At first, I think the baby is me. I’ve seen a few pictures from then. I know what kind of baby I was—the fat, cherubic kind with wrist rolls and dimples and eyes that are too round and open. Of course, newborns never look like that. They look the way people do in those hospital pictures after they’ve been severely beaten. Their faces are always swollen and puffy, and they are red and wrapped up like little caterpillars. This baby is like that, but her color is not the flush of birth. She is not red and blotched but ashen white, pale blue around the tiny lips. I know it is a she because her blanket is pink. It’s only now that I realize my mother is crying in the picture. It’s hard to make out because the edges of everything in the photo are soft and blurred, but the tip of her nose is red, and her cheek is wet and shiny with tears.

My hand is trembling now for a different reason.

This baby is not me.

This baby is not alive.

I don’t understand what I’m seeing. I have never heard of my mother having another baby. Obviously, it wasn’t after me or I would have known. It must have been before. Why didn’t Moony say anything? Why didn’t my mom?

I have—had—a sister.

I study the side of my mother’s face—what you can see of it—in the photograph. She is unbelievably young. Maybe seventeen? My age. And for a woman who has just given birth, she looks gaunt. Her shoulder is too well-defined beneath the gown she is wearing, her cheekbone too striking.

I run to get my cell phone and snap an image of the photo before putting it back like I found it, all the fight drained out of me. I think of my mother’s hard glare as she left, and it feels sad to me, this urge she has to push me away as much as she wants to pull me close. I need to get to the bottom of her story before it fades into the brickwork around me, before she becomes just another stone in the foundation of this city of the damned.

XIII.

I AM STANDING IN THE QUARTER AT A CROSSROADS. There is no one else here—every street is vacant. A soft mist curls up from the pavement. A navy shroud hangs over the buildings. The absence of sound makes my ears ache. And then I see her walking ahead of me. She shines like a piece of sky fallen to earth.