She could not keep a baby. She miscarried four times in five years, each event a tragedy of silence endured at a scream-pitch within as Norman spoke in quiet tones that made her hate him a little, his assurances that they would try again, his certainty each would be the one to swell forth and thrive. Beyond the terror of her failure lay the restlessness of the small souls, lacking even the infants’ headstone awarded to earlier generations of Pelham child-death. The fourth was the worst in a way: a trauma of blood late in her fourth month, the blood thick and rich and darkening fast against the linen, the day outside brilliant against deep snowbanks of February, the window beside her bed hung with sparkling dripping icicles, the pain as if all of her body was clenched tight to hold the creature within her, a fish not to be grasped in swollen viscous liquids. They had kept this one secret until she began to show visibly and it seemed settled within her. Alone, Norman laid the creature too small for him to comprehend truly as a child in a cut-down egg crate and buried it in a place he would not tell her: under the lilacs beside the kitchen where the south sun had softened the soil at the foundation and where she could not see him working from the bed above on the other side of the house. He then carried the bundled linens high up to the woodlot and burned them with a brush pile on a day of soft wet falling snow while she was still in bed, and yet clearly she smelled the smoke of the blood-soaked cloth, the stench of her own failure passing downhill through the snowscreen. She rose silent that day from her bed and resumed her work, unable to not think of what small remains burned also there above her. The doctor was a portly man who wore pince-nez and heavy wool vested suits, abrupt and hesitant with Leah, ineffectual beyond assuring her this happened to many women, not helped by her silence over her own history and not improving upon her impression when she overheard him telling Norman that after all half the fun was in the trying. The doctor’s hands were delicate and timid, trembling slightly as they came upon her and she knew he drank but could not help but think it was her skin that caused their tremor.