how it was possible. Wasn’t he the same man who, when her cat died, made a digital collage of her cat pictures and said that her memories were now his keepsakes?

Over the years, Mark developed these odd sensitivities. They both had read the research that confirmed the benefits of grandparents, natural or implanted, during early childhood development. Their Jonah wouldn’t be a child forever, he’d turn thirty-five and reach the official Maturity Age, like everyone else. The resource centers were full of elderly that no one wanted. Grandmas and grandpas whose old memories wore out, who could no longer tell apart the past they’ve had from the past they could’ve had. Even if they could, Nora would never mistreat them, wouldn’t ask them for too much—only to be some presence for Jonah, tell a story, hold a hand, sing a song—fill in the normal family roles. How was that treating them as objects? Everyone, except for the children, should serve a purpose, Nora thought. How was that inhumane?

She remembered a grandpa they saw when they were looking for their second grandma. He had a patchy yellow beard and wore nothing but boxer shorts with suspenders. He spit and cursed when they entered his room. His twin mattress was flung onto a box spring, no bedframe or nightstand. Under a thin coat of paint, she could still see the graffiti left by the room’s prior resident. Someone had drawn a picture of the sun with a nipple. And she thought, Mark could end up like this, unless he learns to be less bitter.

*

The body removers came around eleven. They took off their shoes, coughed politely, and addressed Nora as ma’am. The older man was short and pudgy, and constantly licked his lips. The younger one was taller, had a ponytail, and wore his service uniform with the sleeves rolled up. He had a large dragonfly tattooed across his bicep, and as he flexed, the insect contorted its face into a toothy smile. Nora quickly escorted them to grandma’s room. She waited in the kitchen while the men packed grandma into a flammable canvas bag, disinfected the room, and carried out the body making minimal noise.

When they were done, Nora signed for the pickup and declined the offer to add optional details to the display. It wasn’t about the money. She had seen the most vulgar arrangements at the park. There was the picnic blanket topped with a wicker basket and a round and pink-faced grandma raising a half-eaten drumstick to her mouth. A grandpa in cargo shorts and sandals, with a bulging belly, asleep in an armchair with a TV remote in his hand. A long thin grandma in a white sundress, holding a violin, with a cat on her shoulder, and a ring of butterflies around her head. The butterflies were skewered onto a thin metal wire and attached to the grandma’s temples.

Once, she told Mark that you could tell a lot about a family by the details they chose for these displays. Mark said the details were immaterial. Enough could be said when a family chose to take their dead to these parks. No one looked dignified as a miniature plastic figurine. When he died, he wanted no display, commemorative or any other kind.

“Think about Jonah,” she said. “Don’t you think he would benefit from a physical grieving space?”

“I thought about Jonah,” he said, “and that is precisely why you should scatter my ashes into the ocean, preferably off the coast of Maine.”

Selfishly, Mark assumed he’d die first and leave her to clean up the scene.

At the farewell ceremony for their first grandma, Jonah had cried. He hasn’t cried since, not even on the night Nora and Mark sat on his bed, each holding one of his hands, and told him that from now on he’d live in two houses, because daddy would have his own apartment, and wouldn’t that be fun? They assured Jonas that he was loved. Jonah asked if he could get a PlayStation at dad’s place and an iPhone, “So I could call you, Mom, anytime.”

*

Jonah didn’t ask where grandma was during dinner. He was stressed because another boy at school sat in his seat during math class. This was unfair, Jonah said, because it’s always been his place. He looked very grown up, with the new haircut Mark had taken him to get without discussing with her, even though they had agreed to make parenting decisions together. She gave Mark’s empty chair an angry look. She wasn’t sure if she missed Mark, or the space he had occupied sitting in that chair, or the space she had occupied when she sat across from him.

“Jonah,” she said, “Grandma died last night, peacefully, in her sleep.” To comfort him, she covered his hand with hers.

Jonah pulled out his hand and shoved a whole meatball into this mouth. “How’d you know?”

“How do I know that she died?”

“That she died peacefully.”

He swallowed the meatball and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. She dabbed his cheek with her napkin and didn’t scold him. Grief called for some leniency.

Was anyone’s death ever peaceful? She imagined rounding up a group of dead people and asking them to rank the peacefulness of their death experience. Birth wasn’t peaceful, that she knew. And if one had to arrive to the world in such a violent way, why would departing from it be any different?

“I know that she lived a long life,” she said, “and she was content here.”

“Right,” Jonah scoffed. “Like you knew what a sweetheart cousin Jeremy was. Until his mom found his hamster super-glued to the bottom of his desk drawer. Took like days for it to die, Jeremy said.”

“Jonah, how do you know this?”

“I read Aunt Trish’s text messages on your phone. Can I have more cheese?”

Again, he took her phone without permission and, what’s worse, broke into it. But he was still a little boy, her little boy, who suffered the death of his first grandma, then a second death of this grandma, and a third death, if you count the hamster. When Jonah was inside her, she could filter oxygen for him, and she felt responsible, almost guilty, for allowing them to be physically separated. She had read in a parenting book that good mothers learn to harvest that guilt, and nourish their children with it.

