The pantry is full. I know this because I checked it four times before nine a.m.

Crackers, two kinds of cereal, three jars of the peanut butter she likes and one she doesn't, in case she changes her mind the way four-year-olds do. A drawer in the fridge dedicated entirely to Caroline; yogurt tubes, cut grapes, cheese in the shapes of stars because someone at the store told me stars make vegetables more interesting and I bought it, I bought all of it, I would buy anything.

My husband, Colton, finds me standing in front of the open pantry with my hand resting on a can of soup I have no plan to make.

"You okay?"

"Just checking," I say, which isn't a lie, exactly. I am always just checking.

He doesn't know, how could he, that somewhere underneath this pantry, underneath this house with its dedicated fridge drawer and its two kinds of cereal, there is a much smaller version of me standing on a highway shoulder with her thumb out, watching her mother lean into the window of a stranger's semi-truck and ask for a ride to somewhere else.

I close the pantry door. I don't need anything from it. I never do. I just need to know it's there.

My mother had six children before me. All six were taken by the state — for neglect, for the drugs, for whatever combination of things made a house too unsafe for a child to stay in it. For the better part of my life I didn't even know most of their names. I know I have half-siblings scattered across a life I'll never fully map, and I know that by the time I was born, my mother had already lost every child she'd ever had.

I think about that sometimes, now that I have one of my own. What it would do to a person, to lose six children and then have a seventh. Whether you'd hold that baby like she was the last chance at something, or whether by then you'd already learned not to hold on too hard to anything the state could take from you.

I think my mother chose the second thing. I think she decided, before I could talk or walk or remember, that the only way to keep me was to make sure no one could find me.

So we moved. Not moved the way a family moves — a new apartment, a new town, a fresh start with boxes and a lease. We moved, continuously, the way something moves when it's being hunted. My mother hitchhiked up and down the West Coast with truckers for the first two years of my life, and I went with her, because a baby that isn't in a house isn't a baby a caseworker can knock on a door for.

I don't remember any of it. I was too young. Everything I know about those two years comes secondhand, in fragments, in the offhand way my mother would sometimes mention it later — not as a confession, but the way you'd mention the weather on a trip you took once. "That was the summer we stayed with the guy who drove the rig with the confederate flag air freshener. That was the winter it snowed in Oregon and we slept in the cab."

She told these stories like survival stories, which I suppose they were. I don't think she ever once told them like what they actually were, which is: a woman running from the consequences of the six children she'd already lost, with a seventh strapped to her chest, teaching that seventh, before she could form a single memory, that home is not a place. Home is wherever you are when no one is looking for you yet.

I used to think I had no memories of those two years, and in the literal sense that's true. I have no image, no sound, no smell I can point to and say that was 1993, that was the highway, that was the truck stop in Half Moon Bay. But I don't think that's the same as having nothing. I think a body can carry an inheritance a mind never gets to see. I think there is a version of hypervigilance that gets built before language, before memory, before the part of you that could object — a nervous system laid down early enough that by the time you're old enough to know what "safe" is supposed to feel like, you've already been taught, cell by cell, that it doesn't last.

 

Every time we've moved as adults, I have had every box unpacked, flattened, and out for recycling within the week. Not eventually. Not "when I get around to it." Within the week, every time, no exceptions, and it isn't a preference so much as something closer to a compulsion — I can't rest in a house that still has cardboard in it.

Colton noticed it on our second move together, watching me break down boxes at eleven at night, four days after the truck had left. "We could take our time with this one," he said. "No rush."

There is no version of taking your time that doesn't feel, in my body, like an invitation for the ground to move again. If the boxes are still stacked in a corner, some part of me is still standing on the highway shoulder waiting to find out whether this is really where we're staying or just another place we're passing through. But if the shelves are full, if the pictures are on the walls, if every last thing has a drawer it belongs in then maybe, my nervous system reasons, it can't be taken away. Maybe permanence is something you can manufacture fast enough that no one gets the chance to undo it. I don't unpack because I feel settled. I unpack in order to feel settled, as if unpacking itself were the thing that makes a place real, makes it mine, makes it safe from whatever unmade every other place I ever lived in as a child.

