“It is all right.” He smiled, and I felt my love for him come back.

I have forgiven you, I thought, but I do not think that will be enough.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Why do you make a face like that?”

“It only hurts,” I said.

At midnight, I sat up in our bed. Emmanuel lay beside me, his breath light.

The pain that was in my body was warm now. It was a pain I had seen when I attended births with Mama. The births back home in Kings County, when I was a girl—every one was a kind of celebration. Because we knew each new child meant we had a claim to the land, to our space of freedom there.

The very first birth I had seen with Mama had frightened me. I had wanted to run from the room while the woman bellowed and hissed, and the air became thick with the smell of something deep and hidden, something that smelled almost lost.

But Mama had given me a look, and I had not dared to leave her side, and on our walk home she had told me, evenly, “You will not understand until you yourself do it, but in birth is the freest you can be. You do not have to take your leave of anyone or do anything for anyone. You are even free of deciding for your body how it will go—it is deciding for you. Your only expectation is to follow, and that is a kind of freedom, if you let it be.”

Now in bed, I felt the next wave of pain and wished that she were here.

The sheet beneath me became wet. Emmanuel was woken up by the damp. He cried out in joy, in excitement. And then he was up, calling for Ti Me and for boiling water and for strips of cloth and for oil.

I wanted to leave the bed again. I wanted to feel the floorboards creak beneath my feet. A line of sweat trickled from under my chin to my chest between my breasts, to the top of my stomach.

I was breathing as hard as if I was racing up the walls of the room. With Mama, sometimes, a woman insisted on laboring with a knife in the bed beside them, to cut the pain. I had thought it silly then, as silly as Mama declaring those moments an emancipation. I had never thought, fully, what it would mean for me to join them there.

“I want Mama.”

“Yes,” Emmanuel said. “Yes.”

By then, Ti Me was there, holding my other elbow. I could feel inside me a great, deep churning. A new world was trying to break out of my body.