The name was in a box she was not supposed to open.
Sam had been looking for batteries. The television remote had died in the middle of a show about doctors who slept with each other, and Stacy had sent her to the back room to find two AA batteries that Mawmaw Lucy kept in a dresser drawer with the green rubber bands, some tangled twist-ties, and a stack of expired grocery coupons. But the batteries were gone, and when Sam’s fingers reached into the dark of the drawer, they hit something hard and cold.
It was a metal cash box the color of a scab, rusted at the hinges, with a thin brass clasp that had been forced open so many times it no longer closed straight.
Sam knew she should close the drawer. She knew the unwritten law of her mother’s house: you did not go looking, because what you found would not be yours, and whatever was hidden had a way of biting the hand that reached for it. But she was twelve, and the afternoon was slow, and Stacy was asleep in the front room with a cough that had been living in her chest for three weeks, a wet, rattling thing that sounded like gravel being swirled in a tin cup. The house was too quiet. The silence had a heavy, dusty weight to it, and Sam needed something to do with her hands.
She pulled the old box from the drawer.
Inside were papers, but not many; Stacy was not a woman who kept records. There was a marriage license, brittle and old, signed by a man whose name Sam did not recognize. There was a social security card for Stacy under her maiden name. There was a photograph of Mawmaw Lucy when she was young and severe, her dark hair pinned back tight, standing in front of a house Sam had never seen in her life.
And beneath those, folded into precise thirds, was a document with a blue seal in the corner: a Certificate of Live Birth.
Sam unfolded it, her thumbs leaving faint, gray smudges on the cheap paper. She read her mother’s name first: Stacy Maynard, and then the date, and then the place: East End, West Virginia, ARH Hospital. She knew the building from the outside, the long brick corridors and the green glass of the nursery windows where she had sometimes stood.
Then she found her own name.
It was not Sam.
JESSICA.
Jessica Ray-Ann Maynard.
She stared at the letters until they seemed to move on the page, rearranging themselves into something foreign and accusatory. Jessica. It was a name for a girl with clean hair, straight teeth, and a mother who did not come home stumbling through the kitchen at two in the morning. Ray-Ann. A hyphenated burden. Ray for the father who had never stayed, Ann for a grandmother she had never met. And Maynard, the family name, the lineage, the anchor tied to her ankle before she had even learned how to swim.
Sam said the name out loud in the empty room: "Jessica."
It tasted like someone else's mouth. Like biting into an apple and finding it was made of cold wax.
She turned the certificate over. On the back, in Mawmaw Lucy’s cramped, heavy handwriting, was a brief inscription: Delivered by Clara Cline. 6 lbs, 3 oz. 10:42 p.m. Would not stop screaming until I held her.
Sam read it three times. Clara Cline. The name sounded like a hymn. She imagined this woman, this stranger reaching into the hot, wet mess of birth and pulling her out, slapping her bottom, wrapping her in flannel. The first hands to touch her. Before Stacy. Before Mawmaw Lucy. Clara Cline had known her before Sam even knew she had a body of her own. And she had written, or Mawmaw had written, that she would not stop screaming until she was held.
It felt like a clue. A key to a lock she had not known existed.
Stacy was sick.
Not the kind of sick that got you chicken soup and soft voices. It was the kind of sick that got you a closed door, drawn curtains, and solitude. She had been in bed for eleven days, rising only to use the bathroom or to go out on the porch to smoke in the dark when she thought Sam was asleep. Her cough was a living thing now, a creature that had taken up residence in her chest and refused to be evicted.
Sam had brought her water. She had brought her crackers. She had brought the television remote with the dead batteries, and when Stacy threw it at the wall in a fit of frustration, Sam had picked it up and put it back on the nightstand without a word.
Now, Sam was still holding the birth certificate, staring at the blue seal, when she heard the bed in the other room creak.
She panicked. She shoved the paper into the back pocket of her jeans, but her hands were shaking and she was too slow. The drawer was still open, and the metal box lid closed with a loud, metallic scream.
"Sam," Stacy's voice came from the bedroom, raspy and dry. "Get in here."
Sam walked to the doorway, her shoulders stiff.
Stacy was sitting up in the bed, propped on one elbow, her nightgown soaked through with sweat and clinging to her collarbones. Her eyes were glassy with fever, but they were fixed directly on Sam’s hip, on the white corner of the paper peeking out of her pocket.
"You was in my drawer," Stacy said.
"I was looking for batteries."
"Batteries." Stacy coughed into her fist, a wet, grinding sound. "You find what you was really lookin’ for?"
Sam said nothing.
"Give it here."
"I don't know what you mean."
Stacy’s hand shot out from under the blanket. She grabbed Sam’s wrist, her fingers hot and dry as paper left in the sun. "Don't play stupid with me girl. I heard that box open. I know that sound better than I know your voice."
Sam tried to pull away, but Stacy’s grip was stronger than it had any right to be, fueled by the fever burning through her bones.
"Let go," Sam said.
"Give it."
"No."
Stacy yanked. Sam stumbled forward, her knee hitting the metal mattress frame with a sharp crack. The certificate crinkled in her pocket. Stacy’s other hand clawed at her hip, trying to reach the paper, and for a moment they were tangled together in the dark room, mother and daughter, both pulling in opposite directions with a silent, desperate strength.