I check on Caroline more than I need to. I know this. I've been told this — gently, by Colton, more pointedly by myself, in the moments when I catch what I'm doing and have to name it out loud to make it stop. I check the monitor when she's clearly, audibly, fine. I recount the snacks in her lunchbox after I've already packed it. I ask her three times if she's cold before I believe the answer, hers or mine.

It isn't about her. She has never once been hungry in a way that wasn't solved within the hour. She has never slept in a truck cab, never been carried across a state line to stay one step ahead of a system that wanted to take her away. Her chapter of this story, so far, is boring in every way I worked for it to be boring.

But I was carried before I could remember it, and some part of that carrying never put me down. I am still, in certain unguarded moments, the baby on the highway — still checking the pantry the way she must have checked her mother's face, still unable to unpack the suitcase, still half-convinced that the good thing, whatever it is this time, is temporary, and that the moment I let myself believe otherwise is the moment it gets taken.

I don't know how to fully put that part of myself down. I'm not sure it's a thing that ever fully sets down. What I do know is this: I can check the pantry a fourth time and still get on the floor and build the block tower she's asking me to build. I can carry the old fear and still be present for the daughter who has never had a reason to feel it. Those two things, it turns out, are not mutually exclusive. They just live in the same body, at the same time, and most days I am learning to let them.

Before she was born, Colton's family pulled out the albums.

We sat on his mother's couch and passed photographs back and forth — him at three months, red-faced and furious in someone's arms; him at eight months, propped on a quilt in a patch of sun. His aunt held one up next to his grandmother's baby picture and laughed. "Look at that. Same toes." It became a running joke through the whole pregnancy, the toes — his mother swore they skipped a generation and landed right back where they started, that you could trace them through four decades of family photographs like a signature. "She'll probably have them too," someone said, meaning the baby. Meaning: whatever she looks like, we'll already have a way of knowing where she came from.

I sat on that couch and smiled and had nothing to hand back.

There is no photograph of me at three months old. None at eight months. I have looked — actually looked, as an adult, gone through what boxes exist, asked the handful of relatives who might have kept something. There is nothing from the two years my mother spent moving up and down the coast, because a woman staying one step ahead of a caseworker does not stop at a drugstore to develop a roll of film. There was no reason to. A photograph is evidence, and evidence was the one thing she couldn't afford to leave behind her.

So when people ask, the way they do, who did you look like as a baby — I don't have an answer. Not "I don't remember." I don't know. There is no image of that baby anywhere in the world, in anyone's shoebox or album or wallet, and there never was. Somewhere in my early pregnancy, lying in bed unable to sleep, it hit me in a way it never had before: I had spent nine months wondering whether my daughter would look like me, and I realized I had no idea what I looked like. I couldn't hold my own baby face up next to hers and check. There was nothing to check against. It wasn't a gap in my memory. It was a gap in the record — a baby who existed but was never documented existing, which is its own particular kind of erasure, quieter than the others, and one I hadn't grieved yet because I hadn't known there was anything there to grieve.

I didn't say any of this on the couch. I laughed at the toes joke along with everyone else. But I remember excusing myself not long after, standing in the bathroom with the water running so no one would hear, doing the math on exactly how much of myself had simply never been kept.

When my daughter was born, I photographed her within the hour. I have since taken, by Colton's count, an absurd number of pictures of a child who is not yet three — more than any reasonable person needs, more than he thinks are necessary, and he's not wrong, and I keep doing it anyway. Every outfit. Every milestone and most of the non-milestones. Not because I think I'll forget what she looked like. Because somewhere in me is a baby girl on a highway shoulder who was never once photographed being loved, and the only apology I know how to give her is to make sure that never happens again to someone I'm responsible for.

Caroline will never wonder what she looked like as a baby. She will have more evidence of her own babyhood than she'll know what to do with. She'll be able to hold her own face up against a photograph and see herself go back and back and back — which is a thing I am giving her precisely because it is the thing I never had, and she will likely never understand what it cost to make sure of it, and that, too, is exactly the point.

Caroline doesn't know any of this yet. She just knows the pantry is full, the fridge drawer is hers, and when she asks for a snack, someone comes.

That's the whole point. That's the entire, unglamorous point of everything that follows in this book: not that I fixed myself before I had her, because I didn't, and I'm not sure that's even possible. Just that somewhere between the highway and this kitchen, I became someone who comes when she's called.