She says nothing more. An orderly brings us sandwiches and fruit donated by nearby restaurants whose kitchens survived the quake. Belinda is quiet and has no appetite, but I admonish her to eat for the child’s sake and she manages to consume half a sandwich. After we eat, I take Kat to a changing area—where in recent days pugilists and acrobats and skaters got ready for their exhibitions—so that we can change out of our soured-milk-smelling dresses and into fresh clothes. From her own case, Kat pulls out the doll who is wearing the frock I made from her old dress. She looks up at me.

“For baby?” Her barely audible words are the first I have heard from her since the night before.

I am about to say her little sister is too young yet for dolls, when I realize she is referring to the dress. She wants to give the new baby, who has nothing to wear, the doll dress made from her own clothes.

Tears prick my eyes and I nod. “That would be lovely.”

In our fresh clothes, we return to Belinda and Kat presents her with the tiny dress.

I explain where the material for it came from. Belinda looks down expressionless at the toweled bundle that is her child.

“Here,” I say, unwrapping the infant in her arms. “I’ll help you.” The babe’s limbs are tiny and pink, her mouth a perfect rosebud. One of the women in our little group hands me a large white handkerchief.

“It’s my husband’s. I brought it with me from home. And it’s clean, I assure you. You’ll need something for a diaper. And the baby’s so tiny, this will no doubt do.”

I thank her, take the handkerchief, and fold it over and over again into a small triangle. Then I wrap it around the infant’s little bottom, tying a loose knot on her small waist. I ease the doll’s dress onto her tiny form. She looks like a flower.

“Do you have a name picked out?” I ask.

Belinda just shakes her head. Her listlessness worries me. Maddens me. I keep forgetting she loved her husband. She loved the man I didn’t love. I keep forgetting that the husband she loved is gone, never to return, and it’s as though he was snatched up in the jaws of a leviathan, here one second and gone the next. A horrifying, violent death.

“Let’s think on some names, shall we?” I say. And I begin to list names for girls, starting with good Irish names like Aileen and Fiona and Maeve.

“How about Rosalie?” says the woman with the bandage on her eye.

“Or Helen?” says the woman with her arm in a sling.

“If I’d had a girl I would’ve named her Margaret,” says another. “But I only ever had boys. Six of them.”

The women in our set of mattresses continue to suggest names, but Belinda seems not to be interested in any of them.

“There’s all those names in the Bible,” the woman who looks like Mam says. “Ruth and Esther and Rachel and Sarah.”