Fat droplets became a steady gray wall of water. Men’s rain. I strained to keep the shore in sight. Steering around islands of fallen trees forced me out to rain-strengthened currents that bested the puny strength of the motor. I passed under a hulking set of tree limbs that reached out like a claw. It hooked under the thatched roof, tearing it completely from the boat with a racketing boom like a gun going off.

Instantly drenched, I struggled to see more than two feet in front of me. My belly convulsed in vicious, pulsing waves as if it had a will separate from my own. Fresh pain felled me back onto the soaked bags; another entity seemed bent on drilling into the base of my spine. I screamed into the rain, gulping it down with a bottomless thirst, blinded as I bellowed into the blank face of the sky. Big logs rolled past, freed by the deluge.

Rain pooled in the boat, quickly puddling in the center and rising; small tributaries formed around the hard leather bags of leaves. Water pounded at the thick sludge on my body, washing whatever poultice remained cleanly away and leaving only the green stains and healing lesions. I jammed my cold white feet in the tapir sandals between the supplies; they looked like someone else’s feet: swollen, bruised, cut, filthy. The thought that I had to bail the boat and had nothing to bail it with was torpedoed out of my mind by a whip crack of agony; a burning.

I was splitting open.

Gasping for air, I swallowed more water instead, gagging and coughing. But I had to know what was happening. To feel it, because I couldn’t see it. My hand traveled over the moonscape of my belly, down and down. It shook so hard, I had to press it against the quivering flesh of my thigh to steady it. The water rose all around me, my body an archipelago. Haltingly, my fingers cold as death, I worked my hand down past the folds of my sex until I felt the top of his head.

For a full minute I rested my fingers there, pain dulled by wonder, by the knowledge of him; the insanity of where I was and what I was doing forced from my consciousness by his physical reality, the hot rain pounding down like I was with him in his water, too. We were all in water together. I ran my jittery fingers along the tiny section of his hard and soft skull, felt Omar’s thick hair, tangled, matted, wet. I closed my eyes and listened to my baby’s desire to be born, no matter what; on a beach, in a plane, in a hut in a jungle village, in a dugout canoe, and I loved him for making his fierce claim on the world.

Water climbed all around me where I lay on the bags; it surged into channels and inlets around my breasts and shoulders, crept up to my knees, lapped at the curve of my hip, licked at my chin. I pictured him coming out of me, facedown, drowning; Dutchie’s dead visage flashed by. I scrambled higher up onto the bags of leaves to elevate myself, which bought me a minute, less. The rain came down harder as if enraged. The bags sank under my weight. Blood turned in S shapes in the rainwater at my hips; the little lake in the boat swirled with sticks and leaves as the water lapped over the sides. I had been torn; I knew it.