Eight and a half months later I woke up in the surgical recovery room of the Dunleith General Hospital and it was over. I woke up screaming for my baby. “Where’s my baby? I had a baby inside of me. A great big baby. I saw it on the X ray. Where is it? Why don’t they show it to me? Give me my baby. Granny, make them give it to me.” My father was outside a glass window and there were tubes and wires and I was going to die of thirst. “Give me a drink of water. Make them give me some water. I have to have some water and I want my baby. I want to see my baby. Somebody better bring my baby to me.” I tried to meet my father’s eyes. I screamed louder. Surely he could hear me. Then a second nurse came in and laid a piece of wet gauze across my lips and lifted my arm and gave me a shot. Then the terrible thirst disappeared and the terrible backache that had lasted for days and I slept and woke again in the late afternoon. This time I was more cunning. I decided to beg. “Please let me see my baby. I only want to look at him. Let me look at him. He’s dead, isn’t he? There’s something wrong with him. If he was okay, you would let me see him. Put a piece of wet cloth on my lips. I won’t suck the water out. I swear I won’t. Please give me some water. Is my father here? Where did my father go? Where is Doctor Freer? Is he coming to take care of me?” The light passed away from the high windows of the room. It seemed I had been on that bed for several days. It seemed so many hours had gone by. Why didn’t my father return and save me? Where had my grandmother gone? Why wouldn’t they give me any water?

I drifted down into a dark sleep and nurses came and put wet cloths on my lips and when they turned away I would suck the moisture out.

Malcolm and I had come back to Dunleith in June to wait for the baby to arrive. He was supposed to come in August, but he couldn’t wait. One Sunday in July he began to be born. Upside down and one foot first, my body began to push him out into the world. We were at a picnic on Finley Island and my mother and my sister-in-law took me to the hospital. At eight o’clock that night Doctor Freer called in a surgeon and they rolled me into an operating room and put me to sleep on sodium pentothal and cut him from my womb and put him in an incubator.