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Meg came into house through the kitchen door with a tray of two coffees and a paper sack of bagels. “Well, look who’s up,” she said.

Sarah got up and walked to Meg. “Thank you,” she said, taking the bagels.

I glanced down at the chair beside me and noticed the blood-soaked cushion. “We have a small problem,” I said.

At that moment Sarah turned away from Meg to move to the counter. Meg saw the child’s bloodstained pants.

“I didn’t know quite how to handle it,” I said.

Meg put her hands on Sarah’s shoulders and tried to gently guide her out of the room. Sarah resisted, twisting away, shaking her head. Meg tried again.

“No,” Sarah said. She bent slightly at the waist, perhaps cramping. I didn’t know.

Meg’s eyes welled up. She tried again.

I stood but didn’t move forward.

Sarah looked at me. She was shaking. “What are you going to do?” she asked. She looked so frightened to me that I was near crying as well.

Meg made soothing sounds. “It’s okay, baby. We just need to go back to the bathroom and get more comfortable. That’s a good idea, isn’t it?” She did not push or pull but touched Sarah’s face. “Is that a good idea?”

Sarah nodded.

I sat like a dumb bird at the table. A pigeon, perhaps, or a chicken. I considered my beautiful daughter marking this change in her physical development while being completely unaware of her body or herself, with no attendant fears that she might have had in a more normal world, while the fabric of her understanding of the most basic, ever-taken-for-granted truths about daily life frayed not only at the edges but from the middle, spiderwebbing out, growing and connecting one destruction to the next. My daughter, a little life in the scheme of the world, of time, the star, however, around which my planet orbited. My source of gravity and warmth and light was eroding and so was I, and I could not help her, couldn’t even contact her to offer an apology or say good-bye or express my love. There might not have been the heaven that so many fools advertised, but there certainly was a hell, and it smelled like blood and cold cereal and the family dog.

I called Basil to me and let him comfort me. The way he settled his chin on my thigh let me know that I was also comforting him. I moved the stained chair cushion into the laundry room.

Meg came back into the kitchen with Sarah in fresh clothes, sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt. The child returned to her previous seat, minus cushion, and fiddled with the pieces on the board with no seeming notion of a game or a promise of one.

I pulled a chair out for Meg and sat where I had been.

“That was her first,” she said. She did not cry now, but the look on her face could easily have been wailing.