“She was here almost the whole time, you know. Left just a half hour ago. Did a whole bunch of crossword puzzles.” The nurse put a plastic cup of pills on the wheeled table and rolled it toward Kate while gently raising her bed. “I’ve got some more Vicodin for ya. It’s about that time.” Wordlessly and seamlessly, she removed Kate’s plastic pan without so much as a shudder. “Hey, you were brave. You rose to the challenge. Just let me know if you’ll be needin’ anything else, alright?”

“Thanks.” Kate tried not to cry in front of the kindly, capable girl probably fresh out of nursing school. Her good cheer was unnerving. There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask her about the pain, about whether the fetus survived, whether it’d been a girl or a boy, but all she managed to say was, “Just my mom, please.”

Mary-Sue rushed into the room twenty-one minutes later. She was in some kind of floral caftan that looked like a grandiose housecoat—she had intuitively put on Grandma clothes. A positive sign.

“The doc said she put up quite a fight,” Mary-Sue said. “Seen her yet?”

Kate shook her head; her hands went clammy.

“Tiny. I saw her through the glass in the nursery.”

Kate said nothing—her mother was liable to say any old diplomatic thing just to get through tough times; at least, it seemed that the baby had survived—for now. Tiny could mean not long for this world.

The knocks on the door tensed her up again. Sensing her anxiety, Mary-Sue grabbed her hands and rubbed them. “Goodness. You can’t hold a baby with these icicles. You’ll make a lousy first impression. She’ll remember.”

The nurse stepped in and Kate finally saw It, the creature she’d tried to avoid thinking about, the thing she’d hoped against hope she could miraculously pee or poop away. It was nestling at the bosom of the young nurse, wrapped in a pink waffle-weave blanket. Too docile, thought Kate, to even drool.

“She looks just like me, don’t you think?” Mary-Sue said, and laughed at her own joke.

When the nurse put the baby in Kate’s arms, she was struck by how much it resembled a hairless, anemic orangutan. Mammalian, but just barely. Black liquid pupils stared back at her, yet they registered nothing. There was no primal recognition. Its eyes darted back to the nurse.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, will you at least smile at your daughter?” Mary-Sue barked now. “You’re scaring her. I tell you she’ll remember this.”

“In about a day, she should begin to understand who you are,” the nurse told Kate, stroking the creature’s wrinkly pink arm.

“Which would make her far smarter than me,” said Kate.

“Or me,” Mary-Sue added, a little too honestly. The nurse smiled amiably. This wasn’t the kind of humor she was used to.