Archive of Our Own

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry   
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

- SYLVIA PLATH, "MORNING SONG"

There was a very important board meeting! And Shiv’s water broke a few hours before the markets opened, at something like five twenty-six a.m.

The breaking, if she had been awake for it, would have felt like a cross between an accident and an arrival: an evacuation that was an entrance. In any case the sheets flooded, sticking the bed to her legs with The Godfather’s slick horse blood sensation. “What the fuck,” she croaked when she eventually slivered her eyes awake. She had been eight the last time she’d wet the bed.

Then, she had called for her mother, who had come lightly only after the au pair had gone to fetch her, and who had said Siobhan, really, tugging Shiv’s nightgown rough up over her shoulders and elbows right in the middle of the big Inverness bedroom. You’re much too old to make such an awful mess. Shiv had crossed her wrists over her chest and shivered though it had not been cold. Really, Siobhan. Really.

Now, she called her mother, who said, “Well, darling, what do you want me to do about it?” In England it was nearly eleven a.m. Shiv imagined her mother drinking tea in a grey gripe of sunlight and eating nothing for breakfast. Nothing, she thought, and said so.

She texted Tom’s assistant next—not Greg, one of the other ones, a Sarah spin-off—who emphasized her text and then sent a thumbs up emoji. I’ll ping him. Good luck!

What kind of luck did Shiv need with three-hundred years of modern medicine and an epidural at her fingertips, not to mention a routine c-section that she was about to arrive for well ahead of schedule? What kind of luck did she need with her husband in a glass conference room before the sun was up and his dog nosing the tell-tale stain she’d left down in their bed?

She’d read in one of the many dumb fat baby books Tom kept leaving by the toilet that early modern Europeans had made glass wombs — to teach, sometimes, but mostly to imagine they’d be able to see whatever the motherfuck was going on inside the warp of women’s bodies. Pregnant bellies perturbed dogs and despots. For most of history, everything that had gone on in there had been a tale told by a girlish idiot, signifying a lot of something, only no one could say exactly what until the thing itself slid into the world saying me, me, me!

Shiv knew her baby was a girl, because it was 2023, and because months ago she and Tom had looked coolly at one another over the monochrome index of a sonogram. He had said, “oh, Siobhan, a daughter” like he was pronouncing the name of a rare and carnivorous flower, or a particularly good wine. Shiv had said, “I guess so.”

It was all so made up until it wasn’t.

She thought to buzz Tom directly, too, just for the sake of the record — it was the kind of oversight she could see him pointing to like hard evidence days or months or years from now, if she gave him an opening. I missed my own daughter’s birth because you couldn’t be bothered to call me! For some reason, the phantom barb made her kind of smile. The way his hands would come up for emphasis when he shouted it. The fact that they had not yet lived all of the worst things they might someday get to say to one another.

Shiv dialed and let it ring once. She resisted the urge to screenshot her call log. She typed: Hey. The thing is happening.

Like, now.

Like, really.

Her belly squeezed low into her groin like a cut lemon. Calling the car around, she thought of how absurd it was, how gross and embarrassing, for anything to happen, to anyone but especially to her. Her sweats were sticking to her tacky thighs. Mondale had sniffed at them as she peeled herself out of bed. “It’s not piss, sicko,” she'd hissed. If Tom were here he’d probably have made her shower first, just a quick rinse, honey, and he’d have held her hand outside the curtain with the fixed wrist of a butler, as though Shiv could not maintain her own ponderous shape without slipping mortally on marble.

But Tom wasn’t here, because their presumptuous offspring was evidently ready to spill out two full days before the blinking purple event banner on their shared G-cal said she should. (It read, soberly, “Shiv’s appointment.”) Tom, and Sarah 2.0, and Shiv’s own Sarah, and her OB, and her OB’s assistant, Sarah-Beth, and Connor and Willa were all RSVP’d. What had Tom said to her a few months ago? You’ve fallen in love with our scheduling opportunities. Well, so much for fucking that. “Little shit,” Shiv said tightly, tapping a finger above her belly button. “Entitled. Impatient. Little. Shit.”

It was not light out, because it was not morning, because it was not the right time. On the stairs Shiv chewed her lip, then crammed sunglasses on her face to greet the no-color of the day.

In the hours before the markets opened, her dad used to say that nothing stuck. Everything was liquid and formless until nine thirty hit. It was pre-real time, said her dad. Time before time meant anything. He'd brought her to the NYSE trading floor once or twice to see them ring the opening bell, which was real and golden and sounded like pure pennies. Hot loud bodies had moved in response to it. Men in dark jackets and long shoes, yelling like her father, like they were being born. Standing between them, Shiv and the men in suits like his, her dad had raised his hands and laughed, and Shiv had known then exactly what counted, and what didn’t.

It was five forty seven. Anything could still be undone. On the stock exchange floor and in glass conference rooms bodies sweat and waited, while invisible around them unreal time tabulated futures that need never exist. There was a world in which she was not having this baby. There was a world in which Tom had never come to France. There was a world in which her father was alive, with his hands raised, and the men wearing his same suits all stayed on his leeward side.

