“I said how odd to see ice and snow this far south,” she said. “I told him how when I woke just minutes before, the baby pressing so hard on my bladder I knew I couldn’t make it until morning, that I saw the white glaze on the ground and thought surely we were getting close to home. But we were still seven hundred miles away. And then I kissed him—he was still half-asleep, stubble on his cheek, a tiny scratch from shaving that morning—and I made my way to the Pullman car to find a restroom.

“The cars rocked back and forth, and I had to hold to the many seats I passed. People were sleeping, snoring, shifting, servicemen with duffels tossed up overhead or at their feet, and outside the windows the world was like a winter wonderland, the trees and ground coated in white. I had to use the bathroom so bad I was afraid I wouldn’t make it. I was carrying your little brother so low. I was so relieved to finally get there. That’s where I was, a tiny cubicle with a cracked mirror and barely room to stretch my legs and attempt to straighten my stockings. Everything made me uncomfortable then. And that’s where I was. One minute, I was watching the dark, glistening trees fly past, and the next, there was a terrible sound and I was thrown into the wall.

“I lost my breath when I landed on the floor,” his mother told him, “and it took what seemed forever to breathe, forever for the screeching sounds and screams to subside. But then there was just a second of jolted silence before the screams began again, screams from every direction, and my thought was so foolish: there I was carrying a baby, there I was with what I knew were broken bones, but all I could think about was my clean hair and clothes on that dirty bathroom floor, where so many strangers had been before me. Then after what seemed an eternity, I was pulled out and out and out, into the cold, and I couldn’t see anything. By then, I was calling your dad’s name as loud as I could scream.”

She stopped then and reached for Frank’s hand. “I’m so sorry I took you from your home.” It was something she said many times before she died, but that was the first time. “But he begged me,” she said. “He said, ‘Don’t leave. Don’t leave.’”