When Naomi first started visiting the cemetery, all she could do was lay her body across her daughter’s plot and sink into despair. She didn’t know how many times she wished the grass would become osmotic and swallow her into its depths just so she could be where her daughter was. She’d pass whole afternoons chest-first on the grass, arms spread as if she was hugging the ground. For two weeks, she spent her days this way, napping fitfully on top of her daughter’s grave, occasionally taking a stunned walk around the children’s garden, observing the strange and intricate grief that comes with losing a child. Headstones with child faces frozen in stone. A stone crib with little stone blankets and a stone stuffed bear. So many of the plots outlined in tiny, child-sized white picket fencing as if the three-by-six-foot plot was a home that needed protecting.
Today, she brings a bucket of water and a few scrub brushes. She starts with the bigger brush, scrubbing large swaths across the marble, taking satisfaction in seeing the water in the bucket change from clear to murky. She eventually moves on to the toothbrush, tracing the letters of her daughter’s name: M A I S I E. When she finishes, she buffs the marble with a microfiber towel until the stone shines. She digs up the dying spring flowers—daffodils, clown-nosed and cheerful—and plants a pot of pink daisies, her daughter’s favorite color. Naomi sits back on the damp grass and observes her work. “Looking good,” she mutters.
For the first year, Naomi came to the cemetery every weekend, bucket of soapy water and scrub brushes in tow. She washed the gravestone and kept the grass immaculately trimmed, often by hand with big garden shears. Until one day, she noticed the grass started to yellow then die. Then, a section of the stone became discolored. A corner of it started to crumble. Irate, she called the cemetery and demanded to know why her daughter wasn’t being cared for. “Ma’am,” the voice at the end of the line said carefully, “we believe you might be caring for the gravestone a little too much. Soap can deteriorate stone. And kill the grass around it.”
Routine has always been Naomi’s normal and her coping. She eats oatmeal every morning and does her grocery shopping on Saturdays. Routine is what eventually pulled her back from the edges of grief—she had to go back to work eventually. She couldn’t spend all day sleeping on top of her daughter’s grave. Rising with her alarm clock, brushing her teeth, pulling into her parking spot, recording the results of her latest research in long, tidy rows of numbers, leaving by six, heating a microwave dinner, cleaning it up, then off to bed. This is what kept Naomi if not living, then at least alive for those first grief-soaked months.
Now, she has ditched the soap and limits herself to wiping down the gravestone just once a month, though she still visits every weekend. Naomi finds other outlets for her grief that don’t involve melting her daughter’s gravestone. The flowers, for one. She keeps them immaculately kept, weed-free and watered, a bright spot of color even amongst all the flowers and balloons and other shiny, gaudy things in the children’s garden.
She also takes walks, checks in on her daughter’s neighbors. The little girl who died when she was just a month old beside her. The boy who is her daughter’s age three rows over. Today, she visits a five-year-old at the edge of the garden, a girl whose face is etched lifelike in the stone. She pictures Maisie at this age, how obsessed she was with hosting tea parties and braiding chains of wildflowers.
It’s a beautiful day. The kind that makes her heart ache—sunshine dappling the trees, a pine tree scenting the air with its musk, the perfect temperature where she can’t tell where the air ends and she begins. She decides to take a walk.
Cemeteries used to terrify her. Grave after grave begged the question that she had no answers or even hypotheses for: who were they? Who are they? A body decomposing into soil? A story people tell sometimes: remember when so-and-so…? What happens when the last person who remembers you dies?
The questions started with her job at BioTech, when she first began 3D printing human tissue every day and injecting it with various diseases. In front of her eyes, kidneys and livers and hearts would bloom with sickness, swollen and bleeding, sometimes green with infection, birth and death happening at her fingertips in the span of a few weeks.
You’d think she would be like other scientists: logical, discerning, comforted by the data. Here was proof that humanity could be boiled down, distilled, recreated in a petri dish. Nothing more, nothing less.
Except a bundle of cells is different from a whole human life, isn’t it? Anyone could logically see that. The heart that was rotting on Naomi’s work bench at BioTech was not anywhere close to a heart that beat in the chest of a person who had a name and a mother and a favorite breakfast cereal.
