Later, after Ruth had slipped back to me, to our far corner of the room, and I caught her round wrist in my hand, my father sat in the chair at Aunt Vera’s bedside, and put his arms around her while she cried a little. “I just—” she said, and she sniffled into his shoulder. “I just really wanted this to go differently. I really wanted to have a baby this time, you know. I really wanted everything to be natural.”

My mother made a noise in her throat, low and displeased like the sound I thought a mountain lion might make. “Ruth,” she said, “Judith. Why don’t I take you girls down to the gift shop?” When the door was closed, she squatted down in front of Ruth and put a heavy palm on her shoulder. “Don’t even listen to your mother right now.”

Ruth turned her cheek away, her hair falling a little into her eyes. “It’s all right.”

Ruth talked with Aunt Vera on the phone, the night before they did the C-section. My father gave her his phone, and he let her sit in my mother’s office, in my mother’s soft desk chair that spun. I sat on my rug and lined up my praying mantises, the orchid mantis sitting at the front of the line, with its delicate thorax and the lines of petals. It looked, to me, so real.

“Why did you take the baby?” I asked it. “What do you want with a baby?”

I had never thought, really, of the baby in my aunt as my cousin, just as Ruth was, except actually related to me. Perhaps we could have been even closer than Ruth and me, made of the same stuff. It made me angry, all of a sudden, that the fairies had deprived me of that.

* * *

My father woke us in the middle of the night, shifting Ruth’s air mattress gently with his toe so that it moved beneath us both like open water.

“Your baby brother’s arrived,” he said. “Do you want to go see him?”

Very quietly, in the half-woken darkness of the room, Ruth said, “He’s not my brother.”

“Of course he’s your brother.” There was warmth in my father’s voice, in the green-lit curve of his smile. “Let’s go and see him.”

I held Ruth’s hand in the backseat of the car. The streets were black, and longer than they were in the daytime, with the lampposts spilling pools of gold-dark light onto the asphalt. Ruth put her chin on my shoulder, moving her lips against my ear. “Don’t let it trick you,” she murmured.

I nodded.

My father and Ruth went to see Aunt Vera first. “They should have a private moment,” he said, folding Ruth’s hand in his. “We’ll see if she’s still awake.” And my mother and I went to find the baby.

It was a small hospital, and the NICU wasn’t full. Still, my mother had to have the changeling pointed out to us by a nurse. It was lying in a tub, at the far left of the room, under two yellow glowing lamps, so that it looked like it was splayed out in the sunshine.