They had meant well, they had drugged me to seal off the pain, but my mind had been sealed off as well. My own quick wits. James came in with our bundled baby and I took hold of her obediently, one hand for her head, one for her bottom. And afterward I came to understand how lucky I’d been to even touch her. How lucky that James, with his authority, had persuaded the midwife to let him bring her in to me. I’d heard him next door talking to the midwife. He had said, Can you wrap her up? Please let my wife hold her, and it seemed very spoiled of me to insist on anything more. I mean, I’d held her, I knew her weight, she was real. I would have that knowledge forever. Most women, their stillborn children disappeared without trace. They lay awake at night wondering if they’d ever had a baby at all.

I sat still, in the electric light, the winter sky dark outside. Pondering and meandering and wondering against the black square of the window and the custard-colored light. His words turning like tea leaves running away down the sink, each revolution not only smaller but spinning faster and faster and faster until they swirled away with a gulp.

“God have mercy,” I said aloud.

—

The only thing that kept me going, the night I labored with Catherine, was a light glowing at me from the distance. A deep, warm yellow glow, far away and high up. I went through my drugged convulsions on the bed and endured the loud encouragement from the midwife to pant or push. Pant! she cried, then Push! The words came out without any brake on them, any modulation, any acknowledgment that the child she was delivering was dead: Pant! Push!, she cajoled me, as if there were a life at stake. This midwife had wanted me to lie with my feet in the stirrups but I refused. I sat up and she planted a heavy hand in the middle of my chest and pushed me down. I slapped her hand away and got up onto my knees, and she knew she was beaten.

I knew, from the light’s deep, warm yellowness, that it represented James’s love for me, and as long as I kept my eyes on it I would survive. And so I did, washed up into daylight. I realized then that I’d been staring at the light in the corridor outside the labor room, which I could see through a panel of glass above the door. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t James’s glowing love, the love that was now all I had.