When You Were Here

first.
    “I’m sorry I was such a dick the other night.”
    She shakes her head. “You weren’t.”
    “Yes. I was.”
    “It’s not like any of this is remotely normal. It’s not like there aren’t a million ways I could have done this better. Or told you better.”
    “Yeah, but you flew all the way over here, and I couldn’t even talk to you.”
    “So talk to me now,” she says in a shy, nervous voice. “If you want.”
    “I do. I do want that.”
    We walk to a bench under a shady tree a few feet away. Neither one of us says anything for a minute, and maybe that’s because us —whatever we were, whatever we might be—is so fragile, or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s because we both know there’s something that needs to be done and said.
    “Do you have her pictures with you? Sarah’s pictures?”
    “Yes. Do you want to see them?”
    “Yes.” I am ready.
    She unzips her shoulder bag, a black canvas thing, and takes out a manila envelope. The sky is crystal blue, andthe sun beats down. But the air is cool under the tree; we’re not baking in the midday heat here on this bench.
    “Is this weird?” she asks. She looks so vulnerable here with me, far away from all her bearings, her internal clock still off by many hours.
    “No,” I reassure her. But it is weird. I brace myself as I watch her hands unfold the clasp. I don’t know what to expect. Part of me expects the macabre, the morbid, even though she said the pictures are of Sarah alive. But I never knew her alive, so all I can think of is a dead baby. Holland opens a slim brown leather photo album. It’s a small album, the kind that holds just a few photos.
    She holds it open on her lap and points to the first picture. It’s black-and-white, an ultrasound picture. I read the type on the white border—twenty-two weeks.
    She turns the page. It’s a close-up of her belly, round but not huge. “I was twenty-four weeks. I took it myself,” she says with a shrug, like she’s apologizing for the angle.
    The next picture is Holland in a hospital chair holding a tiny little creature wrapped in a white baby blanket. Just the top of the baby’s head is showing, a smattering of dark hair on her head. When I see her hair, I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me again. The picture is just like the one I found in my mom’s room, but I’m looking at it in a new light now, looking at it and knowing exactly what it is. My kid. And my kid had my hair. “She has my hair.” The words don’t sound like they come from me.
    “Yes, she did,” Holland says, and touches the back of my hair lightly with her hand, like she’s reminding herself, like the touch of my hair is reconnecting her. She returns her hand to the photo album and turns the page again. In the next photo, Holland is smiling. She looks exhausted, her hair a wild mess, but she’s holding Sarah in her arms and the photographer has captured both faces—mother and daughter. Sarah is tiny, her eyes are closed, but she’s all there, all the parts—lips and cheeks and ears and nose.
    “She slept most of the time, but in this picture of her in the Isolette you can see her eyes,” Holland says as she shows me one of the last photos. Sarah is surrounded by wires and tubes, but she’s wide awake, with a crinkly forehead and bright gray eyes that stare into the camera. There are specks of blue around the edges of the gray.
    “She was going to have blue eyes, wasn’t she?”
    Holland nods. “I think so.”
    “Like you.”
    “Yes. Like me. And brown hair like you.”
    Holland closes the photo album. I expect her to be crying, but she’s not. She seems peaceful. She seems okay with all of this, with showing me the pictures, with talking about Sarah.
    “So my brown-hair gene beat your recessive blond. But your recessive blue eyes beat my brown.”
    “Sounds like we’d call that a draw.”
    Then in a quieter voice, I say, “She was cute. She was beautiful.”
    “She was ours.”
    “I wonder what she would have been like,” I say.
    “I’m sure she would have been very sweet. And very funny, like you. Lots of jokes about Captain Wong’s.”
    “And she would have been easy to talk to, like you.”
    “And kind and thoughtful. She would have been thoughtful,” Holland continues, though I’m not so sure I’ve been anywhere close to thoughtful lately.
    “And caring. The kind of person who remembered to trim the boat orchids.”
    “And she would have made all