We were surprised when Em enacted full-on childbirth; we weren’t sure whose birth it was, but Mr. Barlow figured it out. “Yes, we know—Grace was born the year Ray and I got married, which makes Grace fifteen years younger than Adam,” the snowshoer said, but Em didn’t stop giving birth for long. There was more finger-counting, to indicate the passage of time; then Em was back at it, giving birth again. Elliot and I had watched Em give birth before; in her pantomimes, childbirth was often symbolic. Not this time. You wouldn’t want to watch anyone you love go through this childbirth; it would be hard to watch a total stranger give birth in such an agonizing way. It was instantly clear to the snowshoer and me that we were witnessing Em’s pantomime of Grace giving birth to my baby—not a good idea, in Em’s opinion. I was hoping it would be easier to read the rest of Em’s letter, but I should have known there was a reason why this part of her letter was for my eyes only.

At a glance, I could see the new part had been hastily written—with more urgency, it became apparent. Em had written the new part after the Gallows Lounge shooting. What she wrote was an awakening—the writing-out of a childbirth of the symbolic kind. “Nora was half right when she accused you of trying to start something with me—you may not have been trying to, but you’ve already started something,” Em wrote. Trowbridge had wanted to shoot Em first; he’d taken aim at her first. But when Em was covered with Nora’s blood, standing onstage, as still as a statue, I didn’t know Em had seen me looking at her. I just saw how Em was begging Trowbridge to shoot her—please kill me, too, her eyes, her hands, her whole body had been pleading. I just knew it would have killed me, if he shot Em—this was how I’d been looking at her; that was the look Em had seen.

“I saw how you were looking at me. You can’t look at me like this—you can’t love me that way! How could it ever work?” Em wrote. “I saw you doing those jumping jacks, I heard you calling ‘Fuck you!’ to him—you were trying to get him to shoot you instead of me. Are you crazy? Maybe you should let your mother marry you off to a skier who works in publishing, but you won’t stay married to anybody if you keep looking at me like this. You’re still the boy I danced with at your mom’s wedding. When are you going to grow up? You can’t love me that way,” Em wrote. There was no Love, Em.