"Stop it," Sam's voice was shaking. "You're gonna hurt yourself."
"I said give it here!"
Stacy’s hand found the edge of the certificate and pulled.
The paper tore.
It was a clean, screaming rip down the middle, and they both fell back, each holding half. Stacy looked at her piece, blank, the white back side, and made a sound like a dog that had been kicked in the ribs.
"You little bitch," she whispered.
Sam stood at the foot of the bed, her half of the certificate crumpled in her fist. Her heart was thumping against her ribs like a trapped bird.
"Why'd you change my name?" Sam asked.
Stacy crumpled her half of the paper and threw it. It bounced off Sam’s shoulder and fell
to the floor.
"Get out," Stacy said.
"Why'd you change it?"
"Because I wanted to. Because it’s mine to change. Because you don’t get to ask me nothin’ after you stole from me."
"I didn't steal—"
"You went through my stuff!" Stacy’s chest was heaving, her face flushed a dark, feverish red. "You think because I’m in this bed, because I’m sick, you get to pick through my life like a vulture? You think you get to know things just because you want to?"
"I want to know who I am."
"You know who you are. You’re a snoop. You’re a thief. You’re the girl who stands there with her hand out, always wantin’, always needin’, never givin’ nobody a single minute of peace."
Sam felt the words land, but she did not flinch. She had been called worse by this same woman, in this same room, and she had learned that the only way to survive Stacy was to outlast her.
"Jessica," Sam said, her voice dropping, matching the coldness of the room. "Jessica Ray-Ann Maynard. That's who I was. And you took it."
Stacy’s mouth twisted. "Jessica." She said it like she was spitting out something rotten. "Jessica was a name for a girl with straight eyes and a father who stayed. You didn't have either one. You had a lazy eye, a screamin’ fit, and a face that looked like trouble from the second you slid out."
"So you punished me for how I looked?"
"I saved you." Stacy's voice cracked, and she coughed into her fist, a wet, grinding sound that bent her double. When she came up, her eyes were streaming, and she wiped her face on the sheet with one savage motion. "I gave you a name that wuttin his. Wuttin mine. Wuttin nobody's. I gave you somethin’ clean."
"Ray-Ann ain't clean," Sam said, her jaw tightening. "Ray is his name. You put his name in mine."
"I was nineteen!" Stacy's hand swept across the nightstand, finding the glass of water and throwing it. It missed Sam's head by inches and shattered against the doorframe, water and shards of glass spraying across the floor. "I was nineteen and stupid and I thought I was bein’ poetic! I thought if I put us together, Ray and Ann, it would make us a family! But it don't work like that. Names don't make families. Blood don't even make families. You know what makes a family?"
Sam said nothing.
"Nothin’," Stacy said, her voice dropping to a flat whisper. "Nothin’ makes a family.
You just get born into one and hope to God you survive it."
Sam stood in the dark with the torn certificate in her hand. The air in the room was thick with sweat and bitterness.
"Who's Clara Cline?" Sam asked.
Stacy went completely still. "Who?"
"On the paper. Delivered by Clara Cline."
"I don't know no Clara Cline."
"She signed my birth certificate."
"Then she was there. I don't remember her." Stacy's voice had gone flat, the fever-fueled fight draining out of her as fast as it had come. She collapsed back against the pillow, her breathing shallow and fast. "I don't remember nothin’ from that night except the pain and the sound of you screamin’. You screamed for three hours. Wouldn't stop. Not when they held you. Not when they swaddled you. You just screamed, like you already knew what kind of world this was."
Sam looked at her mother’s face, gray and slick with sweat, younger than it should have been and older than it had any right to be.
"Why'd you keep it?" Sam asked. "The certificate. If you hated the name so much, why'd you keep the paper?"
Stacy's eyes were closed. "Because I'm stupid," she said. "Because I'm sentimental. Because some part of me thought you might want it someday, and some other part of me knew you'd use it against me." She turned her head to the wall. "Get out. And don't you ever go through my things again."
Sam walked to the door. Her hand was on the knob when Stacy spoke again, her voice so quiet it barely moved the dust in the air.
"Sam."
She turned.
"That name I gave you. It's the only good thing I ever did. And you don't even know it."
Sam stood in the doorway, the torn half of the certificate in her pocket, the sound of broken glass under her shoe, and she did not know what to say. She closed the door behind her and stood in the dark hall, listening to her mother’s breathing settle back into the heavy, rattling rhythm of fever-sleep.
She did not know about the warrior’s cry yet. She would learn about that later, from Mawmaw Lucy, in the morning light. But in that dark hallway, holding half a birth certificate, she knew something else: her mother had kept the paper because she could not bear to throw it away. And that was a kind of love, even if it was the only kind Stacy knew how to give.
Sam opened her notebook to a blank page. She wrote her name at the top, her letters careful and precise:
Sam.
Below it, in smaller letters, the name she was still learning to carry:
Jessica Ray-Ann Maynard.
And below that, a new line, written in a hand that was still growing into itself:
I choose.