I miss Lucy in the deepest hours of the night. She always knew what I’d be scared of before I was scared of it. She took the books with the scariest pictures into the hallway before I went to bed. I couldn’t stand their drawn figures watching when I slept—witches and goblins, bad guys from fairy tales. Lucy was a lot of things but she was always my mother. I never had another one. I knew she would’ve had advice about being pregnant but I never got to hear it. Don’t mess this up, she might have said. She would have told me all the good vitamins. She would have known the best positions for sleeping.

I thought those were the loneliest days, carrying the little sack of him when I didn’t have anyone. But how could I have been lonely? Scared maybe, and broke, but I had the bulk of him wherever I went, the slippery clutch of his skull, shoulders, everything. It wasn’t loneliness. I could feel our pulse with my fingertips whenever I wanted.

Now it’s just one tick-tock muscle under my ribs. It gets so loud sometimes I can hear it in the quiet of the night, muttering like an old man trying to remember a tune: ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. Just my one heart, only one I ever had. Still beating no matter what I do.

STELLA

We heard in the middle of the night. A woman called Abe and Abe called me. The woman’s name was Winnie and she was very direct. She said, “Your mother killed herself.”

Abe hung up without responding. He’d gotten a cramp in his foot, he told me, shooting all through his leg. He said it was the most painful experience of his entire life.

“Oh God, Abe. Of course it was.”

“I don’t mean like pain in your heart. I mean it hurt. My whole leg.”

I waited for a moment. This was over the phone. I hadn’t seen Abe in months. I said, “You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I told this woman we’d—There are things that have to get done, I guess. I need to go out and do them.”

I heard him crying. It was a very liquid sound. I wasn’t crying yet.

After a moment he said, “I’m going to hang up now.”

“Please don’t.”

He didn’t reply, but I could still hear him breathing, and then there was a click and I could tell he was gone.

*   *   *

He called back just after dawn. I was living across town, where the light seemed to burn clearer and earlier through the clouds, harsh on the bare floors of my single-chaired room.

“I’m going,” he said. “I’d like you to come.”

“That’s what you want?”

“We can’t leave her body out there.”