When they let her go in to Eggy in the ICU, Miranda saw something else. She saw her six-year-old daughter lying at a thirty-degree angle on a gurney, with a partly shaved head, a red-brown mess of Betadine around the hole that had been drilled through her skull. She saw an array of nameless monitoring equipment, lines and tubes and machines attached to her child’s face, arms, chest, nose, and throat. She saw the scrapes on Eggy’s forehead and the bruise on her naked arm, and she saw that her daughter lay in a wounded sleep, from which some people never wake. When Miranda returned, she was walking very slowly, her lips pressed tightly together, and as she neared us, I saw her list suddenly to one side and reach out to the wall to regain her balance. I stood up, but her father rushed in front of me and helped her into a chair.

Lane arrived a few minutes later. His face was red and swollen, and when his eyes met mine, I saw no flash of recognition. He walked straight past me and then kneeled in front of Miranda. She didn’t look down at him. He was whispering to her in a desperate voice, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I turned my head away and found myself looking straight at Miranda’s father.

Then I heard Miranda say in a commanding voice, “Get up and sit down.”

When I looked back in their direction, I saw that Lane had obeyed and was sitting slumped over beside her, his head in his hands.

And so we held vigil in an eerie space of the ongoing present, an interval drained of all significance, except that it was suspended between a child’s fall and some future moment when we would know.

MIRANDA RETURNED TO Eggy in the ICU, and so she must have heard them say there was lightening, improvement, that Eglantine was coming out of it. Miranda was there when her daughter recognized her, and she was there when Dr. Harden announced his opinion that things looked good, very good, better than he had expected. I saw Jeffrey Lane weep with happiness when he received the news and Miranda’s parents embrace each other and then their daughters. I knew that it wasn’t over, that even if she recovered fully, Eggy would live with the story of the fall inside her. She would be changed by it.