And yet she knew nothing of childbirth except to push and push and push, and where was Mrs. Matsuda or the hakujin’s doctor, Thompson, who would come from town, where was anyone who knew anything and why was she the one who had been chosen to stand here at the base of the bed between her landlord’s wife’s nether parts in the blood and waters of the womb, in the terror of her screaming, the pale soft feet first and then, for a long terrible time, nothing but the pain and the pushing, the whole of that baby stuck there like a stone in a pipe, those naked parts of Evelyn Wilson not even seeming as if they were part of Mrs. Wilson’s flesh at all now but instead were something freakish and alien, stretched tight and swelling forward with each great exhausted push even though, still, it was only those two tiny feet, the rest like a red tunnel fleeing into wet empty darkness. But it had to come. It had to. And so she said, “Push harder,” and then said it again and again and then she was not even speaking in English anymore, that language flooding away from her so that her words were only in Japanese and at last, after how much time she did not know—a half hour, an hour, a day, a lifetime—a great tearing and the sound of liquid upon the boards and the baby, blue and twisted and silent, was there in Kimiko’s hands, a limp terrible thing.

“Is it out? It is out of me?” Evelyn said from her sweat-soaked sheets.

“Eh,” Kimiko said. “Kawaisōni.” The child’s misshapen head lolled hideously in her grasp, its lifeless body stretching toward the wet boards. She did not know how to hold it, this dead thing. Not like a child. Not like a living child at all.

“It’s a boy?”

“Hai,” she said.

“I knew it. Why is he so quiet?”

She answered her in Japanese again and Evelyn was silent for a long moment and then, abruptly, she began to scream, at first her husband’s name and then a wordless keening that rose up into the fetid, iron-scented air like a siren, her head swinging back and forth across the twisted, sweat- and blood-soaked sheets, her mouth open in a great oval of bleak despair. And, standing between her open, bare legs: Kimiko ­Takahashi, her own clothes equally soaked in blood and fluid, holding the blue corpse of that baby out before her as if to pass it directly to the Amida Buddha himself and thence into the pure land beyond.