The jar sits on my dresser.
Has for thirty-seven years. Small, glass, the kind that held baby food once. Pureed carrots or peas. Something orange, I think. I washed it out and kept it, the way mothers keep things.
Inside: her teeth.
The first one fell out at the kitchen table. She was eating an apple. Looked down at the blood on the fruit and didn’t cry, just said, “Oh.” Like it was happening to someone else. Like she was already learning to leave herself.
I was the one who cried. Quietly, in the bathroom, where she couldn’t hear. My baby was losing pieces of herself. I collected them.
Twenty teeth. That’s how many children have. I counted once, years ago, when she was maybe twelve and still let me brush her hair. Twenty teeth in a small glass jar. A complete set.
She’s dead now. Thirty-seven years old. Car accident. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong everything.
The funeral was last week. I haven’t cried yet. I keep waiting for it to come, the way I waited for her teeth to fall out, one by one, on their own schedule.
Today I take down the jar.
I pour the teeth into my palm. They’re so small. I forget, every time, how small. They look like something you’d find on a beach. Little shells. Little bones.
I count them.
I count them again.
Twenty-one.
There should be twenty. There are twenty-one.
I spread them on the dresser. Incisors, canines, molars. I try to remember which tooth came from where, when each one fell, what she was eating, what she said.
I can’t account for the extra tooth.
I pick it up. It’s smaller than the others. Sharper. Almost translucent, like it never fully formed.
I don’t remember this tooth.
I call my sister. “How many baby teeth do children lose?”
“Twenty. Why?”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I hang up.
I look at the tooth in my palm. At the way it catches the light. At the small dark spot near the root that might be blood or might be something else.
I should throw it away. It isn’t hers. It can’t be hers. It came from somewhere else — fell into the jar somehow, a mistake, a contamination.
But I can’t.
Because what if it is hers? What if there was a part of my daughter I didn’t know about? A piece she grew in secret, lost in secret, that somehow found its way home?
What if she’s still leaving parts of herself behind?
I put the tooth in my mouth.
I don’t know why.
It sits on my tongue like a communion wafer. Like a seed.
I swallow.
And for one moment — one impossible moment — I feel her. Inside me. The way she was before she was born.
Then it’s gone.
I look at the twenty teeth remaining on my dresser. I put them back in the jar. I put the jar back on the dresser.
Tomorrow I will call the funeral home. I will pick up her ashes.
She told me where she wanted them. I laughed when she said it. She didn’t.
“I want to be mixed into bread dough,” she said. “Baked. Eaten.”
I told her that was insane.
“I want to become part of the people I love,” she said. “I want to be inside them the way they’re inside me.”
I told her I couldn’t do that. I told her it was morbid. Wrong.
She looked at me the way she always looked at me when I refused to understand her.
“You kept my teeth in a jar for thirty-seven years, Mom. You don’t get to call me insane.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I still don’t.
Tomorrow I will pick up her ashes. I will buy flour. I will buy yeast.
But tonight, I sit with the jar.
Twenty teeth. A complete set.
And somewhere inside me, the twenty-first.
The first piece of her I’ve let myself keep.
