When I saw Margo on Tinder, I had only just broadened my search criteria to include women. Having just broken up with Jeremy—another sudsy all-American boy who treated the clitoris like a scantron, scratching away at whatever answer looked right—I knew I needed to be absolutely crowbarred open, hinge clattering to the floor. I was twenty-four and feeling roguishly sensual in the corner of a particularly damp Applebee’s, gleaming like tinfoil in my seat.

Margo had a smile like an untucked shirt and the sort of hair that every certified Hot Boy had in 1998. Next to her name she posted a little gold star. I missed that bit of ear-tipping because I wasn’t a lesbian—not exactly, anyway. I still haven’t quite caught my crittering sexual identity, which tugs my leash in every direction.

But Margo. Margo kept my attention, and—six years later—I still remember her blurb:

Margo Arquette, 30, not a unicorn, not a tour guide for “bicurious” girls. I love Adrianne Lenker, Louisa May Alcott, and the sort of petty meerkat drama that happens on Animal Planet. I work in IT, but I also volunteer at The Trevor Project. (Republicans need not apply.)

I’m not sure what it was about this absolutely insufferable bio, which took itself far too seriously. Maybe it was her confidence. Maybe it was the fact that, despite having never read Little Women, I imagined it might be a book that I enjoyed. (Was I a Jo? Was I a—I want to say—Bev?) Or maybe it was the ill-contained brushfire of bottom-shelf tequila and post-breakup diatribes crackling in my belly. But whatever it was, I swiped right. Worldliness swirled and bubbled at the lip of my glass, and I’ve still never felt more interesting than I did at that moment. I admittedly exaggerated my experience with women once we matched—she had a disdain for (see: disbelief in) bisexuals that I felt wasn’t quite in congruence with all that kumbaya community shit she evangelized at her activist meetings, but that’s neither here nor there. I quickly redressed my drunken make out sessions with female friends as serious relationships and met her for coffee. 

Margo, like her bio, was arrogant, caustically funny, and wore her particular brand of gold-star queerness like a letterman jacket. I fell in love with her instantly. It was the kind of grassy, unpaved love you took off your shoes to walk through. And we did all the things that people in love do. Between her IT money and the tip money I made pouting my lips and saying “pretty please” at the local breastaurant, we eventually scraped together enough to buy a sticky little apartment on the wrong side of town. We adopted a dog, lovingly named him Heinz because of his red splotches, then (just as lovingly), “Fuckface,” or—most affectionately—“Lil’ Fucker.” We got in car wrecks, we laughed so hard our breath cricketed in our throats, we each learned to despise the way the other ate cereal, and—like a sandal repeatedly slapping against the bottom of a foot—her words would hit me before she even said them. We even integrated our respective friend groups, which was a bit awkward at first. But, in time, they all bonded over their shared irritation with our flakiness. 

We eventually bought a decent-sized house after Margo got promoted. A house she maniacally baby-proofed after making our first appointment at The Revive Center. I remember how she sat on the floor, forehead wrinkling as she concentrated on screwing in the safety locks for the cabinets, which, she prophesied, would one day awash our baby in an avalanche of pots and pans due to my haphazard stacking. I watched as she dropped the screws over and over again, no longer able to feel the tips of her fingers from the neuropathy. I knew that this was something she needed to do, so I knew better than to offer help. Instead, I asked her if scientists could edit out her impulsivity too, while they’re at it, so I could open up my own cabinets again. She didn’t find the question funny. 

Even then, at thirty-six, she never eased her disdain for marriage. This, at first, made hospitalizations difficult. Like when they’d contact her little brother instead of me even though I was listed as her primary emergency contact, assuming he was her husband. But after a while, everyone knew our names. Especially after we enrolled in The Revive Project. 

***

I told Margo I was headed to work, but really I just needed a break from her, to clear my head and decide my next step. She’d become labile since the breast cancer metastasized to her spine, causing drop foot and the type of back pain that hand-peeled her to her fleshy, violet core. I knew she couldn’t help it—I knew she hurt, I knew she was embarrassed by the walker, which was the latest unhappy development. And I felt guilty for lying. But guilt, like caregiving, had become a normal part of my day, so I kept going.

