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fourtiny scars. And it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. All those periods and backaches and Midol, and then it was over, the most essential components of my reproductive system whisked away in a bio-waste bag.
    A couple months later, we packed up all the baby stuff for our friend Teresa. The BabyBjörn, a handful of binkie leashes we’d clip to your onesies, the ladybug infant nail-clippers.
    “You might as well take these too,” I said, handing her two mobiles. Teresa was so grateful as Dad carried the collapsed crib out to her car.
    “Now we can turn that room into an office,” he said, as Teresa drove away with your infanthoods in her trunk.
    “Great,” I said. “So we can stop raising babies and get back to work.”
    Dad hugged me. Georgia, you saw me crying and said, “Mommy, don’t be a Weird-o.”
    I can’t say yet how sudden menopause changed me, us. I looked at you differently, I know that. You became more and bigger. But the thing that utterly altered the way I look at you was not the cancer or the hysterectomy. It was Aaron, Cousin Kathy’s lanky, broad-shouldered boy.
     
    It was raining that night. A lazy summer rain. Kathy wanted Aaron to stay home but he said, “I’m just gonna swing by and say hello to some people, Momma.” Years later, I asked her if he kissed her good-bye and she said, “Aaron wasn’t a kisser, he was a big eye-contact guy. He had this killer gaze, so we just cut our eyes at each other and he left.”
    Kathy washed some dishes, changed into pajamas, met Tony and the girls downstairs for a movie, and went to bed.
    It was hard to sleep—teenagers. But you can’texpect them to play Scrabble every Friday and Saturday night.
    Around 3 a.m., the phone rang. It was a friend of Aaron’s. A car, a convertible, had flipped.
    In the pictures in the newspaper the next day, huge white sheets were draped over the car doors, to hide the ruin, but on the passenger side, I swear you could see a hand, in a loose fist, knuckles on the pavement. The police estimated the vehicle skidded sixty feet before it stopped. EMTs inflated an industrial balloon to raise the car and free the boys’ bodies.
    The officers stood on Kathy’s stoop. She doesn’t remember how the conversation went but the words were said—the combination of your child and I’m sorry and nothing we can do and then someone said dead just to make sure there was no room for misunderstanding or denial or resistance, which could easily happen because next they explainedthat they were taking her boy to the hospital, a place of healing.
    She wanted to go with them. The officer kept telling her it wasn’t necessary. Of course it was. Mothers go to the hospital with their children. We hold their hands and look at them with our most reassuring expressions and whisper encouraging things like The medicine will help you sleep . We slip into the hall for a minute to talk openly with doctors. We make decisions and sign forms and go back into the room wearing that same put-on look of composure. We check for signs of pain, we reposition pillows and lower the bed and curse the paper-thin shades as we darken the room the best we can. We sit, we stand, we stare and stretch, we shudder and sit back down and hold our heads and decide it’s better standing. We lean over the bedside and run the backs of our fingers across our child’s cheek and close our eyes in a moment ofpassion and physical memory of every other time we’ve touched that cheek, that singular orchid of a face.
    The next night, Kathy took a shower, put on some Carmex, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of nondescript black pants, and her most supportive shoes. Aaron’s body had been released from the hospital. He was laid out at the funeral home and visitors were welcome starting at 8 p.m. Kathy said they all went—Tony, the girls, grandparents, even a few friends.
    The mortician had tucked a large white blanket around Aaron, like you would a baby, so all that