"Then why?"
And she told him. Not all of it, not in order. It came out of her in pieces, standing against the sink in her cream sweater with her arms around herself, looking at the linoleum. The bed rest. The job. The hospital bed with the straps of the monitor around her belly, and the phone call from her aunt Ivy, and the doctor saying your numbers, your risk, we can't let you travel. Mama Lou in the purple hat on the front of a program she had never held at a service she had never seen. The NICU. The thought she had while they sewed her up. She said it out loud for the first time in four years, in a whisper, to the floor: "I thought, my mother died for this."
Terrence stood very still against the door.
"I know it's not true," she said. "I know it's not. You don't have to tell me that either. I've read everything, I know about her pressure, I know she wouldn't take her pills. I know he didn't do anything. He was a baby. I know." She pressed her mouth against her wrist for a second. "But I look at him and I hear that monitor. Every time. And Brie—Brie is the one Mama held. Brie laughs like her. And this year with the asthma and the school, I just—I thought she needs it more. She needs it more, and he won't remember. I kept saying that. He won't remember. He won't remember."
"He'll remember this," Terrence said.
She closed her eyes.
He wanted to go to her. That was the terrible part. Even now, even with the tags in his pocket, some old married part of him wanted to cross the kitchen and hold her, because she was shaking, and because she had carried that sentence alone in her chest for four years and he had never once known it was there. He had gone to that funeral and come home and handed her the program and said it was nice. He had not asked her one real question about it since. He had let her lie on her left side on the couch for three months and brought her ice water and gone to work.
He did not cross the kitchen.
"I'm sorry about your mother," he said. "I'm sorry I didn't know. I'm sorry I didn't ask. I mean that." He swallowed. "And it doesn't matter."
She opened her eyes.
"It matters," he said, "and it doesn't matter. Not for this. Not for what you did out there. He's four years old, Renee. He's four. Whatever happened to you, he didn't do it. And he's the one paying for it. He's been paying for it since he was four pounds."
"I know."
"You keep saying you know."