I had to get away and figure out if I was going to go through with it. I turned on my phone and searched for Dr. Reeves, who I had listed under “Bakery.” 

I couldn’t, after all, use the OB provided by The Revive Project. I had signed my freedom away to them completely, and they obviously wouldn’t approve (though, I told myself, they already had our money so why would they care?). Once Margo’s DNA was implanted, I was placed on a strict, organic diet. They charted everything—how much I shit, my cravings, how much weight I gained, how much I sang to the chorus of cells in my body. The chorus of cells that only sang Margo’s name back. 

Revive had just installed a stunning new office near the ICU wing of its cancer center. It was so different from the ICU, where grief and regret moved, quietly, in each dark room. Instrumental music feathered the air of The Revive Center, and a soft, heavy-lidded light oiled the immaculate floors.

 After one of their liaisons made a surprise appearance in our hospital room, I researched them extensively. Most of the articles I found were from former customers giving stumbling, tearful testimonies of the project; others were from scientific journals admiring the company’s historic technological breakthrough. Eventually, I discovered on a cancer subreddit that they normally don’t target adults. They were broadening their market. 

They usually identify children who are dying. Then, they ask their parents if they want a “do-over.” Same kid, same DNA, but edit away the bullet. 

Edit away the whole gun. 

You can do it all over again, they told Margo, as she huffed away in a BIPAP, her lungs fluorescent and buzzing with radiation pneumonitis. I watched her, watched the down-feathered look passing over her eyes. 

The second they left, I turned to her. “What a fucking freak show,” I laughed a little, but it was a nervous laugh, one that crawled under her hospital bed and stayed there, hairless and shivering. 

She agreed with me at first. That it was unnatural, that we probably wouldn’t be approved for any more Care Credit with the amount of debt we were in, no matter what they said about their “special” relationship with the lender. And my anxiety pawed along beside me on the sidewalk for a while, until I eventually forgot about it. Margo was discharged after a week with an inhaler, as-needed oxygen, and a high dose of steroids. And for two months, she was better, better than she’d been in almost two years—we tangled our legs and watched reruns of Yellowjackets, she started answering calls at The Trevor Project again, and one day I came home from work and discovered that she had driven to H-E-B and made me slightly burnt, but still delicious, coq au vin. My mom used to make this on Sundays, she said, then tucked the thought back behind her ear. Her mom, a French-Catholic neonatal nurse, had never responded to Margo’s text when she told her she had stage IV breast cancer. That’s all I needed to know about her. 

I think about those two months often. Our laughter ivying up the balcony that time seemed to have formed just for us, for just a little while. But then the old stones cracked and fell apart when she woke me up with a nosebleed. It wouldn’t stop—it soaked the bed and her shirt, soaked through tissue after tissue, so we went to the ER. When we arrived, we discovered that her platelets were less than 20 and her hemoglobin was 6.2. She was bleeding out.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. In just two months, a second nodule had formed in her lungs. When the doctor turned his screen to us, two white densities glowed in the light of the monitor, like a flashlight illuminating gum that had been stuck under a desk when nobody was looking.

“I want to do it,” she said that night as I filled up a cup of water from the bathroom. Her voice, though moth-eaten after all the transfusions, was resolute. 

“Do what?” I asked, knowing full well what she meant. 

“I want to be born again,” she said. 

“Born again? You wanna go to Bible camp?” I joked, but she stared straight ahead. Not at me, exactly, but past me.

“No, with the Revive people. I want to be reborn.” 

I felt a coolness spill from my arms into my chest, as though a stinger had slipped into my skin. “But you said it yourself—we can’t afford the procedure, let alone afford to pay some poor girl to carry it.” 

“I know,” she said. Then, “I want you to carry it.” 

For a moment, I didn’t speak. I stood on the opposite side of the room, still holding my paper cup. 

“No, that’s insane. I know we can’t use your eggs anymore, but can’t we—I don’t know—adopt, like normal people? It’s so unnatural, we’ve had sex for godsakes.” 