Shiv’s stomach seized in a wet cramp. Her hands felt slick and empty. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to get it over with or never do it ever; if she’d like her daughter to be born after the bell, held golden, or before it.

From the car, she called Connor, who said, Baby!, and Shiv said, yes, yeah, baby, and tried hard to make it sound like a thing a person could believe.

--

There was a very important board meeting! And Shiv slept through it on hydromorphone in a quiet wing of the hospital, where the walls were slate grey instead of yellow to indicate that this was a place where things more vital and interesting than pure pediatrics occurred. It was a wing for people with bad red blood cell counts and net worths over seven bil. A wing for old men and not for daughters.

Tom came in with less trepidation than he had come into the wing where her father had not died. Easy was the way he entered into most rooms now, though his steps were still so soundless as to suggest a fundamental lack of heft.

“Did I miss it?” he asked, running in his breath. He had walked up at a brisk but regular pace.

“There was nothing to miss.” Connor stood and beamed, a floor lamp. “We all miss it, you know? It’s just a moment. It’s missed. Shivvy here missed it — been out like a light since they first wheeled her in.”

Shivvy here: doughy and blotched against the pillows. Her face blurred for lack of make-up. A pair of Tom Ford sunglasses pushed up like a headband around the crown of her head. Tom reached for these so her hair could fall closed around her closed eyes. He folded them precisely into his breast pocket. “And,” he asked, “the baby?”

“The little duchess of Milan,” said Connor. “The burden. The issue. The princess Perdita. Oh, she’s a peach, sire. She’s an eye-apple, a strawberry cheesecake — Willa will tell you. Willa, isn’t she just totally peerless, a pear?”

“A bushel and a peck,” said Willa, who was sitting on a silver-wicked chair with a Moleskine and a yellow novel open on her lap.

“A barrel and a heap,” said Connor.

“Uh, yeah, doodle-oo,” said Tom. He cast his eyes about the room like he could somehow have missed the entire grainery that was his infant daughter. Whom everyone else had already apparently seen.

“They’ll bring her back in a minute,” Willa said. “Counting fingers and toes, you know.”

“Pa had a great uncle once who was born with a tail,” said Connor.

“My baby does not have a tail,” said Shiv, who was now blinking against the curtain of her own hair. Her voice was gum and cotton, but she masticated best she could. “Where are my fucking sunglasses.”

Tom came to her temple. “Right here.”

Shiv glared up at him, a barren furrow where she’d usually draw her eyebrows in, split by a strand of her hair. “Oh,” she said. “I guess I should have said where’s my fucking husband. Two birds.” She let him slide the shades behind her ears to hold her hair back again and, druggy still, allowed herself a sigh.

“Shiv, I’m sorry, I wasn’t — I didn’t see your text until twenty minutes ago. The meeting.” Tom lingered his hand near her face but didn’t touch it.

“The meeting,” Shiv repeated. Her mouth got wan and mean for a moment, then fleshed back out into opioid lushness. “I know. We’ve met.”

Hadn’t they. “You only called once,” Tom said.

“You only picked up zero fuckin’ times,” said Shiv.

“She was early.”

“You,” Shiv sucked the words with ice chip relish, “were late.”

Tom sat down close on the edge of the bed. His dark important board meeting suit creased in a bunch of weird places. One arm angled out across Shiv's stomach to press into the mattress near her hip. It dented, his presence. Shiv dipped low with it, tucking her chin. “You’re alright?” he asked. “They didn’t try to give you the propofol? Dr. Eggar was here? You brought the go-bag? Everything’s okay?”

Tom had been up nights packing the go-bag like a man haunted by apocalyptic visions. Or Connor. Actually, Shiv was pretty sure Connor had been responsible for forwarding him links in some of the furtive little emails he read at all hours of the night instead of sleeping. She hadn’t been sleeping either, of course, but it was because she had been growing an entire college savings fund inside of her, its bones by that time fine and chiseled along the clavicle and ribs, already Ivy League. This, she thought, was a better reason for insomnia than taking calls from a Swede with an entire dexterous hand up her ass. Or exchanging emails with a man currently building a sixth extinction bunker in Botswana.

In the go-bag, which was stupid, there were many stupid things that Shiv suddenly stupidly wished she could touch and see. A soft headband from Rava. A big grey hoodie she’d had since college. A massive water bottle with an infuser. Her mouth was so fucking dry.

“I forgot the bag,” Shiv admitted. She felt like she had when her mother had stripped her bare in the Inverness, the drum of midges outside made louder somehow by all her naked skin. Really, Siobhan. “That’s why I’m wearing these.” The sunglasses. “No hair stuff. No headband.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Well, that’s — you know, that’s okay.”

“Yeah,” Shiv said, defensive. He would miss his own kid’s birth and then be upset about a fucking bag. “I know that’s okay.”

“Hey.” Tom peered at her. “It really is, Shiv. It is okay.”

What? “I know,” Shiv said. It came out snotty, literally. Tom peered harder. Con and Willa had ducked conspicuously out of the room. Shiv swiped at her face. Evidently, she had been crying since the word bag. “What the fuck,” she muttered. “I’m on drugs.”

