Each time a new nurse came on, she would ask how the baby already had a bandage on her cheek. One of us would explain that the doctor had cut her face when they were taking her out.
Hmm. That’s unusal.
Wow, they must have been in a hurry.
Poor thing.
Your incision, my doctor explained, is a little longer than most. A smile from hipbone to hipbone. Low enough that you can still wear a bikini, he joked, maybe by next summer.
Later, we would joke about her scar.
She’ll be the toughest looking kid in daycare.
You should see the other infant, etc.
Sometimes friends would offer a word of comfort, though I didn’t ask. You know how baby’s skin is so elastic, they’d say, it’ll be gone in no time.
A year passed and the tiny indentation below her right eye was not gone. If you didn’t know to look for it, you might not notice. But I did. Sometimes I trace my finger along that smile, hipbone to hipbone, the place where my body was split for her, searching for where it still feels numb to the touch and like pins and needles all at once.
Just before her second birthday, the midday sun caught her cheek in such a way and I saw her scar, almost imperceptible now, a ghost. A memory so faint, you wonder if it ever even happened at all.
I felt something catch in my chest, an ache that was familiar and foreign all at once.
Please don’t let it disappear, I thought, not completely.