“Had being the operative word, Nicole.” Margo murmured. Her voice was as expansive and darkly laid as asphalt, stretching endlessly beyond me. “You’ve been mothering me for almost two years. You don’t see me that way anymore.” 

And that was true. I didn’t admit it, but I didn’t deny it. Her body, this hidden dock I once found—where I could unfold each desire from its paper napkin, where I could skew my reflection with my fingers—had given way to its reality. A reality of chemo-induced menopause, of pathologic fractures, of endless hospitalizations, of thrush, of hair loss, of debridements and blackening rot when her breast reconstruction became necrotic. 

“We can’t anyways,” I said, my chest tightening. “They said you’d have to give up on palliative care and go on hospice.” 

She said nothing. 

***

I was at a Starbucks near the clinic when Margo started calling me. Once, twice, three times. I silenced it and watched the crowds swell and ebb, watched the peculiarities of people waiting in line. People rocking heel-to-toe, women tugging their hands through their hair, men scratching the delectable little hairs on their necks. There was a group of teenagers across from me, laughter leaving their bodies like rock sugar peeling from its sticky wrapper. They glanced at me and I smiled. 

I wondered how I looked to them. 

I wondered if they thought I could be somebody’s mother, if I even looked old enough. 

Margo would have made a much better mother than me—she knew how to talk to children, how to make them laugh, and how to cradle them. She’d been the eldest of four, and had often been deputized to babysit when her parents went on dates. 

“I think they wanted a do-over once I started lopping off my hair,” she once joked, but I could hear something else behind her laugh, like a fly rattling between closed blinds. 

Sometimes I wanted to die, but then I remembered what it looked like to be dying. 

Mostly, I knew, I just wanted to be empty. I wanted to be scraped clean, I wanted to ring like aluminum when any dull blade touched me. I wanted to be cored in the same way scientists drew the shout from my egg, DNA still crackling as it was taken, carbonated with its own mythos. I wanted the quiet, the peace of the unselfing, before they ladled in Margo’s DNA. 

My phone buzzed, and I knew I was too selfish to be a mother. 

The transplant was a success, the Revive OB had said, and Margo had squeezed my hand. 

Do you think I should call the doctor? Margo had said almost three years ago as she got dressed, looking at herself in the mirror. I stood up and saw that one nipple had suddenly inverted. 

***

I was five weeks pregnant when I met Norah.

Norah was twenty-three and beautiful, the kind of alleyed beauty that glittered blue-black in the dark and struck the very pail of you. I’d just given Margo her last dose of morphine for the night—Heinz, who’d barely left her side over the last few weeks, watched me pace with tired eyes. Silence hived all around me, itched past my face, arms, legs, as it worked to fill every empty pocket in the house. 

I needed to get out. 

I needed to be around other people. 

That night, for the first time in months, I wanted to feel my body again. I pressed it with lipstick, scratched it with eyeliner, and bound it with a tight, red dress. The fabric strained across the swell of my breasts but sagged a little around my stomach. Despite the pregnancy, I had continued to lose weight after Margo’s last hospitalization. Since we transitioned to hospice and started scheduling morphine doses, hunger no longer rapped at Margo’s door. Something I had been warned about, but still wasn’t necessarily prepared for. It was difficult to eat when she couldn’t, and after a while the dentistry of eating, heating out the blood, and making something spongy and wet, felt unnatural and repulsive. 

I turned the handle as I shut our front door. The night seemed like an animal stretching out at my feet. My breath shattered the cool air as I walked, pushing past all the men who chased after their own propositions like children clutching onto kites. 

I walked for forty-five minutes until I got to Eleanor’s Letterbox, a bar that Margo and I used to frequent when she was well. The drinks were underwhelming, we mostly just loved the implied fanfiction of the name. I promised myself that I would just dance to a couple of songs, drink ginger ale, and then go back home, but then I noticed her. Her eyes kept flicking toward me repeatedly, like a teenager flicking the flame of a lighter, on and off, on and off. 

“Hey, can you take a picture of us?” she shouted over the music, sweat glistening in her light brown hair. 

I smiled and nodded. I took a few haphazard pictures with her phone, most of which probably contained my thumb, then handed it back to her.

