Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. A perfect mix of my eight-years-younger brother Joshua, my parents’ only son, and my sixteen-month-old Lydia, my parents’ only grandchild. The dream-toddler had Joshua’s eyes, Lydia’s cheeks and chin, both babies’ blond curly hair. We’re on the phone—me in Oklahoma, my mother in West Virginia, in my childhood home—and it’s a few days after I peed a positive on a pregnancy test. I tell her I might have another girl.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. Next month, it will be ten years since my mother found Joshua, twenty-two years old, green eyes, hair that had turned brown long before, hanging from a belt in his closet.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. I’ve called my mother, five weeks pregnant, leaking pulpy clots at a baby clothes consignment sale. It’s over, I tell her. She concedes it’s possible, says maybe Joshua’s already met him. But there are other reasons for bleeding. She thinks that dream means the baby is still alive.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. I remember my father, straight-backed and muscular at thirty-seven, rocking in the La-Z-Boy with Joshua’s curls on his shoulder. Then I remember my father at Christmas, bent and trembling with the Parkinson’s he developed after my brother’s suicide. I count the days since my miscarriage, wonder if I can get pregnant again so quickly that I can fool the people I told at work, perhaps even my parents. Perhaps I can nearly fool myself.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. Maybe it’s a future boy, I suggest. But I’m nearly forty; I don’t know if I’ll have another pregnancy. I imagine my father reading a picture book in bed. Lydia, about four, rests her head on one of my father’s shoulders, the dream-toddler leans on the other. I imagine the boy’s face, his lips curved with the happy lordliness of older sister adoration. Then I imagine the boy away.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. She’s on the phone in West Virginia, in the house where she got pregnant God only knows how many times. I grew up knowing about the burst ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed my mother when I was a baby. But in recent years, my mother has populated heaven with stories of long-ago miscarriages. Companions who fish in shining rivers with Joshua. Children who can’t kill themselves at twenty-two years old.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. I just emptied that month’s bloody bathroom trash; we both know I’m not pregnant. Now, I have one of those safe heavenly children, Joshua has a nephew, and my parents have a grandchild who looks like their son. I sob and try to explain: I believe Joshua’s in heaven, but I don’t know about my five-week blighted ovum. I want to focus on Lydia. I ask her to never tell me that dream again.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me. You’ll get to meet that baby. I snarl and hang up the phone.

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. He has Lydia’s hair, she tells me. I reach down and touch that hair, will myself to be quiet this time until she finishes her story. She tells it because she’s too far away to hug me. Because she held me and my brother inside her body. Because she’s grieving too.
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Sarah Beth Childers is the author of two essay collections: Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss, and Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family. She lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she teaches creative nonfiction at Oklahoma State University, serves as the nonfiction editor of the Cimarron Review, and endures the 110-degree summer days by soaking in a stock tank with her two little girls.

Artwork by Barbara Gillette Price