“Ow,” Ruth said.

“Oh no, sweetheart, it didn’t actually hurt. It looked like it would hurt—“

“No.” Ruth raised a clawed hand to her head, held it against the place where Aunt Vera had tangled her fingers in her hair. “Ow.”

“Oh.” She held her hand delicately, turning it loose from Ruth’s hair. “Did I hurt you, Ruth?”

Ruth lifted one shoulder. “A little.”

“Sorry, baby.” Aunt Vera petted her hand, her long, manicured nails resting briefly on Ruth’s knuckles. “They’re going to tell me tonight,” she said, again to my father, “whether they think I’m going to need to do a C-section.” My father nodded, in time with the bob of Aunt Vera’s head. “I wanted it to be natural.” Aunt Vera sighed. “I really want it to be natural. But obviously, whatever the baby needs.”

* * *

“Changelings,” I told Ruth, in the car on the way back, “are babies that the fairies give you. They aren’t really babies, though.”

“What are they?”

“Sometimes they’re the babies of fairies.” My father was singing along to his country music in the front seat. “Or they’re bad fairies that just look like babies. Sometimes they’re not even anything at all, the fairies just weave them out of sticks, they make them out of grass and mud, and they switch out the real babies for them. They steal real babies, and they leave behind the changelings. And just like with the ants and the butterflies, you can tell a changeling is a changeling because it eats and eats until there’s nothing left for anybody else. “

“Your mom’s gonna be fine, Ruth,” my father said. “Stop telling her scary stories, Judith. Your mom is gonna be fine, and your baby brother is going to be darling.”

“What’s a C-section?” Ruth asked him. She’d opened her hands on the seat next to me, peeling her fingers apart as if it were painful, and I saw that there was a series of small crescent cuts on her palm, places where she had, again and again, clenched her fists so tight she bled.

“It’s when they have to take the baby out with surgery,” my father said. “But it’s very safe, for your mom and the baby.”

Ruth had a look like she was carved out of stone. I had caught enough of medical dramas over my mother’s shoulder to have a basic, visual concept of surgery, to understand that it was the reduction of your body to its nonhuman parts, the opening of you to reveal things that oozed and squirmed. It was so like the picture I had had already, the opening of my aunt Vera like an anatomy doll. When I asked my mother, whom I trusted to tell the truth, she only said, “No worse than labor.”

That night Ruth sat on my blue tie rug, with my room closed up around us like a pair of clasping hands. I was eleven years old and had never seen anyone look so sad. I remember that it made me angry, with Aunt Vera and with the baby, who had made her so sad already, existing in the hypothetical, and also with Ruth, because in the bow of her neck and her small balled fist, it seemed to me that she was feeling something I was not capable of understanding or sharing, like she’d gone beyond a wall into a different room, an area of adulthood where I wasn’t welcome.