PROLOGUE

VIVIAN

This is what happens when your family won’t cut the cord. You’re left tethered, floating above them, watching their lives unfold from a waiting room. Over time, you become a witness to mundanity, bitterness, triumph, a legion of other states that follow after they lose you. You watch them go through the motions. Living, truly living, takes longer to relearn. You catch glimpses of it, rare moments that suggest that, eventually, you will be able to rest. But these come few and far between in some families. Mine included.
Right now, I am watching my mother, Rosy, tear up in a car parked outside the supermarket. She is sitting beside a woman my mother has only met once before, at a parent-teacher night years ago. Her name is Isaura, and her daughter, Mivi, means just about everything to my brother. They’re in the old Toyota where their children lost their virginity to each other. Neither of the mothers knows this, of course. I only know because I died nineteen years ago and have seen just about everything ever since.
It’s almost been two decades now, yet it’s still too difficult for my mother to let go. Leading up to each anniversary of my death, my father and brother tense up, wondering how she’ll handle it. It’s the big question on everyone’s mind come August. In our family at least. Everyone else seems concerned only with squeezing all the pulp out of summer. Most people seem happier that time of year, especially in Toronto, where heat is fleeting. But suffering isn’t softened by warm weather in our house. If anything, it exacerbates it. Brings it to a boiling point.
We’re months away from my anniversary, though. It’s just begun to snow in Toronto. As I watch my mother, I count each flake collecting on the windshield, each second it takes for them to melt before the two women.
It’s unlike my mother to get deep with anyone, especially someone she barely knows, but some maternal instinct led her into the car, sequestered her there with a woman she will now be forever yoked to. They idle for about half an hour, the windows foggy from conversation and Isaura’s misty eyes.
When my mother opens the door to get out, Isaura reaches her hand across the console and holds on to my mother’s. She thanks her. They both nod, an agreement to stay quiet, to keep the secret safe. My mother steps to the side and watches Isaura drive out of the lot, gazing at the warm gold of the blinker like it’s a lighthouse.
As soon as the car’s out of sight, my mother walks back into the grocery store to buy the bread she promised she’d bring home. The mantra that got her through that day she found out she was pregnant with me pops back into her head. It’s the one she uses every time there’s an unknown. Gather the data first, she thinks, then make a plan. She swipes the bread through the self-checkout scanner. Best to limit interactions when she’s on the verge of a spiral.
When my mother gets in her car, she allows herself a few tears, stops before the point of no return, before her eyes get swollen and tender and there’s no pretending. She thumbs the grey streak of makeup that’s gathered in her laugh lines; she won’t let it give her away. Gather the data and then make a plan. It’s time to make a plan. For the first time in almost twenty years, she believes that she might actually be capable of changing, making things right for our family.
She sits there a while longer and writes a bullet-point plan on her phone. She’s not instinctive like Isaura. She needs an outline, a to-do list. A structure with measurable steps like See how much is left in the emergency fund and Get Eddie to Detroit. Once she’s done writing the list, she whispers it to me.
“All right, my girl,” she says, a tinge of hope coating her words. “This. This is our new plan.”
ROSY

