being around, now that she had a new boyfriend. So off to a foster family I went. I fell pregnant within a month of being there to one of the other foster kids. He was about sixteen, maybe seventeen, and the first boy I ever slept with. He had moved out before I even knew why I was puking into the toilet every time a smell—shampoo, bread, the wind—brushed past my nose.
Once I started to show, it was decided fairly quickly that the baby would be put up for adoption. I don’t think this was my idea, but I didn’t disagree—I had no ability whatsoever to care for a child. Losing my virginity had been horrible, and pregnancy was basically nine months of puking, so I had no romantic ideals about what motherhood might involve. Gemma—my foster mother—held my hand during the delivery and said I could spend a few hours with the baby until the social workers came.
I called her Mia. I knew it wouldn’t go on the birth certificate, and the adoptive parents would choose her real name, but to me, she was Mia. Mine. She was so tiny—barely six pounds—but so beautiful and peaceful, and I was stunned, absolutely stunned that something so special could come from me. I had never imagined she would be so exquisite, that her little hands would be miniature copies of mine, that her skin would smell so gorgeous. She had a lick of shiny black hair on her crown and the longest eyelashes, curled up like a doll’s. Somehow it felt like I had always known her, and that she knew me.
It broke my heart when they came for her. The only reason I let them take her away was because I knew she’d be much, much better off with a family.
On the day of her fourteenth birthday, I woke with a pain in my chest. It was a physical pain, but there was something beneath it. Terror. Mia had turned the age I was when I gave birth to her. About a year earlier, my mother had blurted out that Mia was never put up for adoption. She was put immediately into foster care. The horror of this burrowed deeper and deeper into me until I thought it would consume me. I fell pregnant because I was in foster care—I only slept with that boy because I wanted someone to like me, to hold me. And I had been beaten, shamed, starved, and abused while in foster care; this was doubtless the same fate that Mia had endured. When I had given her over to the social worker with big glasses and frizzy hair, I had done so in blind faith that Mia was headed for a much better life than I had had. And when it dawned on me that, no, her life was a repetition of mine, a horrible echo, a fate to which I had abandoned her, exactly like my own mother had abandoned me, I couldn’t bear it.
That was the night I tried to kill myself. I had never told anyone about Mia. Not a soul.
And yet, I was glad I had survived. If I hadn’t, I would never have met Gaia and Coco. And I would never have known the love of small children, those two smiley, utterly mental girls, who I had somehow managed to care for all these months.
Maybe I wasn’t completely useless after all.
* * *
—
I was in the loo when the phone rang.
My phone, I mean. It was charging at the wall socket in the playroom after Gaia and I had been watching a YouTube video about how fjords were formed. I had popped out of the playroom for two minutes when the phone rang, shrill and loud throughout the playroom. Coco waddled over to it and bashed the phone with her little hand.
“Stop it, Coco!” Gaia yelled. “You’ll break it!” Snatching the phone from Coco, she inadvertently answered the call.
“Hello?” a voice said through the mouthpiece.
Gaia pressed the phone to her ear, the way she’d seen her daddy hold it. “Hello? My name is Gaia. Who is speaking, please?”
“Gaia?” the speaker spat. “Put Lexi on. I want to talk to my bitch of a daughter.”
It was my mother.
“I’m very sorry,” Gaia said, “but swears are naughty and Father Christmas will be very cross.”
“Gaia?” another voice called, this time from the doorway. Gaia looked across the room to see Maren standing there. She tried to conceal the phone, but it was