“You’re on drugs,” Tom agreed. “And you just had a baby.”

“And I just had a baby. I just had a seven pound baby.” Shiv settled her bewildered head against the pillows. “I can’t believe I just had a whole heavy person cut out of me, and I still have to sit here and talk to you about it.”

A silence in which the hospital did not make hospital sounds, because they were too far from the riff-raff to hear. Everyone on this end bled and died quietly.

Then: “Seven pounds?” Tom said, a thrill in it. “Really?”

Shiv considered her husband from beneath the uncomfortable tug of her sunglasses headband. He was like a stalk of straw in a black and white movie. Something upon which people chewed and chewed while it stayed straight and eagerly ruffled. His teeth were Vanity Fair foolishness, his eyes pained and remote. They’d made public her pregnancy at a GoJo merger gala a couple months back, his first major society outing as CEO, and he had looked like this in all the pictures: too white below too blue.

“Did you,” he was saying, “Shiv, did you see her?”

Hardly. “Yes,” Shiv said. “For, you know — for a moment. I was awake for most of it. It was like, the world’s worst form of interactive theater. This fuckin’ white curtain is splitting me in half, and Willa is there.”

Tom’s laugh was not about anything funny. But it was funny, still. “Yeah.” Those teeth. “Willa is there.”

“And then they gave her to me,” Shiv said. “And I — got to say. I got to say, hello, you know. I did. I got to say hi.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Good. I mean, good.” He was not laughing anymore.

“I was the first one to know her,” Shiv said. It was a thing, she thought, like how he had told her the night of the funeral that he would never forget seeing her dad on the floor of that airplane bathroom, that they would both do well to remember. “I was the very first one.”

Tom looked hard at her. White and blue, white and blue. Shiv was going to have a scar down her belly as thick as a finger. She was going to show it to him as soon as possible, as soon as it was pink.

“You were,” Tom said, “that.”

“You weren’t even second. Or third. Third was Connor. Think of what that’s gonna do to the poor kid.”

“Shiv.” Tom rubbed at his forehead. “Please.”

“What? Three is an important number. He could be her favorite person in the world. I’m just saying. If my baby grows up obsessed with collecting dead imperialist’s tiny shriveled dicks, it’s on you.”

“And if she grows up with a tail,” said Tom, “it’s on you.”

“Are you shitting me? Tail genes absolutely trickle down from your inbred farmer side of the family.”

“Not according to Connor and Logan’s great uncle the dog-tailed boy.”

“No shit.” For some reason this thrilled Shiv. The right wrongness of it. “Imagine if one of us had had a fucking tail.” Us, her brothers, and not Connor, though he was the one she saw most often. Roman was available via FaceTime and unexpected midnight 'drops round,' which could not be counted upon nor anticipated. Kendall was not available at all. “Then we all would have wanted one.”

“She will have a perfectly average, perhaps even above average, tail-less bottom,” said Tom. His eyelashes cast a pretty pall across his cheek. His power suit was now just dumpy and rumpled. He looked like a man from a place where sadness made sense. “Our baby.”

Shiv laughed, because she saw him so clearly then with her eyes still oozy from bad theater and pain medication. Because he had said the word bottom like a school marm. Because he had tucked her sunglasses so sweetly. Because they had met, and G-calendared, and still he had missed it for the meeting.

“What’s funny?”

“You,” she said. “You and ‘our.’ You and your ‘our’ thing.”

“Our thing,” said Tom in a mild suburban living room voice.

When Shiv had said, my baby, nothing had happened. But when Tom said it, said this, said our thing, well fuckin’ — poof! She winked right into existence. One moment, they were Shiv and Tom, and they were vain and stupid; the next they were someone’s parents, and they were the same, except now they were to blame for everything.

Rolling into the room between a nurse’s two thin hands in a see-through plastic box with wheels that chimed like bells, their thing signified herself, red-faced and round-mouthed, all thing-like and tail-less, with eyes Shiv recognized straight away, though the toilet book had said all babies’ were the same.

The nurse said, “Here we are! And dad’s here, too. Great. Great timing.”

“What time is it?” Shiv asked.

“Nine thirty-one,” said the nurse.

Tom said nothing and fished his mouth open and closed like a trout.

In her arms the nurse put the thing, and the thing put out her fist, and Tom put out a careful knuckle to meet it, and Shiv put something out of place in her gut when she sat straight up to better get a grip on her, this golden bell baby, who existed so fully it felt like she’d invented new shapes to accommodate her.

“Oh my god, Shiv,” said Tom.

And “oh,” Shiv found she was already saying, “oh, I didn’t know.”

--

There was a very important board meeting! And Rooney was screaming all night because that’s what babies did, apparently, and even though Shiv couldn’t hear her on the first floor of the triplex where the baby shared a suite with the nanny, she could still know.

It was exhaustion and the apartment’s hollow echo and the insistent gross swell of her breasts that made Shiv pack up the baby and the nanny and the baby’s bags full of diapers and soft things and board a jet to Inverness. It was the raw open way Tom had looked at Rooney when he first held her in that grey hospital, too. Shiv was not sure she had ever seen anyone wear quite that face before. She was curious to find out what it meant.

