Ruth was diffident. “I think so. She really wants the baby.”

A point had been made to both Ruth and me as children about how wanted we were. My mother had her own story about fertility treatments, marking off days on her calendar, calculating with my father how long they could afford to do this, the budgets still on the dining room table the morning she discovered she was pregnant with me. Aunt Vera’s want of a child was well and widely known, that she had tried hormonal treatments, essential oils, crystals, and prayer, before and while she waited for her adoption application to be approved. There were photos in our family album, taken by my father, of a short, round woman, limbs all slim and pointed like a pixie’s, the social worker passing Ruth into Aunt Vera’s arms, Ruth a small bundle, a slice of her shining head and a soft fuzz of hair, poised perfectly in between the moment of transfer, when she ceased to be one person, part of one family, and became another.

“Isn’t it interesting,” my mother said once—it was amazing the things that I could hear through the wall of my room, how much thicker my parents thought that barrier was than it was—“how she seemed to start really needing a child only after you told her we were trying?”

“Do you think that’s something you can copy?” my father asked impatiently. “Being a parent, do you think you invented that, Patricia, do you think that’s something you can copy?”

I had not stopped thinking about this, this suggestion that Ruth could be in some way a replication of me. We were not the same. Ruth frightened easily, and didn’t like to talk to people she didn’t know. Ruth’s hair was shorter and darker, she liked to wear dresses and was good at math. Ruth was missing her back left tooth and her bottom front one, and most of my adult teeth were already in. When I looked into her mouth with a flashlight, I’d found a new tooth, a little ridge of white bone stabbing out of her gum. I put my finger on it to see if it would hurt her. I told her, “If your mouth was a cave, this would be the door.” It made a lot of sense to me, though, if Ruth had been brought here to our town, and grown into herself, only because I was first.

“Do you know if it’s a girl?”

“No. She wants to be surprised.” The bones in Ruth’s back shifted under my hand as she folded more tightly into herself. Behind her, the green glow from my night-light looked like the headlights of an alien ship. When I thought about being abducted by aliens, I imagined them realigning my bones, or pulling out my teeth and dropping them into a set of small and separate jars, all the individual secrets of my body.

“Do you want it to be a girl?”