“Haymarket Relief Station,” he said. “It’s closest. You understand?”

She nodded quickly and he knew it was his tone she was responding to and they pushed their way through the crowds and people began to make way. Danny tried a few times, calling out, “Cerco un’ ostetrica! Un’ ostetrica! Cè qualcuno che conosce un’ ostetrica?” but all he got were sympathetic shakes of the head.

When they broke out on the other side of the mob, the woman arched her back and her moan was small and sharp and Danny thought she was going to drop the child onto the street, two blocks from Haymarket Relief, but she fell back into him instead. He scooped her up in his arms and started walking and staggering, walking and staggering, the woman not terribly heavy, but squirming and clawing the air and slapping his chest.

They walked several blocks, time enough for Danny to find her beautiful in her agony. In spite of or because of, he wasn’t sure, but beautiful nevertheless. The final block, she wrapped her arms around his neck, her wrists pressing against the muscle there, and whispered, “Dio, aiutami. Dio, aiutami,” over and over in his ear.

At the relief station, Danny pushed them through the first door he saw and they ended up in a brown hallway of dark oak floors and dim yellow lights and a single bench. A doctor sat on the bench, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He looked at them as they came up the corridor. “What are you doing here?”

Danny, still holding the woman in his arms, said, “You serious?”

“You came in the wrong door.” The doctor stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood. He got a good look at the woman. “How long’s she been in labor?”

“Her water broke about ten minutes ago. That’s all I know.”

The doctor placed one hand under the woman’s belly and another to her head. He gave Danny a look, calm and unreachable. “This woman’s going into labor.”

“I know.”

“In your arms,” the doctor said, and Danny almost dropped her.

“Wait here,” the doctor said and went through some double doors halfway up the corridor. Something banged around back there and then the doctor came back through the doors with an iron gurney, one of its wheels rusted and squeaking.

Danny placed the woman on the gurney. Her eyes were closed now, her breath still puffing out through her lips in short bursts, and Danny looked down at the wetness he’d been feeling on his arms and waist, a wetness he’d thought was mostly water but now saw was blood, and he showed his arms to the doctor.

The doctor nodded and said, “What’s her name?”

Danny said, “I don’t know.”

The doctor frowned at that and then he pushed the gurney past Danny and back through the double doors and Danny heard him calling for a nurse.

Danny found a bathroom at the end of the hall. He washed his hands and arms with brown soap and watched the blood swirl pink in the basin. The woman’s face hung in his mind. Her nose was slightly crooked with a bump halfway down the bridge, and her upper lip was thicker than her lower, and she had a small mole on the underside of her jaw, barely noticeable because her skin was so dark, almost as dark as her hair. He could hear her voice in his chest and feel her thighs and lower back in his palms, see the arch of her neck as she’d ground her head into the gurney mattress.