Desmond exhaled hard, his face flushing red now instead of pale, both hands pressed against the sides of his own head like he was trying to physically hold something together.
“Look at her back,” he said. “We can’t do this.”
I looked down at Nora, gently turning her slightly in my arms, and when I saw what he meant, I nearly lost my footing entirely, one hand gripping the hospital bed railing to keep myself upright.
Renee screamed loudly enough that a nurse came rushing through the door within seconds, and I imagine, from the sound of it, half the maternity floor heard her too.
PART 4
Along Nora’s lower back, just above the base of her spine, was a large, dark, irregularly shaped birthmark, roughly the size of my own palm, the pigmentation deep and mottled in a pattern I recognized with a horror that dropped straight through my chest.
It was nearly identical, in size, shape, and location, to the birthmark our mother had carried her entire life, in almost exactly the same spot on her own lower back.
The birthmark that had eventually turned into the melanoma that killed her, five years earlier, six months after her sixty-first birthday, after a diagnosis that came too late for the kind of treatment that might have actually saved her.
“Desmond,” I said, my own voice shaking now too, “is that what you’re seeing? Mom’s birthmark?”
He nodded, unable to speak for a moment, his eyes wet in a way I hadn’t seen since the week we buried our mother.
“I watched her die from that exact thing,” he finally said. “I watched it start as nothing, just a mark, just skin, and I watched it turn into six months of hospice and a funeral before either of us had time to fully understand what was happening. I can’t watch that happen to my own daughter. I can’t sign up to spend the rest of my life waiting for that same mark to turn into the same thing that took Mom.”
