“Aunt Vera might still have a baby,” my father said, and clicked the fetus into place in the woman’s body. “A miscarriage is when a woman is going to have a baby”—his fingernail tapped on the plastic stomach—“but then something goes wrong in her body, and what was going to become a baby—”

“A fetus,” my mother supplied. She was dragging our air mattress into my room, her back arched with the effort, it having mostly unrolled onto the floor already. I already knew what a fetus was, because I had seen a cow’s at the Museum of Natural History that year, suspended in amber liquid.

“The fetus comes out of the woman, and then she isn’t going to have a baby anymore.” My father reached back into the figurine. “Do you understand, Judith?” I held my hand out for the fetus, expectant. It was the size and color of a grape Jolly Rancher, and looked like a movie alien, curly and insectoid. I closed my fingers over it, and then opened them again.

“Aunt Vera might still have a baby.” My father returned the fetus to my aunt’s macabre stand-in. “But only if the doctors take good care of her, and she gets a lot of rest.”

“Which is why”—my mother plugged the air mattress pump in, and it roared to sudden life, a beast, outraged, in the silence of my attic room—“Cousin Ruth is coming to stay with us.”

* * *

My aunt Vera loved to call her pregnancy a miracle, and it did seem miraculous to me, if also disquieting. She was the first pregnant woman I’d ever known before she was pregnant, and closely enough to be present for the transformation. I’d known as long as I could remember that Aunt Vera was not capable of having children. This fact did not carry for me any of the connotations it did for the adults in my life. Her marriage, her divorce, the fertility treatments she tried first with her husband and then on her own all happened before I was born. I knew it because Ruth was adopted, and it had been necessary to explain to me, when I was small and she arrived, where my new cousin came from. This incapability of Aunt Vera’s body was what had produced her, Ruth emerging from negative space, and so it seemed as natural and impenetrable to me as my cousin’s presence in my life.

Aunt Vera and Ruth lived two blocks away from us. I could have sleepwalked to their door, if I sleepwalked. I spent a quarter of my nights on the floor of Ruth’s living room, the two of us sleeping on our backs on Aunt Vera’s sheepskin rug. Aunt Vera, who worked from home, drove us both to the same after-school activities, took us, occasionally, off-campus for lunch, cheered, the year before, at both our soccer games. Ruth and I were both only children, and Aunt Vera and my father were so close. Our sisterhood was inevitable.