Amy and John walked up the hill to the Hemlock section, Amy relishing the memories this place produced, as she always did. This camp was a marker for all her firsts: a bunk in the Hemlock section, where Helen lived now, was where she’d woken up one August morning and found blood in her underwear; in the bathroom in the same section was where Jenny Smalls had coached her, from outside the bathroom stall, on how to put in her first tampon; and down in the oar house, that was where she had sex for the first time and where, a summer later, she had her first orgasm. Now those things felt so long ago. She did not want her girls to grow out of the camp life, because that would mean the end of their firsts too.
Helen’s blond curls bounced as she bounded over to her parents. Physically, Liam was a miniature version of his father and Fiona an amalgamation of both parents, but Helen was all Amy. They had the same toothy, uninhibited smile, which John had said was one of the first things he noticed about Amy when they were kids: that she smiled no matter what was happening, even if it wasn’t something particularly delightful. Helen, like Amy, gave her smiles away easily, to anyone and everyone. This made them both likeable people. It had taken longer than it should have for Amy to learn that it also gave the impression that they were simple people.
“How’s Dandelion?” Amy asked. “How’s Josie?” These were Helen’s and Fiona’s horses, which the Larkins kept at camp during the summer. Amy missed spending time with them like she was able to during the school year. Now that Fiona was away at college, Amy had taken on the care of Josie as if she were her own, and she and Helen would go on rides together on weekend mornings. The Larkins had bought the horses for their girls because they could. This was the consolation that came with being married to a man who didn’t touch you anymore but who did well: At least you could give your daughters what you never had.
“She’s so good,” Helen said. “There’s a horse expo later, so you’ll see everything I’ve been working on. I want to surprise you.”
“Okay, sweetheart,” Amy said, running a hand through her daughter’s hair.
She then realized she had forgotten Helen’s goodies in the car, things she thought Helen might miss: magazines, nail polish, and hair scrunchies; provisions such as peanut butter and ramen noodles; necessities like face wash and sunscreen.
John put an arm around Helen and playfully pulled her closer. Helen beamed as she looked up at her dad. Amy loved how much they loved each other, because she was their link; she had everything to do with it. She had chosen this man, and she had birthed this girl.
“I have a few things for you,” Amy told Helen, still glowing at the sight of the two of them. “I guess we were so excited to see you, we forgot to bring them up.” She turned to John. “Keys?” He nodded, reached into his pocket, and tossed them to her. She caught them effortlessly.
She walked back down the hill, smiling at the kids running ahead of their parents.
“Luke, slow down!” a man yelled. The woman next to him was cradling a tiny bundle to her breast. Amy could not stop herself from peeking into the sling as she passed. The baby’s face was tiny, red, wrinkled. Fast asleep.
“How old is he?” Amy whispered to the mother.
The woman smiled, that tired smile exchanged only between mothers, which contained so much intrinsic knowledge, and happiness, and pain.
“Three weeks,” the mother said. “It’s a girl.”
—
Liam was Amy’s first, a baby with bright eyes who was so easy that he cried only when it was something Amy could easily fix and almost always slept through the night. At first, she did not understand all the fuss about babies being hard. But then came the girls: Fiona, who had an inquisitive, worrying face—such a serious girl—and who, between her third and fifth months, refused to be put down even once. When feeding her, when taking her out, even when puttering around the house, Amy had to be standing and holding Fiona in her arms and moving in a back-and-forth motion, or else Fiona’s unhappiness would be irreparable, and Amy would have to pay for it in painful, deafening screams that could last for hours. And so she paid in constant, tireless attention and chronic low back pain instead. Fiona eventually got excited by her own crawling, an immense relief to Amy until the baby started eating paper and chewing on remote controls and drinking water from the toilet bowl.
Then long after Amy thought she was done—six years after—Helen came. She was not planned—this was when Amy and John still had sex—but how Amy loved being pregnant again, how she loved having a second girl, how she loved that she would have two daughters and they would be sisters. She had never had a sister of her own.
Yet her girls did not like each other. As a baby, Helen did not like anyone, in fact, except Liam. Helen would let herself be held by Amy only when she was feeding, and then she wanted to spend the rest of her time with her older brother, who doted on her so much that Amy worried for Helen’s future with boys. There was no way to explain why she was smitten with Liam and yet so uninterested in Fiona, who wanted desperately to be Helen’s friend. When Helen was six months old, Fiona wanted to bring her into her first grade class for show-and-tell, and Amy suspected how it would turn out, but she took the chance anyway—hoping, against the odds, to be proved wrong. At the entrance to the classroom, an excited Fiona, wearing a new pink dress, took Helen from Amy’s arms carefully, the way she had been taught, holding Helen’s butt with one hand and her head with the other.
Once she was transferred to her sister, Helen cried so passionately and flapped her arms and legs so violently that she literally wriggled herself out of Fiona’s tenuous grip and fell, butt first, onto the linoleum floor. Fiona was still small, so Helen’s fall to the ground was neither too far nor too hard, but it was enough to startle the baby, enough for her to stop, look up in that surprised, delayed way that children do, in the moment of confusion between being fine and being hurt, and then break into a stunning scream.
Amy took Helen home before Fiona could show her sister off. Helen would not stop crying. Amy fed her, changed her, sang to her, rocked her. She was inconsolable. Two hours later, Amy drove back to the school and had the principal call Liam, who was in third grade, out of his class. When he saw his crying sister, he very calmly sat down in the chair across from the principal’s desk and put his arms out for Amy to place the baby in them. Helen fell asleep within minutes.
“Thanks, sweetie,” Amy whispered, kissing Liam on the forehead and placing Helen gingerly into her carrier.
The whole drive home, with Helen fast asleep in the backseat, Amy wept quietly. She had never felt more useless.
—
Amy opened the trunk of their SUV and unloaded the shopping bags onto the ground. As she was about to close the trunk, she heard the distinct bleep of John’s cellphone. Odd that he had left it in the car; he was always so connected to work, even on the weekends. But she thought perhaps he was trying to unplug by leaving it, and that thought was heartening to her.
She shut the trunk. She was walking away with the bags when she stopped and thought, Maybe John didn’t mean to leave the phone in the car. Maybe he’d meant to slip it into his pocket and had forgotten. It might be best to get it in case something important came up.