“Let’s start down the hill,” I say as I pick up the two travel cases. “We’ll find a carriage or something, Belinda. We’ll go to the emergency hospital at city hall. It’s new. It’s nice, I’ve heard. Hold on to my skirt, Kat.”

We start down the hill, passing neighbors in a daze. One is holding a bloodied handkerchief to his head. I ask another if his telephone is working and he says it isn’t. No one’s is.

We continue down the hill, stopping every few minutes as Belinda doubles over in pain. Every chimney on every house is a pile of bricks on the ground. Windows are broken, pavement is upended, and one house leans slightly to the left. As we near a cross street, three men are clawing at the crumbled front entrance of a two-story house. They are calling someone’s name—Lila, I think. A little dog with plaster clinging to its fur is barking at the men.

At California Street, where the cable car would stop if the cable car was running, a milkman is trying to calm his spooked horse. Broken milk bottles cover the cart bed, and creamy milk is dripping through the slats onto the twisted rails below. An old man, covered in dust, zips by on a bicycle with a squawking parrot on his shoulder. The horse nickers and starts to rear and the milkman pulls on the reins and says, “Whoa, there, Ginger!”

I approach him. “Please, sir. We need help. My friend is having her baby. Could you take us in your wagon to Central Emergency Hospital? Please?”

At first I think the milkman will refuse. He gapes at Belinda as if to say, Why on earth would you be having a baby now when the world has just turned itself upside down? But then his countenance softens and I think perhaps he is a father or a grandfather and knows there is no stopping a baby from coming when it starts to come.

He tells Kat and me to climb into the wagon and sit where his bottles would be if they hadn’t all toppled over and been smashed, and that Belinda can ride on the seat up front with him. Belinda looks at me with worried eyes as she grimaces through her pain.

“We’ll be right behind you, Belinda. Right behind you. We’re not leaving you. Up you go.”

The milkman and I help Belinda onto the passenger side of the seat, and then Kat and I find milk-spotted seats in the wagon on wooden shelves where the metal milk crates usually sit. My skirt is made immediately damp. Kat seems unaware of the spilled milk soaking into her dress.

The milkman eases his still-nervous horse away from the twisted rails beneath the wagon wheels and then starts south down Larkin Street, making his way around crumbled bricks and rubble that the quake has tossed into the street. More people are out now. Some are pushing baby prams full of hastily tossed belongings; some are pulling toy wagons loaded with travel bags. All are heading east, toward the ferries I assume, and away from houses they are afraid to stay inside or simply can’t. Others, dressed in nice clothes, and whose sturdy mansions surely survived the quake, are standing about, talking to one another, worried looks on their faces.