Aunt Vera had gotten pregnant just before the start of that summer, when I was eleven and Ruth was ten. The pregnancy was announced to all of us at once, my father, my mother, Ruth, and me all gathered in Aunt Vera’s living room. I loved Aunt Vera’s living room more than I had ever loved any part of my house, because it was made of flinty gray stone, on both the walls and floor, and had a fireplace like a yawning mouth. Aunt Vera poured champagne into tall, thin glasses for my parents, and apple cider for Ruth, me, and herself. “Can’t drink,” she said. “It wouldn’t be good for the baby.” She beamed like a pillar of quartz.

Aunt Vera would be forty next year. She’d wanted to try just once more, she said, before her odds got even worse. She used the word miracle in those early months of her pregnancy with such persistence that it began to drip into everyone else’s vocabulary. “Miracle baby,” my father and mother both called the child, and my mother said, “I hope she doesn’t name it that.” “It’s a miracle,” Ruth and I said, when we passed spelling tests, when we found our lost toys, when we located a creek deep enough to swim in. Miracles were abundant.

Ruth spent more time at our house than before, and she had always spent a lot of time there. Aunt Vera’s pregnancy must have been difficult from the beginning, because we often heard that she was sick, that she was too tired for us to play at her house, or to drive Ruth to Junior Biologists Camp. Our air bed got regular use.

“I think it’s admirable,” my father said, as he shut the car door on Ruth and me in the backseat, ready for him to drive us to camp. Ruth was a Junior Ornithologist that year; I was a Junior Entomologist. “That she’s doing it on her own.”

“I think it would be admirable,” my mother answered, probably not knowing that the other door was still open and we could hear, “if she was doing it on her own.”

My aunt Vera’s artificial insemination was explained to me in the same concrete and semi-scientific terms as Ruth’s adoption had been, and miscarriages later would be. I was not told at the time that my father had helped pay for it, though he had given Aunt Vera the money with the intention of paying off her student loans.

My aunt’s condition baffled and frightened me, not because of its origin but because of its details. She was a small woman, and dieted extravagantly during her pregnancy, reciting, whenever food was offered to her, how little weight she had gained while creating life. “Barely more than the baby weighs!” And so the protuberance from her abdomen dwarfed her. Her morning sickness was unrelenting, and was the first time I had seen an adult throw up. She carried herself delicately, with a hand on her lower back and another groping for things to balance her, as if she were in constant pain. Looking at her, I thought inevitably of parasites.