So—what was it that made a person a person? A spirit? A soul? What happens when the physical manifestation of those things dies? Where, in other words, do the parts of ourselves that love and grieve and laugh and rage go when they are no longer caged within a body?
An age-old question with so many theories, it used to make her nauseous.
Now, though, cemeteries have simplified to one thing: the place where her daughter is. It has given Naomi’s life a sense of purpose again, bucket and brushes in hand, and a (relative) sense of peace.
She’d read once that cemeteries used to be comparable to public parks back in the day. Beautiful, sprawling gardens. Well-kept walking paths. Sculptures that looked more like masterpieces than tombstones. She understands this now. It is a resting place. A restful place. A spot to stroll or sit and close your eyes and feel the sunshine on your shoulders. To think about your daughter and the children who keep her company during the long days and nights when she and Naomi can’t be together.
Of course, she doesn’t really believe that. Her daughter, she is painfully aware, is gone. Questions about spirit and soul aside, it is highly unlikely that her daughter is some sort of misty-eyed creature, frolicking with other translucent children, braiding flower crowns.
At the end of the day, no matter how colorfully planted and serenely quiet a cemetery is, it still holds the biggest tragedies and deepest traumas of people’s lives.
She has strayed away from the children’s garden, further into the cemetery than she normally goes. Her eyes rake over the unfamiliar tombstones and catch on one a few rows over. Set in the middle is a little placard of some sort, and when Naomi gets closer, she realizes it is a recipe handwritten, she is assuming, by the deceased. Deborah Abrams, beloved mother, aunt, and grandmother. Born in 1919, died in 1991. The recipe is for something called spritz cookies. The ingredients are simple: butter, sugar, vanilla, an egg, flour, baking powder and salt. No instructions, just the list of ingredients. It almost makes Naomi smile. She imagines a cheeky old woman who didn’t want to give up the family recipe, even in death. Though she doesn’t know what a spritz cookie is or how to mix and make them, she snaps a picture of the tombstone with her phone.
She waves goodbye to Maisie on her way out.
Nights are the hardest. The world outside begins to shut down. Darkness descends. The lights turn on and so does Naomi’s grief.
She tries to keep herself busy. Television was a constant companion for the first few months. She’d fall asleep with blue light flashing across her face and startle awake to disembodied voices, policemen telling someone hands up, get down. A chef screaming about the thinness of a sauce. Reality women sucking down lemon-scented iced tea, hating each other as much as they hated their boring lives. After a while, t.v. depressed Naomi too much so she turned to social media. She signed up for TikTok and scrolls video after video of babies shoving fistfuls of food into their mouths, babies taking a tumble, babies curling up beside kittens and puppies. The algorithm has clearly homed in on something about Naomi’s life, though Naomi has no idea how it could know.
Recently, she came across a video about something called angel numbers. Every number has a unique vibration, the woman on the screen said. She was young and dressed in a cropped tank top. Droopy hanging plants and a dark purple cloth full of white splotches that looked like stars made up the background. Numbers are not coincidences. They have meaning. You just need to be open enough to interpret them.
Which, surprisingly, Naomi agreed with. Perhaps not in this context, but she looks at numbers every day and derives meaning from them: nozzle size and what that means for print resolution, temperature and its impact on 3D printed cell viability. Cell growth. Cell longevity. All of it: numbers.
Tonight, she goes to the angel number woman’s TikTok page. It’s not that she believes in them. She thinks they’re new age hippy dippy bullshit, like crystals and essential oils. But she finds the whole thing fascinating. She scrolls and scrolls. What are angel numbers? What do angel numbers mean? Why am I seeing angel numbers? Video after video lists the numbers and their meanings. 222—surrender to the flow. 4545—lucky in love. It becomes like a game to her. Naomi tries to think of numbers she’s seen a lot lately. Her license plate, the time she wakes up in the morning, how many shots of espresso she drinks in her morning latte—none of them reveal any sort of pattern or real significance.
But then, realization douses her like cold water.
Her daughter.
Born June 6, 2006. 6-6-6.
