We make our way across the street with the last of the evacuated patients and all the new incoming wounded.

The floor of the pavilion is being strewn with mattresses that have been brought in from the hospital and nearby hotels. A surgery is taking shape near the entrance with operating tables and trays full of metal instruments, sharp and glaring. Nurses at the door are assessing by sight those of us coming inside.

Belinda is not bleeding from open wounds, nor cradling a broken arm, nor being pulled on a makeshift stretcher with maimed legs. She is a victim not of the earthquake, just of terrifically bad timing.

“Her baby is coming,” I tell the nurse who asks where she is injured.

“Is your home still standing? Can you not return and let her have the baby there?” the nurse says, in a frazzled, nearly scolding voice.

“Her baby is coming,” I say again. “A month early. And, no, we cannot return home. This woman doesn’t even live here in San Francisco.”

“All right, all right. I’ll see if we’ve a nurse who can be spared to help her,” she says, her tone softening. She calls over her shoulder for an orderly. “Take this woman to where we put the patients from the Female Ward.”

The orderly, a thin man whose uniform is spattered with bits of dried blood and dirt, nods and motions for us to follow him.

Belinda grabs me as a labor pain seizes her. “It hurts!” she wails.

“I know,” I tell her. I do know how it hurts. I sweep the remembrance away. That was from another life, another time.

We are led past teams of people placing more mattresses on the floor and doctors treating the injured as they get to them in turn. The orderly shows us to a collection of mattresses on the arena floor grouped like a little dormitory. Four on one side and four on the other. Women of various ages, attired in hospital gowns and lying on these beds, watch us arrive. There are no sheets on the mattress Belinda is given. No pillow. No privacy curtain.

I ease Belinda, who is half–doubled over, down onto the makeshift bed. “I’ll find some sheets and a blanket. Somewhere.”

“Is it her time?” one of the women behind us asks. I turn to her. She is Mam’s age but pale and thin.

“Yes.”

“Is it terrible out there?” a second woman says. She has a large bandage over one eye. “No one has time to tell us anything. All we saw was what happened to city hall.”

“Yes,” I say as I loosen the buttons on Belinda’s maternity shirtwaist. “’Tis terrible.”

“Do you know if Beale Street is all right?” says a woman whose arm is in a sling.

“What about King Street?” says another.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know those streets.”

“South of Mission. How are things south of Mission?” says the woman who looks to be Mam’s age.