She wrote him a two line email. Heading for the Highlands with the baby, baby. Back soon. He called her eleven times before the plane had even taxi’d out of LaGuardia. By thirty-thousand feet, her whole phone screen was unusable with missed calls. It was odd. She’d thought he was in a meeting.

Propped up across from Shiv in the thirteen-hundred dollar car seat Tom had lost six nights of sleep picking out, Rooney wore a delicate pout. Her eyes were the same blue as before. Her skin was ruddy and her hair was dark. Her fists had tiny moony fingernails that the nanny kept trying to cut with a pair of fine silver scissors. They made Shiv nervous, their sharpness and its proximity to Rooney’s small hands. She’d snapped at Sonia twice over it. Now Rooney scratched whenever she made contact, and Shiv’s skin was always running with little pink strings hooked to her daughter’s fingertips.

“You’re mad at me too now, huh?” she asked, rocking the seat with the tip of her boot. It was equipped with tiny airbags, and an iPhone charger.

Rooney said nothing. She blew an impressive spit bubble. Most things she did were impressive, quite frankly. The other morning she had thrown up breakfast onto Tom’s tie with such verve and accuracy that Shiv had been forced to press her nose into the side of the baby’s soft head and try not to want to eat her whole, morning vomit and night screams and all.

“Mm, the silent treatment,” Shiv appraised. “It’s a good strategy. I’m not sure who you learned it from, though.” She held up her buzzing phone. “Your father cannot shut the fuck up. Also, it won’t work on me.”

She ducked her head close into the car seat to mouth a plummy cheek. Her daughter’s fingers caught in her hair, sticky though they were clean, and her nails scraped against Shiv’s cheek. Good.

“I’m un-iceable, baby,” she said. “You’re gonna have to not talk to me forever.”

Rooney said, “Gack!”

Shiv said, “See? Ya blew it.”

Her phone said TRISH WAMBSGANS when it buzzed again. To Rooney, Shiv mouthed, What the fuck? And then, surprised to the point of wry interest, she actually picked up.

“Uh, hello?”

“Shiv?” Tom’s mother always spoke too loudly over the phone, though in person she had the voice of a bird-watcher.

“Trish, hi.”

“How are you, dear?”

“Oh, you know.” Shiv rolled her eyes at Rooney, as though Rooney were not the whole how of it. “I can’t sleep at night, drinking coffee makes me feel like I’m on crack and raising a crackhead baby, my boobs keep jizzing all over every top that fits. I haven’t seen another adult besides Sonia in like ten days.”

And Tom, but the thing about him was he didn’t count.

“Glad to hear you’re well,” said Trish.

“Uh-huh,” said Shiv.

Trish then made the creaking sound Shiv knew meant she was literally choking on an unpleasant bit of information. Tom had made a sound like this when he told her Matsson was 'still thinking' about her and ATN.

“Er,” she started, “this is rather awkward, but I’m sure you know why I’m calling.”

Shiv shook her head at Rooney, who spit another perfect bubble back. “Uh, no,” she said. “Not calling just to touch base with your favorite daughter-in-law after she bore your son a sparess?”

"No," said Trish. "But give Rooney my love. And the thing from the package I sent last week."

It had been a floppy pink-eared puppy, and Shiv had given it to Mondale. 

"I did. She loves it. She says thank you so much. I still have no idea why you're calling me." 

“Well, Shiv, I find that a little hard to believe,” said Trish, not louder but somehow heavier, and Shiv shimmied a little, liking it. Trish Wambsgans with the pink plush puppies and the sensibly manicured talons. If she could only manage seventh grade science teacher levels of severe, so be it. It was more interesting than sounding like a woman who stared at sparrows for fun all day. “It seems Tom is concerned that you’ve taken Rooney out of the country in preparation to make a play for full custody, and he would like to — “

“What?” Shiv liked it less now, the voice. “I mean, what the actual fuck? We’re not even splitting up.”

They hadn’t talked about it, but there was no reason to talk about it when every morning he got up and said honey, and she stood smiling closed-lip next to him at every photo op. Sometimes they even shared a bed. Always they shared the thing — not Rooney. The other thing. In the plane bathroom. In the brisk reports from Kendall’s rehab facility. In the way they did not look at each other in the backs of cars.

“That’s what I said to him, Siobhan, but he seemed very upset.”

“Tom’s upset? Tom? Wow. Should we call all the stations? I mean, that’s never happened before. Tom. Upset. You’re blowing my fucking mind, Patricia.”

Trish sighed like her son. A breath that was a superior condemnation. Shiv looked at Rooney, who was looking at her with only mild interest, and spit, and no scorn. She’d kicked the iPhone cable up to where she could twist it in one little fist. Smart.