It had always been a running joke between her and Sal. They had spawned the anti-Christ. Their child was bound to a life of evil and darkness. Our little devil baby, they’d called her when she was a newborn.
Oh Jesus. Naomi frantically types in the search bar. What does the angel number 666 mean?
The results are mixed, though they all agree it doesn’t necessarily mean evil. Six is a spiritual number, one site claims. It puts you into connection with the otherworldly. Or, another site says, you need more connection in your life. Another: treat yourself gently and compassionately. Seek out support. You are giving too much of yourself. Naomi’s favorite: when you see sixes repeatedly, try a little self-care. Like taking a bubble bath.
Naomi sighs and exits out of the browser. Her eyes are gritty beneath her fingertips. When she presses into them, she sees stars explode. It is getting late, yet she knows if she goes to bed now, she’ll lay there for hours with just the dark and her thoughts for company.
She snorts. Perhaps she needs a bubble bath.
Instead, she opens up her phone and pulls up her photos. It’s one of the ways she soothes herself after a visit to the cemetery, the denouement of the ritual: scrolling through what used to feel like endless photos of her daughter.
Now, they feel precious and too few.
The first photo, she realizes with surprise, comes from today. It’s the first picture she’s taken in months. There have not been many important or fun things worthy enough of a picture in her life lately. But this was interesting. It was a weird. A recipe on a gravestone—to what purpose? For the family? But wouldn’t they have the original recipe card? So then—for people in the cemetery?
Except that doesn’t make any sense, either. Who’s going to bake a recipe from a gravestone? And could you even call this a recipe? She zooms in on the list of ingredients. No instructions, although it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out. The ingredients seem similar to a basic sugar cookie recipe. Plus, they’re staples. Stuff she has in the pantry and refrigerator right now, no extra trip to the grocery store needed.
Naomi squints her eyes at the recipe then at the clock on the oven. Ten-thirty. She shrugs. It wouldn’t take too long. And this day calls for something a little sweet, doughy, and warm. Comfort in the form of a cookie. She gathers the ingredients and zaps the butter in the microwave until it is just softened. She whisks in the sugar, the egg. Sifts the flour and baking powder together. Finishes with a splash of vanilla.
This is the part that’s tricky—what temperature should the oven be? How big to make the cookies? And how long to bake them? Damn it, Deborah, Naomi scolds mildly. She could look up a similar recipe online, but that would take the fun out of the experiment. She preheats the oven to 350 degrees, rolls the dough into golf-ball-sized pieces, and sets the timer for ten minutes.
As she is waiting for the cookies to bake, she swipes her finger across her phone screen and watches her daughter age backwards: holding a cup of pink Starbucks drink, her lips stained and shiny. With her arms around her best friend after their sixth-grade graduation. Hair braided into two, her scalp a taut line down the center of her skull. A grin with more teeth missing than there. Summer teeth, Sal called them. Summer here and summer gone.
When the timer beeps, Naomi pulls the cookies from the oven. They are too brown on the bottom but still doughy on top. She stuffs one too hot into her mouth and swallows the mass of burnt-sugar-dough in one gulp.
She scoops the rest of the cookies onto a plate then cleans the kitchen. When the counters are wiped and scrubbed and the ingredients are put back in their proper homes and the dirty tray is tucked into the dishwasher, Naomi feels exhaustion, like warm milk, flow through her.
She climbs into bed and clicks off the lamp. She’s asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.
When she wakes a few hours later, her mouth still tastes of sugar. She looks at her alarm clock: 3:30 in the morning.
The clock’s faintly lit numbers cast a green sheen around the bedroom, outlining the dark, heavy forms of furniture: the half-emptied dresser, the stationary bike in the corner, the one Naomi had insisted on purchasing years ago and stopped using after a few rides because of her busy schedule. The bed with the empty imprint of a body that used to lay beside her every night. Familiar and strange all at once, like the hole a missing tooth leaves behind.
Everything awash in the alarm clock’s eerie, sleepless light.
Faint enough that she nearly misses the woman, gritty around the edges and foggy around the eyes, sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, watching Naomi while she sleeps.