Ruth’s mouth was a thin, tight line, and when she started to cry I didn’t know what to do, so I pretended she wasn’t crying. I took the changeling out of her backpack, switching it back and forth in my arms, trying to get the blanket that had come loose wrapped again. “Keep going,” I said, and Ruth shook herself like she needed to rebalance her head between her shoulders. She went on all fours as the hillside steepened, knocking dust and pebbles down behind her. The changeling writhed in my arms, trying to press its little limbs free of the blanket. Its face was all wrung up, squeezed tight, and the sound it made was like pain, or terror.

Ruth got a foothold against a tree stump, and held her hands out so that I could pass her the changeling, and then I climbed up past her and she passed it to me, and in this way we went.

It was harder, moving so fast, and only one of us at a time, and in the growing dark. Halfway up, Ruth’s foot slipped out from under her. She went a bit down the hillside, with a little cry that seemed to scrape open the inside of her throat. She caught herself against a tree branch, the muscles trembling hard in her arms, a struck bowstring, and then scrambled back up, bleeding from her knees and the bottom of her chin, biting her lower lip with muddy tears down her face.

Nearly at the hill’s top, there was a copse of trees. The changeling had stopped crying now, and when I held it, it blinked at me, sluggish and baffled. As if it did not know what was happening to it.

The trees were oak and birch, the bark peeling and ashy and the ground prickling under our feet with oak leaves. I stepped on one wrong, and jumped, and almost dropped the changeling, but it didn’t scream again. It was so silent.

“Is it dead?” Ruth asked, with a voice like the point of a needle. She sounded frightened.

“No.”

I handed the changeling to her, at the edge of the trees. These were woods enough. And Ruth unwrapped it from its blanket and unzipped the yellow pajamas my aunt Vera had put it in. She took off the diaper too, squinching her face, and laid the baby down on the dry oak leaves.

“What do we do now?” she said. She was still crying, new tear tracks appearing in the dust on her cheeks. The changeling squirmed on the ground, turning its head, pressing its soft face into the sharp edges of the leaves.

Below us, my father’s car turned the corner, and the baby screamed again, a renewed, painful sound.

Ruth and I both watched the car stop, watched my father and Aunt Vera get out. Aunt Vera was like nothing I had ever seen, narrow and stark as the birch trees, a ghost and a carved monument to herself.