If a changeling could be tricked into revealing itself it would go away, but the ways of tricking them seemed beyond us: gathering hundreds or thousands of pieces of silverware and placing them in front of the changeling, so that it would exclaim in shock; cooking a meal in the broken half of one eggshell. A changeling might be starved out, but this was not, we agreed, something we could convince Aunt Vera to try. If a changeling is taken, though, into the woods, and set on the ground there, the books said that the fairies would come and take it back, and in its place they would leave the real baby.

“The real baby is probably dead,” Ruth said, her small voice rasping across my floorboards, lying so close to me that her breath tickled my face. I nodded. The fairies, surely, had no body in which to place a half-formed fetus, though I did imagine this briefly, a dark leather sack full of fairy-water for a child to grow in, or tucked and developing under the stretched skin of someone else, sewn into a thigh like with Zeus and Dionysus or an oviposited wasp egg.

“Probably.”

“But at least the changeling will be gone,” she said, and I put my arms around her, happy to hold her while she grieved her brother in the hypothetical. I kissed the crown of her head, the place that all her curls seemed to twist away from, which was nearly bare like the head of a baby.

My aunt Vera was scheduled to have a C-section at thirty weeks. We went to see her once more in the hospital, where my father surrounded her with flowers he had bought in the gift shop, laying them on the tables on both sides of her bed. “Oh, don’t do that,” she said, laughing. “The nurse will only move them.” I took one out of a bouquet and put it on her chest, between her hands. She clasped them sweetly around it, and I thought that she looked like Sleeping Beauty or the painting of Ophelia on the cover of a book my mother owned.

Aunt Vera kept reaching for Ruth from her pale bed of flowers, holding her hand out in the air whenever Ruth drifted to the other side of the room, as if to gather her closer by a transparent thread between them. She would pull Ruth into the bed with her, half out of the awkward hard chair and close against her side. She would press her nose into Ruth’s hair. “There’s no reason to be scared, Ruthie,” she murmured. Her arms jarred a little, side to side, as she shifted as if to rock Ruth, and Ruth did not move at all. “Are you scared?”

Ruth shrugged one shoulder. She was so still, a hard curve passing all the way from her jaw down her huddled spine. Aunt Vera stroked her hair, stroked a hand over her cheek, tapped the small, jutting bone of her chin with one of her soft fingers. “Don’t be scared,” she said, and kissed Ruth’s forehead. “There’s nothing better than having a brother, Ruthie.” And she smiled at my father over Ruth’s shoulder, almost shyly, almost like a little girl. I dragged my foot across the floor. “There’s nothing,” my aunt repeated, “better than that.”