Nicole blinks into the blinding light and tries to remember where she is, what she has been emptied of.
"This is the hospital," Peggy says. "You are in the hospital." She says it loudly as if that will help it stick.
It all comes speeding back: Lloyd, dead. The baby, dead. He was 42. The baby was 17 weeks. He was a little boy. She was going to name him Riley. She pats her belly and feels the emptiness on the outside that matches the emptiness and rawness on the inside. She rolls to her side and stands slowly. Her belly droops where once it had been full and hard. She's without child.
And now Lloyd was gone, too.
"It's gonna be all right. You've got to believe that," Peggy says, taking Nicole's small smooth hand in her large rough hand. Nicole notices the smallness of her hand; the tiny, small, insignificance of herself in the world.
"You are just a girl. You've got the whole world ahead of you!" Peggy says. "Now you can go back to being a kid. You shouldn't have all this on you now, not now."
A big, blonde nurse shuffles into the room that smells of darkness and death and hundreds of bottles of antiseptic, and scolds Nicole for being out of bed.
"Git, git, git! Back to bed with you! Oh, yeah, by the way The coroner was here for you, Miss Nicole. They want to know what you want to do with the baby's body. You can have a funeral or "
"Crme-A-tion. I want it cremated," Nicole says loudly and mostly to herself. She is out of breath. She is out of tears.
She lies there in the night, her hair plastered to her forehead. She is sticky and naked beneath her gown. She lies atop the thick floral comforter on her twin bed in the guest room of Peggy's home. She is sucking on ice chips. Thinking. She is thinking how she would be holding her baby in the crook of her arm like a wet stuffed pillow. Heavy and light at the same time. Meaningful, anyway. She would be letting her baby suckle from her breast right now, taking milk from underneath that indelible butterfly-cross tattoo.
She thinks of the day she had today. It hit 114 today in the sunny spots, which was all the spots with no shade in site. There are no real stars out tonight. The sky is the blackest black.
They had handed her the ashes in the tiniest of boxes. She fingered through it all, expecting it to have some heft. But amid the dust were only wee bits of sharp bones. Chunks and stones. Shards of white. All of it light like weightless light, not like bright light, although it was that, too. She shuffled through with her fingers and palmed some of it, then spread it in an even layer over the red dirt that lay beneath the old oak tree where her friend Lloyd had finally found his peace. Slowly, she swirled the gray and red dirt together, like dried blood mixing with porcelain clay. She knew their souls were gone but she imagined marking the place where they once were significantly here, a place where maybe they never even left.
She lets out a little cry in the meager breeze of the night air that skips in from the window. Lets the ice chips melt on her tongue. The Earth is all a part of us, she thinks. And she sleeps.