“No, I didn’t mean that.” She got up and unhooked the picture from the wall and handed it to me. “I haven’t paid him as much attention as I should, these past years. That’s all.”

He was a shut-eyed light-haired baby, mouth closed, one loose little fist raised above the hem of a blanket.

“That was how he lay in the hospital cot,” said Bridie, sitting down again. “With his hand like that. Not that I saw him. Pat did. Father O’Neill was with us and he insisted Pat be allowed.” She sighed. “But I wasn’t. They thought it would be too upsetting.”

“I’m sorry you never got to hold him.”

“And I’m sorry you never saw Catherine, my dear. If she took after you she was a pretty girl.”

I was silent, looking down at my hands. They had held my daughter like a pair of scale pans, one palm under her bottom and the other under her head. That wrapped-up baby, hooded as she was by her towel: the state I must have been in, not to pull that towel away from her face. What they must have injected me with . . .

“Bridie.” Only now did the question occur to me. “How did you get to have this beautiful drawing? It can’t have been done in the hospital, surely?”

Bridie put one hand on her chest, just below her neck. A gesture she made sometimes, to show mild remorse. “Goodness, I haven’t explained. My grown-up son drew it from my husband’s memory of Gerard. Pat hadn’t forgotten a single detail, not one, of that little baby’s body. Down to fingernails. Earlobes. That’s the fine copy, with a little color added, as you see.”

Just a little color, yes. On the tiny sandy locks of hair. On the rosy hue inside curling fingers, and the blue-violet shadow of a fold of the blanket. I couldn’t imagine what kind of baby Catherine had been. All I had was a strange vision of a miniature girl with long hair, much longer than a baby’s hair ever is, radiating out from her head as if she were underwater or as if the air were thicker than normal air. So that she could be suspended in it like an angel.

“Your son’s a good artist.”

“He’s the baby I mentioned, the one who came after Gerard. I love my girls desperately, of course, but the rainbow child, the one who comes at the end of the storm, is always a bit special.”