“Good,” Denise said. “Fossils are rarely the actual remains of organisms. Most of the time, they’re just traces
of that organism. Like a footprint or a mold or a petrified bone.”
Or photographs, she thought: her stillborn child in the blue and taupe striped beanie and white gown
Denise had received as shower gifts. The nurse had helped Denise curl her child’s cold fingers around one of
her own. “Someday, you will treasure this,” the nurse had said, and Denise had turned and vomited into a waste
basket.
Or the flesh around Denise’s belly and thighs that had yet to recede.
Or ghost stirrings in that belly that made Denise think she was pregnant again even though she hadn’t had
sex in well over three months, not since before she went into labor. Thirty-nine weeks: no reason to suspect
anything was wrong.
Or the terrible words she had spoken to Garrick, like “Don’t touch me.”
Denise gestured toward the plastic tubs of dirt on the floor along the front of the classroom. She told the
children they were going to conduct their own fossil hunt. “You’re going to take turns playing three roles:
excavator, archivist, and curator. The excavator digs carefully to locate fossils. The archivist maps the location of
the fossil, removes the fossil, and cleans it. The curator records observations of the fossil.”
She knelt on the floor of the classroom and brushed gently at the sediments in one of the tubs with a
medium-sized paint brush, to demonstrate. “You have to be gentle or you could destroy the fossils. Just because
you don’t see anything yet doesn’t mean you’re not close.”
The night before, as she’d hid the fossils in the tubs like Easter eggs, Garrick had smiled sadly.
“What if we do destroy one?” one of the children asked.
“Just try not to,” Denise said.
“But what if we do? By accident?”
“I don’t understand the question,” Denise said.
“What happens if a fossil gets destroyed?”
“Then it gets destroyed,” Denise said.
“But then what?”
“Then you move on,” Denise said.