Once, she remembers not being able to sleep, hearing voices in the kitchen, coming down to find her mother and her friends here, sitting around the table. “What are you making?” she had asked.

“They’re cranes,” her mother replied. “Here, look.” Sarah lifted her into her lap and showed her how to fold the paper to make the origami birds; she explained they were making them to mark an anniversary, of a bomb dropping in Japan, that they were a sign of peace, a sign that nothing like that should ever happen again. They sat around the table, the women, speaking in low voices, as Lissa followed her mother’s instructions and a bird emerged, like magic, like something beautiful being born.

The women murmured to each other, and there was the soft, susurrating sound of their voices, the rippling sound of their occasional laughter, the warmth of her mother, the smell of her, of turpentine and of spices, the feeling of being allowed to stay up, of being held, the whiteness of the paper and the pleasure in folding and in making something fine.

She remembers all this, standing here in the kitchen—the peace there was in this room. She remembers the sense of peace.

2012

Hannah

IT HAS NOT BEEN EASY TO SLEEP, THESE LAST NIGHTS. EVEN with all the pillows she cannot find a comfortable place to lie.

The baby wakes her often. She lies there, feeling the baby move her limbs in the small space left to her. Hannah thinks she feels a heel bone, an elbow. She touches the baby through the skin of her stomach. The baby is a Selkie. An underwater swimmer. An habitué of the dark.

The baby is a girl. At first, this knowledge troubled Hannah. A boy felt simpler somehow. How to be a mother to a girl?

But now the thought of a girl is wondrous.

Now she is impatient to meet her.

There is a line to be crossed first. A birthing. She is not scared, she thinks, of pain. It is only the surrender, perhaps, that frightens her.

She speaks to Nathan sometimes. He has a room in a flat close by. He visits, and when he visits, he is quiet, solicitous. He cooks for her, soups and risottos. He makes a large pan and leaves it for her on the stove. Sometimes they walk together, along the canal. Sometimes, when she is tired, she takes his arm. Sometimes, before he leaves her where she sits, huge on the sofa, she catches him looking, catches the look on his face.

He asks for little, but he has asked to be present at the birth. She has not said yes to this. She does not know if having him there will make things easier or harder. There are many things that she does not know. And this not knowing, in these cold January days lit from a warmth within, feels OK somehow.