I don’t dread your birthday. On the first one without you, your father and I spent most of the day on the couch together like we did when you were alive. I wonder how much of it was muscle memory. Placing ourselves exactly where we’d been the last time we were all together, my belly almost as swollen as it had been then. On that first birthday, our neighbour Lorraine dropped off a cake in the morning. Some people might’ve found it strange, insensitive even, to bake a cake as garish as the one she’d made us. Angel food (how fitting), smothered in buttercream frosting, the borders piped, the top lush with marzipan roses. It was a cake that must’ve taken hours of meticulous work, pinching almond paste into coin-sized flowers, painting each petal until it blushed with realism.
Initially, the sight of your name in sugary, cursive lettering felt like an affront—I hadn’t written your name in months, and there Lorraine was, adding hearts to the is like she’d been an old friend. Still, I could appreciate the hours she had dedicated to your memory. As limited as my appetite was in those days of round-the-clock morning sickness, I savoured each sliver with that in mind.
I remember bringing the cake up to bed, setting it in the middle of the comforter, two forks stabbed into it. Crumbs littered the sheets, small dollops of icing, too. But we didn’t really care about those things on your birthday. What mattered was honouring your life. Between bites, we talked about your navy eyes, sure that they’d just been that shade that newborns grow out of, wondering if you would have inherited your father’s hazel eyes or my green ones. We recalled the feeling of your feathery hair, your padded feet, that gummy smile that you only treated us to once, milk drunk. We wondered whether the child I was carrying would look like you or not, unable to admit that either way would break our hearts.
Once our room got too hot, we made our way to the living room and pulled out your photo album. Your father had put it together around month ten. I can’t remember whether he’d wanted to mark the occasion—your being gone longer than I’d carried you—or just thought it was time. He’d developed all 117 photographs of you and slid each one into the plastic sleeves of a photo album. Going through the book didn’t make us cry. The photos were all so happy. But then we retrieved your box from the top of the storage closet.
From then on, each birthday that we summoned the courage to open the box would lead to an excavation. The careful removal of the onesies, which your father and I would pass between us, lifting each one up to our noses and making sure to set them back in the pile before any tears could alter the smell. We were stingy about every inhalation in an effort to prolong that bit of you. The sweet, powdery, milkiness of you. We’d paw through each scratch mitten, each pacifier, each pair of socks that we’d ever wrangled onto you, each burp blanket that we’d never had the time to wash. That was what would make us cry.
When there was nothing left, no more tears, no more memories, no more projections about what you might’ve grown into in the past year, we’d settle onto the couch that had moved with us from Detroit, where you were born, to Toronto, where we try to live without you. If hunger came, we’d order pizza like we had done in those first days with you. We’d eat it out of the box, in front of the TV, flipping through channels until we found something mind-numbing enough to distract us from missing you, if only for a few minutes. That was all we strove for back then.
It’s different now.
We barely even talk about your birthday. Not since the bottle incident. On the birthday that followed what I did to Eddie, both he and your father stayed out all day. That has since become our tradition. Nobody mentions it, nobody risks “triggering” me—I think that’s how your brother put it. It’s funny, almost, to think that I could forget if they didn’t remind me. But I let them stay quiet.
Today, like the last few birthdays, I stay home, alone, sipping coffee on the reading chair where no one ever sits, plucking through your album. On the arm of the chair, I’ve set my half-eaten piece of Black Forest cake, a layer of icing smeared against the thin plastic container. Every so often, I swipe my finger across it to scoop up some of the chocolate shavings. I let them melt on my tongue before reaching for more.
Your father and I still have cake for breakfast on your birthday. Eddie used to, until he understood the reason behind the tradition. That’s when he started pushing away plates, asking us how we could stomach so much sugar first thing in the morning. I baked them every year after our move, but eventually I stopped to spare us your brother’s disapproval. Now I just buy us each a single slice from the grocery store. Chocolate for me, red velvet for your father. He wakes up early on your birthday and we don’t have our cake together anymore. I picture him eating his slice by the bay window this morning before going off to work, and keeping a bite or two to taste the sweetness again after lunch.
My ritual is simpler now that I spend your birthday alone. I eat my cake and go through your album, stroking the lilac embroidery on the cover that reads BABY in block letters. Slowly, I scan each photograph, to pace myself but also to see whether I find anything new. A clue, maybe, something I missed that might’ve saved you. For the most part, I just spot old clothing of mine I don’t remember getting rid of.
Usually, people only print out their best or favourite photos, not the ones with blinking eyes and thumbed corners. But we wanted to keep them all. Each shot of you in the plastic bassinet at the hospital. The close-ups of the wristband inscribed with Baby Girl Powell. All the angles of your tiny body strapped into the car seat on the drive home. As I raise another forkful of cake to my mouth, I flip the pages. I go through all the firsts and lasts. Naps on the couch. Bath time. Pyjamas that hung too big on you, making you look like a tiny doll. Looking at the photos feels like taking a sip of water when you don’t realize how thirsty you are. But I have to pace myself on your birthday. I can’t drown in the memories. I can’t open your box anymore. I haven’t in years now. Mostly, because I’m afraid of the smell. That it’s not there anymore. That no bit of you, even a particle, exists anymore.
So, instead, when I’m done with your album, I work. I spend the rest of the day in my home office, reconciling. I make things make sense. It helps to be sucked in by the cleanness of numbers, the reward of solving something that didn’t add up before. A couple months after Eddie was born, I started working again. Ever since we’d lost you, I’d been diving in and out of lows so deep that not even your brother’s arrival could pull me out. As strange as it might sound, numbers were the only thing, I felt, that could save me. Work wasn’t exactly a cure, but it did feel like somewhat of a balm. I’d had my own accounting practice for a few years by then. Before Eddie was old enough to send to daycare, I had a sitter help out a few afternoons a week. Whenever she was here, whenever Eddie slept, whenever your father got home, I worked. On nights I couldn’t manage to sleep, I could turn to numbers. Distract myself. Solve problems that weren’t my own.
Before I open my computer to begin working, I plug my phone into the speakers by my desk and start the playlist I made for your father’s fiftieth a couple years ago. It’s a compilation of the musicians he and I used to watch in bars and clubs when we were young. The Gories, Big Chief, The Romantics. They’re some of the only Detroit memories that I can stomach, probably because they feel so removed from you, from me as a mother. I was barely a woman when we’d danced to them. Since no one’s home, I turn the volume nearly all the way up to drown out more thoughts of you. To try to move on from your photos and dive into my spreadsheets, fill my head with music and math. For at least the duration of fifty songs, I try to forget that you were born twenty years ago today and that I miss you just as fiercely as I did that first birthday.