“Chewy was sweet,” Jonah said. “He liked watermelon and carrots. Once, he stuffed a whole baby carrot into his cheeks. His face blew up like a balloon. And he wanted to climb into his house. Only his head was so enormous that he couldn’t fit through the hole. I watched him try to get inside his house for like an hour, he kept bumping his head and falling on his butt. I’m sorry I laughed at him, I didn’t know what Jeremy was going to do.”

Her Jonah always had been compassionate. And she assumed she’d have Jonah, for years, after she’d stop seeing the shadows of Mark’s shirts tossed over every chair in the house. She reached over to hug her boy and lingered a bit, hiding her face in his hair. This was for her comfort, not Jonah’s. She knew it was wrong to use other people as flotation devices, especially children. But she didn’t care.

“You have a kind heart,” she told him.

“Mom, are you crying?”

“I’m not crying, Jonah.” Just the sound of his name was like a warm blanket she could wrap around her shoulders. “We are going to have a ceremony for grandma on Saturday. You could invite a couple of your school friends.”

“Can Dad come?”

“We will ask him. But it’s not his weekend.”

“Chewy died with glued feet, but a free heart.” Jonah raised his fork and pointed it toward the ceiling.

Nora wiped the pasta sauce from his chin. Her boy might grow up to be a poet, a famous one, like Frank O’Hara.

*

It didn’t rain on Saturday, despite the forecast. The clouds were pacing the sky like restless commuters waiting for a delayed train. Jonah walked kicking the soil with the tops of his sneakers. They found their commemorative display and Jonah let her hold his hand. She kissed the top of his head. Grandma came out well. Her four-foot figure was positioned on a backless bench, with legs crossed and hands folded in her lap, and her face turned toward the park entrance. Her smile was welcoming without being overly eager, and the cream color Nora had chosen for her skin looked very natural. Jonah put his other hand on grandma’s head and stroked it a little.

Their guests began to arrive, and Nora thought it was going to be fine, even if Mark came. Trish showed up with Jeremy and apologized for her husband not making it. He was stuck at work, she said, yes on a Saturday. He had been stuck a lot lately, at work, in traffic, at the gym, or inside his garage. Trish said it like he had a condition, like his feet excreted small amounts of glue, fastening him to locations he was trying to leave. Nora noticed the dark circles under her sister’s eyes and said that she understood.

Someone had drawn a picture of the sun with a nipple. And she thought, Mark could end up like this, unless he learns to be less bitter.

The kids started a game of tag, making too much noise. A woman from a neighboring group gave Nora a look, but Jonah was being active and laughing, and Nora didn’t ask the kids to lower their voices. They probably shouldn’t have been shooting at the displays, she thought, but the park was not that crowded, and water does no harm to plastic. No one ever told the rain it was being disrespectful.

Nora knew most of these kids since they were babies, watched their bodies gain mass and their faces learn to lie, little lies growing into bigger lies. When they grow up, she thought, hardly anyone would be able to tell what they want anymore. Jeremy scouted the area, dropped to the ground in full sniper mode, and pointed his water gun at a nearby grandpa. The water hit the figurine right at the crotch. Nora knew her Jonah would never shoot at the balls. And then she thought it wasn’t going to be fine, if Mark comes, or if he doesn’t.

But he decided to come. She recognized his ambiguous walk from afar. This way of swaying side to side, throwing each foot out at an outgoing angle, as if he was about to turn but changed his mind at the last minute, and had to correct his trajectory with each subsequent step. These small details used to make Nora think that Mark was unique, and that uniqueness explained love. But after they separated, these details began to detach, and the person who she knew as Mark was becoming a collection of parts without assembly instructions.

He smiled and said hello to her as if he never had told her that their life together became a house without windows, or doorways, or even a skylight, and he needed to leave. And she wondered how he was planning to escape, dig a tunnel? Now the man coming to pick up Jonah every other weekend, passing her Jonah’s backpack without touching her hand, was Mark, but not Mark.

Jonah ran to his father. Mark lifted his son into the air, wrapped him in a hug, and paused, hiding his nose in Jonah’s hair. Nora recognized the move. When the world stood too close, the smell of Jonah’s hair could push it back about an arm length.

“How are you, champ?” Mark said.

Nora hated when Mark called their son champ. Such an innocuous word, but it had spent years rolling around in her irritation, grew fat, and now subtexts and undertones were pasted to its buttery surface. Two people become too close, and simple language turns into an obstacle course.

“Are we ready to start?” Mark asked her.

He didn’t thank her for planning the ceremony, or helping Jonah with his parting speech, or for all the years she had spent in a car with him, listening to him criticize everyone else’s method of changing lanes, or breaking. It takes a special kind of patience to be someone’s passenger. Then they stopped being a we, before she could tell him that she only pretended to sympathize, and his driving in stop-and-go traffic made her nauseous. Then became now. Now, on a painfully clear night, with whom did he share the moon? When he wasn’t feeling well, who touched his forehead, first with a hand, then with lips, to judge if he felt warm? To whom was he sending videos of baby elephants bathing in mud puddles?