“Shiv,” Trish said, “you know I’m not a family lawyer, but I would caution you that getting the UCCJEA involved in something like this is really no light matter. The courts do not look kindly on international abduction, and the Hague Convention clearly stipulates — “

“What the fuck?” Shiv punched out a laugh that made her feel her c-section scar. “This is a joke. You’re joking, Trish. If I wanted to keep him away from his kid, I’d fucking serve him. Jesus Christ. Tom would wake up to a fire alarm and think it’s a fucking air raid siren.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I’m taking my daughter to meet her grandmother — her other grandmother, I mean. Is that okay with you? Do I have permission? My mom hasn’t been able to come into town. My great aunt had a place in Inverness, which is where we’re going, which Tom knows, because I fucking told him.”

“It didn’t sound to me,” Trish was using a Kohl’s size 00 voice, “like he knew where you were. And you wouldn’t answer his calls.”

“Well, it’s not my fault if he can’t read a fucking email. I gotta go, Trish, your granddaughter is choking on an iPhone charger. Bye!”

Shiv unthreaded the white cord from Rooney’s fingers. “Don’t eat that,” she said. “Your father will use it against me in a court of law if you start talking like Siri.”

Rooney screwed up her face, grasping, gearing up for the Big Scream. Shiv felt a familiar wet pressure in her chest. “Nuh-huh,” she said. “Not right now.” To Sonia, probably sleeping somewhere past the cabin curtain, lazy, she sent a quick text. Need to pump in ten. To Rooney, she gave her pinky finger as a peace offering, and hoped it would not punish her later, like Versailles.

She called Tom, who answered on the first ring the way he hadn’t on the morning Rooney was born.

“What,” he said flatly, “the living fuck, Siobhan.”

“Hello to you, too, Norman Bates. You called your mom?”

“You called your mom?”

So Trish must have texted him in the forty-five seconds since they’d hung up the phone. He was very plugged in, today.

“Yeah,” Shiv lied. “She was hounding me about seeing the baby, so I thought, why not? I’m unemployed. Getting pretty boring sitting around watching news with your daughter clawing at my tits all day, if I’m honest.”

“Oh, sure,” said Tom. They both liked to pretend she breastfed, because the books said it was better. “Sure, sure. I’m sorry that you were bored, Siobhan. I’m sorry it made you feel like you had to kidnap our fucking daughter.”

Shiv laughed. “Oh, please. I told you where we were going. I said we’d be back soon. Don’t get so worked up.”

“Shiv, I swear to God.” He sounded so worked up. Shiv grimaced.

She did not care about God, nor anybody swearing to him, but she felt suddenly hot and embarrassed by the appeal to a higher power. Trish’s legal thing — well, it had been unsettling, but mostly because it was so absurd. Of course this wasn’t some long game custody maneuver. She had just been, I don’t know, curious? She'd wondered what it would be like if she made a kind of Caroline move. In the sense that she was going to her mother and that she was going, in the abrupt way she had, like her mother. But it wasn't a real thing. It was only just to see if anything might happen.

“It’s not a big deal, Tom,” she said. “I’ll have Sonia forward you the address.”

“Good. Do that. I’m already on the tarmac.”

“What? You’re stalking me to fucking Scotland? Are you insane?”

“Yes! Yes, I am fucking insane. Do you know the meetings I’m missing for this? Do you know how sick I’ve been all day? I had to leave Greg in charge of the meeting. Greg! I’m out of my mind, Shiv, and you put me there.”

“I haven’t done anything to you,” said Shiv. Trish’s seventh grade teacher tone came back to her, and she felt able to meet it now, as a seventh grader herself. “I sent you an email.”

“You sent me an email. I don’t know how to explain to you, Siobhan, that until roughly one minute ago I thought you had stolen my fucking baby.”

“That’s impossible,” said Shiv. Rooney was digging her nails into her pinky. “I can’t steal her. She belongs to me.”

“I know you think that.”

The pinky ceased to satisfy. Rooney peeped, bird-like, then opened her whole red mouth and squalled. Fuck.

“Is that her?” asked Tom. “Rue?”

“No, no,” Shiv said. “I’m torturing someone else’s child, Tom.”

Shiv hung up to go let a mouthy plastic machine suck all the milk and ire right out of her chest. When this had filled up her daughter's stomach, they both slept for identical hours with their lips turned down.

--

There was a very important board meeting! And Caroline met Shiv and Rooney in the shifty green world of the manor’s front gardens, where huge orange bougainvillea lolled their boozy tongues.

“Darling,” Caroline said, “you should have told me you would come.”

“I thought I had Sarah text you, so.”

Shiv’s mother was wearing a hat so big it was possible that she could not see Rooney under the rim of it. Shiv had taken the baby in her arms, which she didn't often do, because it felt important that her mother see her with her daughter’s cheek pressed holy and mild against her shoulder. Rooney, who was tetchy and irritable after the long flight, was not on the same wavelength. She held her tear-stained face away from Shiv’s and dripped snot and kept kicking one round heel into her belly. After a moment, Caroline reached out and caught this heel between two fingers, like the mother before the River Styx.

“Well, well,” said Caroline, tilting her head up to raise the brim of her hat. “What’s all this, then?”

“All this,” said Shiv, “is Rooney. Your granddaughter.”

“I know that,” Caroline said, “I’ve seen the pictures. I'm even thinking I may have one of them framed. She’s a little heavier in person, hm?”

