One afternoon, with nothing else to do, I took off my dress and looked into the mirror. My hips and thighs had puffed up, thanks to Nat’s forced feedings, my belly stuck out, but my arms and legs were still skinny. I looked like someone had started to blow me up but stopped before the limbs were fully inflated. There was a dark line drawn down the center of my torso, as if by a Chinese brush. It traveled from between my breasts all the way to my pubis, bifurcating my belly, as if marking me for some operation. How strange pregnancy is. I still can’t get over it. To house a baby inside. It makes me feel anonymous, animal. That day, as I stood in front of the mirror, I felt the most intense need to meet this baby. I suddenly had to see its face. This image of me I saw covering up my child—I wanted to claw it away like clay. I needed to break the spell of containment, confinement; I needed to escape from Nat. I wanted to scream. And then—I swear to God it happened this way, I am not making this up—my water broke. As I was standing there naked in front of the mirror, warm liquid traveled down my legs and gathered in a pool at my feet. Two months early. I put on some sweats and called the doctor. Left the kids with Nat. Thank God she was there, I thought, as I rushed out the door with Craig. My dear husband’s face looked pinched; he avoided my gaze. He was frightened. Seven months can be enough, but not always. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking, If we lose this baby, she won’t survive.

They cut me open and lifted him out of me. After, I looked down at the ruby-red gash in my abdomen, glistening like a fleshy flower, my legs warm, numbed, itchy from anesthesia. The doctor held the baby up. He was silent. Moving faintly. Blue. He was handed away. Two masked nurses massaged him wordlessly under orange light. I asked to hold him. No one answered. They kneaded his flesh, trying to coax his reluctant spirit back through the threshold of the world, where it hovered, undecided. Then I heard the wail, fine as a silken thread, floating through the air and I knew he would live. I knew this one was fine, just as I had known my baby sister would die from the moment I held her in my arms, though I did not know it in thoughts. She lasted two months. A child without a destiny. Sixty-one days stamped on her hand. Virginia.