There sat our mother, a white form punctuated by the gray of her mantle and her gloves.

Around her, in various postures, sat also—

Sat also white forms around her on the snow gray rocks, their white faces several round moons, skin a milky blue—as though I gazed at them through the surface of a pond. The figures indeed looked the watery reflections of themselves. Mother did not sense my presence, so I heard her broken words as she carried on what seemed a one-sided conversation. I could not make out any answer from the forms, but I noted some of them bent and nodded in liquid acquiescence.

Then she turned to me.

“Can you see them?”

“Yes,” I whispered, and stole closer. “Who are they?”

“Visitors.” She smiled. “From the other side.”

One of them rose as if to give me his seat. A great tearing pain caused the earth to crack open at my feet, and Mother loomed high above me. I dimly perceived her hand reaching down before I fainted dead away.

When I revived, it was with the faint sensibility of swimming upward toward a bright hole at the top of the water’s surface. I opened my eyes, gasping. Susannah stood quietly by. She leaned over me and tenderly adjusted the coverings at my neck.

“Can you sit up?”

I struggled to do so, wanting to leave this gray place, wanting the solid of our house, the trim white sheets of my own bed and the cold window glass between the inner and outer worlds. I rose to my feet, swaying a little into her encircling arm. She turned us toward the home path. We walked side by side in silence. Around me, the trees leaned to listen. I promised nothing. As the woods thinned, as we approached the wide back field that stretched behind our house, my heart eased somewhat. But Mother was not finished. She put her lips up to my ears and whispered into them, her breath hot in my hair.

I have named my little one—Perdita.

There is my baby crying at the back of the house—I can hear her tiny little wail. I raised up my head, but all about me is darkness, and when I try to move, I cannot swing my legs from the bed, I am grown so weak and feeble.

“Susannah!” I called. But I cannot even hear her, and since I have written this, I do not hear the baby’s call.

I woke with a start, my heart beating wildly. “Where is my baby? Where is my girl?”

Susannah’s face bent near. “Hush now.”

I turned to her. “Where is my baby girl?”

She patted my hand, though there is such coldness in her face!

“Sue,” I cried, and I lay back, weak as a child, weeping. “I thought I held her little body in my arms as on that first night. I thought she lay beside me—I was digging.”