“We’re ready,” she said.

Kids formed a circle around the display, holding hands and giving each other slight pushes. Adults stood back, letting their children fully engage in grieving. Kids walked four circles around their grandma’s display. Each circle represented a life stage: childhood, youth, adulthood, then the age of reflection. They chanted the farewell jingle. Earth to water, water to air, air to memory, memory burns in colors of spring.

Then her Jonah stepped forward, composed and somber. Nora shushed the other kids. Trish squeezed Jeremy’s arm; he squirmed but stayed in place. Jonah unfolded the paper in his hand and began to read without rushing or swallowing his words, like they had practiced.

“Dear Grandma Two. I’m sorry you died. Mom said it was the natural order of things. My first grandma also died, so she is even deader than you.”

Nora was thinking that deader shouldn’t be a word. Aliver wasn’t one. If one could argue there were gradations in the state of being alive, being dead was a binary proposition. Anything no longer alive was equally dead compared to all other, preceding dead things. It was not a sliding scale.

“I asked Mom and Dad to pick you because you seemed nice, and also you were short, like my first grandma. I’m the shortest in my class, even though Ben S. is shorter than me, but he is the new kid, so no one cares about him. But I cared about you and I’m very sorry about the natural order of things. I wish you didn’t have to die, and we could go upstate this summer. There is a lake with these really cool frogs. They are big and fat and glow a little. Dad said if you discover a new star you could name it after someone. I don’t know how to discover new stars, but I know how to discover new frogs. I will name one after you. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which frogs are new and which I’ve already discovered. But Dad said it’s the thought that counts. I will think about you when I go to the lake and count my thoughts. I will try to miss you as much as I missed my first Grandma. Love, Jonah.”

Nora teared up a bit after the speech, even though they had practiced it together. She always knew her Jonah was imaginative and creative, but what intensity and vivid imagery. She shared her observation with Mark, but he nodded without conviction. Kids returned to eating pizza and spraying each other with water guns; adults returned to checking their phones and polite gossip.

Mark said his goodbyes. He hugged Jonah, ruffled his hair, and said: “See you later, champ.” Jonah ran off to play tag with the other kids.

“You cannot keep doing this,” Mark said to her. “You cannot keep filling in the blanks for him. He has to learn to live with them. That’s growing up.” Nora wanted to tell Mark that if he wanted to continue telling her what she could or couldn’t do in this patronizing fashion, he shouldn’t have left her. But she felt exhausted even imagining the fight they would’ve had and said nothing.

On their second, maybe third date, when they still saw each other through the smoke of excitement, Mark had told her that a family was the only place where people could do small things for each other and feel bigger. He said there was only one thing people truly wanted from each other, and it was to know that they mattered.

Jeremy was throwing dirt into the drinking fountain. Nora watched Trish struggle to drag him away. People told each other they mattered, she thought. It was easy enough. What people also wanted was to be spared the words that left tire tracks on their skin. For people who were a family, but aren’t any more, not starting a fight remains about the only thing they could still do for one another.

*

They read together at bedtime. Jonah picked a book about a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia that offered a refuge to sea lions. Her son cared about animals. After he fell asleep, she stayed in his bed and listened to him breathe. His breaths landed softly all around, on the blanket, the floor and her skin, and soon the space around her was filled with air that used to be Jonah’s.

Her son’s bed was narrow, but she tried not to move, wondering how long she could stay still. Good mothers keep calm. Should she start looking for a new grandma alone? Or try dating? She had been with Mark since college and had no idea what had happened to men since then. They could’ve evolved. Developed an ability to see infrared light. Or maybe they’ve learned to sprout extra arms on demand, like an octopus, who used one of these arms to mate. She and Jonah had read a book about cephalopods and it said that an octopus had three hearts. That was handy. If she were an octopus, she wouldn’t use all three, she’d keep at least one heart in reserve, not to wear it out. And when she grew old, it would still be perfectly intact, maybe ossified.

Maybe this wasn’t what she wanted anymore: not a new grandma, or Mark, or a new Mark. What if people overpack for old age, not realizing there are restrictions for both the number of bags and their weight? She imagined arriving there with nothing but a carry-on and, for some reason, a parasol umbrella. She could travel to Patagonia. She liked the idea of a place that was called the South but was inauspicious and cold, like the North. There’d be glaciers and penguins, but to them she wouldn’t matter. She’d be windburned and have arthritis. With her, she’d carry a picture of Jonah, maybe a graduation picture or one from his wedding. She’d keep showing it to everyone she’d meet, and they’d smile politely and know that having nothing was a position she had earned, after years of bagged lunches, math worksheets, overcrowded swimming pools, and mended temper tantrums. Would she keep the memories of who she was? Or replace them with the memories of who she was not. Would it matter if her memories were true, if she believed they were hers?

Jonah turned in his sleep, with a whimpering wet sniffle. The room wasn’t cold, but she tucked the blanket under them, then pulled it over her face. She could still see the outline of Jonah’s head on the pillow in the light leaking from the outside.