Ruth pressed her knuckles against her teeth, like she was about to bite. “Why does she even want a baby so bad?”

And I said, “It’s not even a real baby. It can’t be.”

“A changeling,” Ruth said.

I was anticipating argument. “Wasps put their babies in the babies of butterflies, they kill the caterpillars and make them wasps inside the cocoon. Those are changelings. It’s not even any different.”

When Ruth looked up at me with huge eyes, like the stunned eyes of a deer, I got down off the bed and sat on the rug behind her. I pulled her body against my stomach, hair and her squirming bones. I dug my chin into her shoulder until it must’ve hurt, and held her around her ribs until she turned to me and pushed her wet face against my throat. I told her about butterflies raised in the nests of ants, about wasps that paralyzed spiders to incubate their eggs in, and wasps that filled the bodies of caterpillars with their squirming larvae until they burst out through the skin. I stroked her hair and told her about tricksy fairies weaving babies together from sticks and vines. The world was full of frightful things, but I knew about them and so I could help her. People in fairy tales dealt with changelings; I could hold Ruth close and explain to her that so could we. Her back was bowed and trembling. I pictured knobby hands plunged into my aunt’s body, plucking out my real cousin, replacing this creature that scraped her insides and made her bleed.

* * *

The days following were tracked in Aunt Vera’s ultrasound pictures.

My father sat Ruth down and explained that they were going to have to take the baby out of my aunt. He told her that this happened to a lot of women, all the time. He told her that the doctors would monitor the baby, so that it could stay inside my aunt Vera as long as possible, and then come out.

“They’re leaving him in her?”

My father touched her shoulder. “Not for very long.”

The ultrasounds were taken daily, and my aunt Vera sent copies of the pictures home with my father whenever he went to visit her. Sometimes they ended up on our fridge, sometimes facedown on the dining room table with mailed flyers for school events, sometimes set on top of Ruth’s inflatable mattress. “That’s gruesome,” was all my mother said about it, not in earshot of my father. Some of the photographs looked like they had been drawn with white sand sprinkled over a black background, a suggestion of the baby. There were newer ones that did not look like the ultrasounds on TV. One of these was given pride of place on our fridge, a picture of the baby that showed its facial features as if they were sculpted out of mud, the flat nose, uncanny half-closed eyes, mouth small and carved, like the body of a clay vase caved inward with the press of a thumb. If Ruth and I were not already convinced that this was not a real child, that it was sculpted from dense earth and dead foliage, maybe this would have decided us.