“I’ve never seen you here!” she said, touching my arm. “I would have remembered you. What’s your name?” 

“Margo,” I said, her name rippling away from me before I could catch it. 

“I’m Norah,” she said, then introduced me to her friends, though I can’t remember any of their names. “Come, come drink with us!” 

Norah was one of those people who only spoke when they had something important to say, yet had a rich, flirtatious sense of humor, one that swiveled like olives inside a martini glass. She and her friends, I learned, were all in grad school studying psychology. I lied and told them that I was twenty-six, and in college, too, studying veterinary science—a job that I hadn’t considered a viable career option since I was in elementary school. 

“Let me buy you a shot then,” Norah said. “For protecting the puppies.” 

I waved her off, but she slid the shot in my direction, her eyes moonlit. I looked at the glass, suddenly estranged from myself. 

The familiar sting of alcohol wasped down my throat as I knocked it back. I listened for the cells in my body, but there was only unquestioning stillness. 

Before a feeling, any feeling could find me, Norah handed me another shot. “Aren’t you afraid, Margo?” she asked, her leg purposely brushing against mine. 

The question clattered through me, which she noticed with a laugh. 

“I meant afraid of getting bitten,” she said. “It wasn’t an existential question.”

I explained to her that in veterinarian school, we were taught various techniques to calm down an aggressive animal. Then, I lifted my dress to my thigh, showing her a scar that I passed off as a Doberman bite, but really, I’d earned it when I was sixteen and tried to tattoo myself. 

She ran her hand across the scar, and the next thing I knew we were making out in an Uber and heading back to her apartment. I could feel the driver, a middle-aged man with army decals on his car, watching us, but I was too drunk to care. 

When I finally arrived home at four a.m., Margo was still asleep.

There was no way she’d be able to find out, I reassured myself. And, for reasons I couldn’t explain, this made me angry. 

***

It was almost six p.m. by the time I made it home from the clinic. My waitress uniform was wrinkled from being stuffed into a cubby, and a dull ache rippled across my back. When I walked in, our house was humming like it did when there was nobody to listen to it. I set my keys down at the table and ran my fingertips against the cherry wood. 

I found her in our bed with Heinz. Her head was resting on his great, huffing belly, and she was stroking his neck slowly, rhythmically, in the same way a newborn curls and uncurls her fingers against her mother’s breast to fall asleep. Her walker was still propped in the same place as I’d left it that morning, and the bland toast I’d made her was untouched. 

“I’ve been trying to call you,” she said as she watched the rise and fall of Heinz’s belly, her voice a line cast faraway and drifting. 

I looked at her, and no words could find me for a moment. She was beginning to grow hair again since she’d stopped the chemotherapy, but it was coming back curlier, a different texture than I’d grown used to after years and years of running my hands through it, of stealing each other’s mousse. 

“Margo, we need to talk,” I started to say, but she put a single hand up, signaling me to stop and come to bed. 

Hesitantly, I crawled next to her, fully clothed. The sheets were damp and fragrant with her scent. She lifted herself with a small grunt and placed her head against the back of my shoulder, breathing deeply. 

“I really need to talk to you,” I repeated. Her closeness made the knot in my belly tug loose. 

“I stumbled across a poem today,” she said. “I was calling you because I wanted to read it to you.”

“It’s about the pregnancy.” 

“I wish I could remember what it’s called, but I can’t shake the chemo brain,” her breath was small and damp against my shoulder, making my shirt cling to my skin. “My phone died, but I can still remember one part.” 

I quieted, and she stilled as she tried to find the words, like a child cupping her hands in the water, trying to catch minnows.

“It goes: 

‘I climbed the red rocks robed in their red dust.
I put the earth—all its charms—within me,
into each waiting pocket.’

“Isn’t that beautiful?” She asked after a moment, her arms pulled around my hollowing stomach. “Doesn’t that remind you of us?”

And for the first time in a long time, I fell apart. Because it did. 

Author’s note: This story’s title, as well as the quoted lines, are taken from a poem by Keetje Kuipers. “Landscapes with Sage and the Names of My Children” from All Its Charms, © 2019 by Keetje Kuipers, BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.