Baby Teeth by Pam Mchugh

prompt: the silence is suspicious

​Jillian sits bedside, forehead in her hands. Her mind rewinds to November 5, 2013. The day of the baby teeth.

She’d just climbed the stairs and stood in the second-story hallway. Bedroom doors were ajar, lights were off. A few random socks strewn here and there.

“Emily?”

The silence was suspicious, practically foreign in this household.

“Emily?”

Jillian’s daughter must’ve gone to the park with her brothers. She started back down to the kitchen. But then, a whimper rippled through the stillness. Jilian stopped, a permafrost creeping through her body.

Another moan. She travelled quickly down the hallway, poking her head in bedrooms as she went.

The powder room’s light was on—the bathroom everyone forgot about. Jillian pushed the door open. Hey gaze snagged on the blood-streaked sink. Two baby teeth rested by the drain.

“Emily! Stop!”

The seven-year-old gripped pliers against her central incisor tooth. “I want them gone!” The little voice gurgled in a mouthful of crimson.

School friends lost their baby teeth, displayed cute gaps and the beginnings of permanent fangs. Even the slightest taunt about the baby teeth crippled Emily. She wanted to be like all the other grade two girls.

“Emily, you’re perfect the way you are,” Jillian reminded.

After the baby teeth, it was clothing and hair length and knobby knees.

“Knobby knees?”

“Stella’s knees, you can see them. Not like my fat knees.”

“They’re not fat. You’re not fat, Emily,” Jillian said, exasperated.

Age twelve, Kendra came on the scene. How should Jillian describe Kendra? Kendra was HIV and Ebola wrapped up in one pretty little package.

“Please, mom! Kendra has Instagram. Everyone does. It’s weird not to have it.”

Jillian considered this, her own junior high years flooding back in a tsunami of emotion and self-hatred. She pictured herself as a flat-chested, pimply pre-teen, always on the periphery.

A trip to the mall’s cell phone kiosk and Emily saying, “Thank you, Mom!”

Kendra sunk her manicured talons into Emily. But that’s an excuse, isn’t it? Jillian should’ve been paying attention.

“You have to follow her,” Kendra gushed in Emily’s bedroom. “I lost eight pounds with her tips.” Jillian stood (uselessly) outside the door, listening from the hallway.

“Teenage girls,” Jillian thought, dismissively.

Endless scrolling: Thinspiration. Taste, don’t eat. #fitspo

By grade nine, the guidance counsellor was calling. The family doctor, too. “Emily needs a day treatment program.”

Seventy-two pounds and losing. A shadow of her former self.

Emily was the family baby, the only girl after three loud, burly, messy boys. Jillian wheeled her baby into a palliative care bed at age 19. How about that?

“The refeeding is too much on her heart, Jillian. I am so sorry,” Dr. Mulligan said, his warm hand on Jillian’s shoulder.

Now, Jillian sits, her head jerking as sleep tries to overtake her. And it does for a moment. What wakes her? The silence. Where did the beeps go?

​Jillian leans forward, clasping her baby’s unmoving, bony hand.

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Pam McHugh lives and work in Calgary, Alberta. She's discovered the joy of creative writing in middle age. Many of her ideas come from her three children.