She gives a note to the housemaid to deliver to him, and asks that some fresh butter be sent up. She helps me to the bed, where I’m to kneel, sit, crouch, lie down, as the pains permit. When the butter comes, she stretches my loins to ease the way for your head. I can hear Godwin’s footfalls up and down the hall outside, imagine him wringing his hands. He knocks on the door, but I can’t hear his exchange with Mrs. B. I want to call his name, to reassure him, but can’t find my voice.

The closer the pains, the more I grow quiet and withdraw into myself. Mrs. B mops my brow and whispers into my ear that a child cannot be far behind.

And then at last you slip from my body.

Mrs. B tips you upside down and slaps your feet to wake you into the world. But the moment lasts longer than it should, and I begin to doubt. Then you gasp for air, at last, and live, not with a wail so much as a chirp and squeak I think only I can hear.

Oh little bird!

Your father bursts into the room at the sound of my giddy relief—was I laughing? He startles at the sight of you naked and trembling in Mrs. B’s hands.

“Is it—”

“Breathing, sir, she is.”

“Oh, darling,” he says, coming to my side. “A little girl.” He half sits on the bed and presses his forehead to mine—his joyful tears, my ragged hair matted against my forehead—as Mrs. B cuts the umbilical cord and washes you with all the ceremony of scrubbing a turnip just plucked from the ground.

“Made us wait for you a good long time, yes you did,” she says, sponging your tiny face and chest.

But I know I have waited for you—for this—all my life.

“Let’s give your limbs some liberty, shall we?” Mrs. B wraps you loosely in cotton cloth and delivers you into my arms. I free the blanket even more, to survey the whole of you, count your fingers, your toes. I can see in your father’s eyes that you aren’t what he expected, or what our gentle confederacy of perfections rarely admits: A child at birth is a shocking thing. Your skin is coated, as if with wax the color of jaundice, so thin it bares the atlas of dark veins beneath. Instead of feathers you have fine white down, barely visible, all over your body; instead of wings, arms like spindles, held tight to your heaving rib cage, not much bigger than your father’s palm, which he holds against your quick-beating heart.

The love, instantaneous!