I pulled myself up onto a flat cleared space, and ahead of me, way on the other side of a small open field, I saw the smoking remains of a hole in the rock wall. There were bits of wood and twisted metal scattered about, and a few small fires burned inside and around it. Ash drifted down in flakes and specks.

I leaped forward, running toward it, as if there were still a reason to run toward it. As if I might find him there, pink and sweet and fat and gurgling, unharmed in all that wreckage. Thorns grabbed at me, trying to slow me, and I ripped through them. My feet tangled in a low rail fence. I went sprawling into brambles and sun-warmed earth. I could barely breathe. There could be nothing living in that smoking, blackened cave. I knew that. I couldn’t make myself not know. I felt blackness rushing through me. Coming for me somehow, though its root was in me. It was coming. I could not stop it.

I said, “Robert. Robert,” quietly, into the dirt.

That was when I heard him. A thin, unhappy wail. I knew his voice, upset and singular and uncertain and perfect. I felt a sharp pain in my breasts and then a release, as if the milk from all the weeks I hadn’t nursed him had let down at once.

I rose up on my knees, looking all around. Behind me Marshall was coming over the rise, red-faced and breathless with the car seat in his arms. He ran across the thorny field toward me. He must already have been on the way down to Trey when the blast hit. He must have heard me screaming.

I got up, ignoring the thorns that were ripping at my clothes and my skin, and I ran toward them. I got to them and grabbed them, both of them, hauling them to me, the car seat banging hard into my chest between us. Marshall grabbed me, too, holding my arms as I clutched the seat and stared down into Robert’s dear, red, angry face, his eyes now screwing up, his mouth opening in a perfect, furious circle, his volume building.

I dropped to my knees, and they came with me to the ground. I had never loved anything more on this earth than I loved the tiny life we held between us. The car seat’s base touched the dirt, and I bent over it, hands scrabbling to unlatch him, to feel him all over, making sure he was moving and whole and unburned and unhurt and exactly himself. And he was. I pulled him out and held the dense, warm weight of him against my chest. His whole body was a clenched fist now. He screamed in my ear, and I loved his living, perfect fury.

My eyes met Marshall’s, and he was looking back, whispering, over and over, “I got him, I got him.”