“Mom — “

“No, no. Don’t take it in a bad way. You love to take things in the worst way. I just mean there’s more of her, you know? She’s very present.”

Rooney kicked free the heel still in her grandmother’s fingers. Shiv again fought the urge to eat her safe and whole. “Yeah, mom,” she said, “one thing you always want to be able to say of your grandchildren is that they sure are here.”

“Indeed,” Caroline said. “And may I?” She made no move to indicate for what she would like permission.

“May you—?”

“Oh, you know.” Caroline's fingers pinched by her sides. “Hold her, or what have you.”

When Shiv had pictured this, which she hadn’t, really, she had vaguely imagined that her mother might molt before her, turning to spiders or dust in the radiant face of Shiv’s own glorious maternity. She had not imagined the weird sameness of them, the chain link of her and her mother’s wedding bands toasting each other as their hands overlapped on the baby’s fat thigh. She had not been prepared to recognize the sharp way Caroline jutted her left hip to take Rooney’s weight. Shiv’s own body did that, and she had never thought it might look like anything.

“Well,” said Caroline again when the baby was situated, examining her face, “her eyes are like her father’s, aren’t they?”

Shiv blinked her own blue eyes. “I guess so.”

“And she’ll never have that gorgeous red hair. Recessive genes,” her mother scolded, “it’s a crime. Rooney was a very presumptuous name — you knew it meant red hair? It’s not even in our family.”

Shiv shrugged. It also meant born of winners. “Maybe she won’t have to wear SPF 80.”

“Maybe she will be very tall,” said Caroline, not listening. “Yes. Yes, I think she might tower above you before the time she’s turned thirteen. Do you think so, pet?”

Rooney blew a spit bubble, and when it popped Caroline winced like it had caught her in the eye.

“That means no,” said Shiv.

But Caroline was listing down with the baby in her arms to get close to a spray of blue-green leaves, underfoot all around the overgrown garden. She pointed for Shiv’s benefit. “You see these leaves? These thin little hardy things? These are rue. It’s a very difficult plant. It tastes like blue cheese, and it can blister a sunburn and repel insects. Two hundred years ago they used it as an abortifacient, so Peter says.” Caroline looked to Rooney. “That means to make sure babies aren’t born.”

“Okay,” Shiv said. She put her arms out. “That was fun. Grandma time is over.”

“Don’t be silly!” said Caroline. To Rooney again: “It never really worked. Just made an awful mess, blood everywhere. Ghastly stuff.”

When Rooney was born, Shiv had watched doctor’s gloves go redder and redder with every dip into the cavity of her torso. Her baby had not been rosy pink so much as she had been carmine. Before that, as an idea, she’d existed mostly in black and white. Aminocentesis results on a MacBook screen. The sonogram on the glass coffee table. The stone wall way she and Tom looked at each other. The living color of her had been an immediate shock. Shiv had thought, Well, she won’t go with anything in my closet.

Rooney, blue and brown, bigger and realer now than at the time of her birth, tore at the rim of her grandmother’s hat with only just enough force to tug it down over her eyes. Shiv’s laugh was sharp, approving. Rooney looked at her with a blank confusion that said, I didn’t do that for you. The space between Shiv and her baby was filled with plants that bled babies. Back in the apartment, it was filled with stairs. 

“Rue, sweet thing,” said Caroline, blinded, “also means bitter regret.”

--

There was a very important board meeting! And Shiv was watering down her wine after dinner on the flagstone patio. “I’ll pump and dump later,” she told her mother. “Binge and purge, you know, it’s fine.”

“You always were good at that,” said Caroline.

“I was,” Shiv said, “wasn’t I.”

“Yes, darling. Very discreet. Mistress of your own gag reflex.”

Shiv preened. She had had an excellent eating disorder. Better than Roman or Ken’s. It wasn’t about how her body had looked, though she had been peckish and bruisy that summer. No, it was about how clean and accurate she could be, how her vomit was nearly always the same pale beige color, no matter what she ate. How she brushed her teeth with baking soda afterward and dabbed her cheeks with folded toilet paper that smelled like peonies. At the beginning of her pregnancy, the lack of morning sickness had been almost disappointing. She would have been amazing at it.

“Are you feeling alright now, darling?” her mother asked. “You’re not too tired? She’s not keeping you up?”

“Nah, no.” Shiv was so tired her body constantly felt like it was trying to drop into REM sleep while she was doing important things, like call contacts in Washington or make her baby like her. “I’ve got Sonia, so.”

“You,” said Caroline, “never slept. There was nothing wrong with you only you could never stop screaming.”

Pre-pregnancy, Shiv had always considered herself a good sleeper. But her memories only really started after the age of six, which was how old she’d been when Roman had pushed her off the porch swing at the compound in Key West, though there had been room for them both. No there’s not, dipshit, he’d said. It’s gross. Your arm keeps touching my arm. Shiv had not really realized, before that, that their arms were not the same thing.

“How do you know nothing was wrong with me?”

Caroline cut a smile up the side of her cheek. “How do I know anything, darling? Because I was your mother.”

“Yeah.” Shiv sipped the water and wine. The combination made it taste like it had come from the kind of bag she’d pump milk into, later. “You sure was.”

