And then the massive city hall, that palatial block-long structure where I married Martin, comes into view and it is as though I am looking at drawings in one of Kat’s history books of the ruins of the Roman Empire. All those stately columns, massive and thick, are tumbled about like sticks. The dome still stands but has been stripped of its stone. It is skeletal, nearly obscene in its nakedness. Dust floats all around, like flurries of snow. I would not have thought a building of such size and elegance could be brought down by anything.

The Larkin Street entrance to the Central Emergency Hospital, a place I’ve had no occasion to visit but which I know is located in the basement of city hall, is partially obstructed by piles of stone and rubble. There is activity at the cave-like opening as nurses and people in plain clothes, passersby perhaps, pull out patients on gurneys and stretchers. Some are walking out on the arm of an orderly. Other people are arriving to the hospital, just like us, and are being told the destroyed hospital is being evacuated.

The milkman stops the cart and turns to me. “There isn’t no hospital no more!” he says.

Belinda grimaces beside him, her eyes screwed shut.

“Please just take us to wherever they are taking all the other patients.” I point to the line of evacuated and incoming injured in the street.

“I’ve done my part,” the milkman says. “I need to see about my own family. I’ve done my part!”

The sight of all those wounded people has him panicked, and I can see there will be no convincing him. I help Kat out of the wagon and grab hold of the travel cases. The milkman has the decency to help Belinda out of the passenger seat but is gone before I’ve asked her if she can walk, if she can follow the other patients who are walking on unsteady feet away from the great ruin of city hall. She nods.

I bend to Kat. “We need to help Belinda now, love. She needs us. The baby needs us. Can you carry your travel case, sweets? So that I can help Belinda walk? You hold on to my skirt with one hand and your travel case with the other, all right?”

Kat does not answer me, but she takes the handle of the case when I hand it to her, and when I guide her hand to my skirt, she grabs hold. I pick up my case with one hand and put my other arm around Belinda. We move toward the retreating hospital evacuees. When I am close enough to a nurse who is helping an elderly man in a hospital gown pick his way across the rubble, I ask where the patients are headed.

She looks back at me, and then at Belinda, and she shakes her head in pity.

“Mechanics’ Pavilion. Just across the street there.”

She points across the wide boulevard to the immense barnlike structure where just the night before costumed skaters competed for a prize. It appears to be undamaged. We took Kat to the pavilion on her birthday the previous summer to see the circus. I’d never seen so many people all in one place; eleven thousand seats ring the exhibition floor. The pavilion is a performance arena, not a hospital. And now, apparently, Belinda will deliver her child inside it.