Chapter 13: June

My son was born on a Tuesday in June, at dawn, in a hospital in Ludington that smelled of bleach and burnt coffee.

He came out furious.

The nurse laid him on my chest, wet and red and shouting, and every other thought in my head went quiet.

"Look at all that hair," she said.

It was dark and flat and stuck to his skull.

He opened his eyes and looked straight at me.

They were gray.

They were the gray of the eyes that had looked past me at a microphone and said Sanne's name.

I cried, but not about the gray.

I cried because he was real and loud and mine, and nobody in that building could take him out of my arms.

Greet stood in the corner with her braid half undone and her flannel buttoned wrong.

She had driven me forty minutes with one hand on the wheel and the other on my knee, saying "breathe, Fem" every mile.

"He's got a Verwey jaw," she said now, gruffly.

"He's got my name."

"I'm not arguing."

"I mean it, Greet."

"I know you do."

At ten a woman from the records office came in with a clipboard.

For seven months I had been Fem Dekker on every page in this town, a widow from Grand Rapids who rented a room over a bait shop.

"Mother's name?" the woman asked. "Fem Dekker, it says here."

"Femke," I said. "Fem is short for it."

"And the baby's last name?"

I looked at the pen.

If I wrote Dekker, he got a name I had borrowed from Oma's side to hide behind.

If I wrote Verwey, he belonged to the club before he was a day old.

"Brandsma," I said.

"That doesn't match your chart."

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