“And now you are,” said Caroline. “I hope it’s alright to say to you, Siobhan, but I still can’t quite conceive of it. You, this.”

Shiv tightened her mouth. “Well, you don’t have to,” she said, “because I already did.”

“And immaculately it would seem, too, hm? Where’s the other half of the equation?”

“Tom?” Shiv had left her phone in her bag since getting off the plane. When she’d woken up on the tarmac, she’d had a text from him that said: This conversation isn’t over. And wasn’t that always their fucking problem. “He’s in a meeting.”

“Ah. Well, he is very important, nowadays. Or so I hear.”

“He and I are fine,” Shiv said. “We have an understanding.”

Caroline shrugged her shoulders by bringing them toward her chest, rather than up. It made her look like a crow. “Don’t we all.”

Shiv swallowed weird, and now she did feel like she was going to throw up. “He loves Rooney,” she said, in the same way she’d said, there is room for me! to Roman on the porch swing.

Shiv’s mother smiled again, this time in the center of her mouth. She said, “Don’t we all.”

“Yeah, mom, we really fuckin’ do. Give me a second.”

The closest bathroom in Inverness was not familiar, but the feeling of getting empty and clean in it was just the same. The toilet paper smelled like lavender. Purged, Shiv retrieved her phone. Two missed calls from Tom, no new texts. She took herself down the big empty hallways in the direction of the wing where she and her brothers used to stay as kids. Rooney slept somewhere deep within there now, probably in the same room where Shiv had once wet the bed and stood naked on the floor. The threshold for this half of the house was marked by two huge indoor French doors. She snapped a picture to send to Roman. Do you remember when you fell through these?

Back on the patio, her mom was looking straight off into pure darkness. At dinner she had had celery and salted water. “Someone must have killed the gardener since last I was here,” she said when Shiv came back. “Things are growing where they should not.”

“Hey,” Shiv said, “do you remember that summer we were here as kids?”

“Be specific. There were at least four.”

“When I was eight, I think. I wet the bed?”

Caroline looked narrowly at her, like she was the garden. “You never wet the bed.”

“Uh, yeah, I did, mom.” Shiv wished for someone she could look at; someone with whom to exchange glances like trade secrets. “I wet the bed, and Ingrid had to come get you, and you made me take my nightgown off and stand in the middle of the room naked while it went through the dryer?”

The same narrow look. “No, darling,” Caroline said, “no, I don’t think so.”

“What? Yes. It was fucking cold. I was afraid I would get mosquito bites?”

“There are no mosquitos in Inverness, Siobhan.”

“Mom. I’m serious. Are you screwing with me? That happened.”

“Alright.” Caroline patted her knee. “If you say so.”

When Shiv said her goodnights and checked her phone again, she had only a text from Roman, in response to the glass door picture. Haha, it read, I was pushed.

--

There was a very important board meeting! And Shiv was sitting on the floor of the room where she had absolutely peed the bed and held her arms up rag-doll limp for the removal of her nightgown, listening to the cicada sound of her baby’s snoring. Jet lag and her mother had made it difficult to sleep.

There was a rap at the door. “Shut up,” Shiv whispered. “Who is it?”

And it was Tom. There was a very important board meeting, and still it was Tom. Shiv gaped at him from the floor. “Are you serious right now,” she said. “Are you actually fucking serious.”

Tom was wearing the very important board meeting suit that seemed sewn to him these days. His jacket was open on a plain white collared shirt. He used to wear suspenders, which Shiv had liked because it made her feel like he was going to hook his thumbs in them and sing something from Oklahoma!, and because it had meant she could probably never be more embarrassing than him, never look wrong enough to be the most wrong. Now he was on the inside cover of Wired and The Economist looking fittingly neither wrong nor right. But from the floor of Rooney’s room in Inverness Shiv thought he looked very much like Tom, whom she had known in rooms all over.

“I told you I was going to come,” he said. He was good at the-baby-is-sleeping whisper, though his voice was angry and hard. “Do you actually listen to anything I say to you? Ever?”

Shiv should stand up, she knew, and take him outside — at least as far as the glass doors, so they could have this conversation in their favorite way: before a transparent screen, before a seemingly breakable thing that, actually, several put-upon contractors could attest to being newly near bulletproof.

But just because Shiv was an excellent vomiter did not mean she was a good eater. If Tom wanted her to take her medicine, he was going to have to do it on her terms. So she stayed where she was on the floor and whispered back, “Sorry, what? I can’t hear you.”

He came into the room and shut the door behind him. Even that was managed softly. Without the light from the hall, it was very dark but for Rooney’s light machine, hurling false stars against the wall. Tom watched these slide around corners for a moment. “You brought this?” he asked.

Rooney loved it. When she laid awake in her crib, the false stars made her open her mouth clean as a cat's, eyes heavy with wonder. “It’s portable,” said Shiv. “All her shit is. Isn’t that what they mean by pack and play?”

“No,” Tom said, “I don’t think so.”

He came her way but it wasn’t about her. His blue suited legs stopped somewhere high over her head as he looked into the crib. Shiv craned her neck. She wanted to see if he would make the face again, the one she had never seen anyone make before, though she had heard talk of a kind of love that was without price or condition. But then there always was talk.

In the darkness she couldn’t tell. Tom reached a hand down into the crib, which was made of high light wood, and Shiv said, “Don’t wake her.”

“I won’t.”

She knew he wouldn’t. She knew the way she knew he was making the face. She knew it the way she knew that no one had ever looked at her like that.

Through the bars of the crib, she watched as Tom’s knuckle brushed Rooney’s cheek in the same way he’d met her hand after she was born. It was the way he touched her always, with the bluntest edges of himself. 

“Were you going to come back, Shiv?” Tom asked.

“Yes,” Shiv said. “I don’t know. I didn’t really — I didn’t plan it, or anything. I just went.”

“So, how you do most things. Spur of the moment, seat of your pants, fuck everybody else who can’t keep up.” When she looked up at him she thought maybe he was smiling at her. “Right?”

“Fuck off.”

“That’s kind of your speciality.”

Shiv shivered, though it was not cold. “Fuck on, then. Sit down. You’re fucking looming. You’re eleven freakish feet tall.”

Tom sat beside her on the floor in his very important board meeting suit. It wrinkled weird, like before. His knees and elbows stuck out at all angles. The back of his head leant back against the bars of the crib, and there were six evenly spaced tines between them. Rue right in the middle.

“Are you going to say ‘if you do this again, we’re through’?" Shiv asked. "Are you going to make me swear up and down to share my location with you for ever and ever until we die? Or did you have something more original in mind.”

“If I say it,” Tom said, “and especially if you do, that still won’t make it true.”

Her mother: If you say so, darling. 

“You know, I once wet the bed in this room,” Shiv said. “I was like, eight, and my mom had fed us a totally liquid dinner, once again, and I was having a dream about finding a bathroom in the Saks on 5th ave, where there are no bathrooms, and when I woke up I had — yeah. So I called for my mom. And when she came she took my pajamas, and then she just made me stand here. Totally naked. It felt like she was gone for hours.”

Tom had turned his head. “That sounds awful,” he said.

Shiv said, “It was.”

“You know it doesn’t explain anything. Or — or make this okay.”

“Yeah,” Shiv said. “I know. I just wanted to say it.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “Anything else?”

I love our daughter, Shiv thought, and if she called for me in this room, I am not sure how long it would take for me to come. 

“No,” she said. “We can leave tomorrow. I’m sorry you felt you had to fly all the way out here.”

“It wasn’t a choice, Shiv,” said Tom. “She’s my daughter.”

“Yes,” said Shiv. “Except, everything is a choice. I could have had an abortion. I could have never met you. I could have made that up, what I said about peeing in this room. But yes. She is our daughter.” 

Their daughter made a snuffly little coughing sound, and both her parents turned their heads to wait and see what she would have them do. The cough weaned into a half-cry, then died out. Rooney was awake though. It changed the shape of the room. Shiv could feel the satiny outline of Tom’s suit nearly touching her now. He stuck a finger through the bars of the crib, then winced and huffed a laugh. “Her nails are long,” he said. “Like, sharp.”

“I don’t want Sonia cutting off one of her fingers,” Shiv said. “And I don’t mind.”

Tom looked really at her for the first time since coming into the room. “I don’t either,” he said. "She likes to get a grip on the world." Shiv watched as Rooney grizzled on her father’s finger, spit and gums and the glint of his wedding ring in the light from her bullshit stars.

“Imagine when she’s teething,” she said. “Our little carnivore. Claws and all.”

“She’ll have bite,” Tom said, “like her mother.”

No one had ever called Shiv that before. Rooney was obviously still too preverbal to call her anything, and Tom mostly just called her Shiv, except for in the mornings when he called her honey, or when he was displeased with her, which was every other time of day, and then he called her Siobhan. 

“She’s probably hungry,” Shiv said. It felt like something someone's mother would say. She didn’t know if it was precisely true — Sonia handled the feeding schedule, and also she had no idea what time Rooney’s bite-sized body thought it was. A peek at her phone said it was getting on almost nine thirty in New York. The markets would open soon.

“I’ll call for Sonia,” Tom said, “in just a minute.”

“Yes, in a minute.” Soon the bell would ring. Bodies would grow hot and real, and everything would mean something.

“I would have come back,” Shiv said. “I wouldn’t have taken her away from you.”

Tom pulled back from the crib, just enough that they could face out into the room together, pinkies in parallel on the hard floor where once Shiv was almost certain she had asked for her mother for the last time. Tom’s shirt sleeve was wet with Rooney’s spit, and the room smelled like her soft warm body: sour milk and sassafras, nothing of rue.

“And I didn’t,” Shiv said, “make it up. The thing about this room. I didn’t make it up.”

“I know,” Tom said.

There was a very important board meeting, and Shiv and Tom sat on the floor in Rooney’s room, where once things had happened but no one could be sure what. The markets would open soon. They would call the nanny in a minute. They would take a long flight back to New York on opposite ends of the plane. Rue right in the middle. The sour milk smell lingering. No one and none of it went away.