I was in a semi-private room and my roommate had lost her baby. The hospital was so overcrowded they couldn’t give her a private room. One of the maternity nurses had seen Life, a photography show I’d had at the Hardware Gallery, a small art gallery near the hospital here in Kentville. Life was a series of portraits of people in the local hospice. The maternity nurse delicately asked me about taking portraits once she found out I was the photographer who had done the show about the dying. I agreed to take the photos of the stillborn baby. It put into perspective Saul’s jaundice, even my strained relationship with his father. It can always be worse. That’s what Athena says.

Athena arrives as Clara leaves to answer a page over the intercom. “Honeycakes,” she says, patting my hair, looking at the blood-soaked johnny gown and robe on the floor which Clara hasn’t picked up yet. Matilda, the older nurse, comes in and puts the dirty clothes in a basket. She leaves as the doctor arrives. He gawks at Athena like she’s famous. She has that effect on people.

The doctor composes himself. They couldn’t see the right tissue when they X-rayed the strands of flesh they extracted, he says. It was such an awkward location to do a core biopsy on. The pathologist will probably tell them to call me back in to do the test again. Or they might just do a surgical biopsy and remove the whole area.

“That’s a lumpectomy, though, isn’t that what you’re saying?” Athena isn’t pleased. She thinks they’ve been sloppy. She feels the testing is getting too invasive too quickly when they don’t even know what they’re dealing with yet.

The doctor nods. “Well, yes, that’s true, but we’d be doing it as a biopsy.”

Clara comes back in and puts the bandages in the garbage. “It is impossible to know how these tests will go ahead of time.”

“It was unusual for it to be this hard to get a tissue sample,” the doctor says with a sympathetic look on his face.

Clara rubs her hand on my arm.

The doctor leaves.

Athena says she’ll wait outside.

Clara says through the closed drapes as I dress how she wanted to tell me how much she still loves the photos. When I started taking the post-mortem portraits here, she says, she never imagined I would be taking pictures of her baby. Clara says she has the prints in a small white satin album. She looks at them only occasionally now, a year later. The first few months she looked at them on the hour.

Athena drives me home. We talk about facials and yoga, about novels and podcasts. The pale blue sky is an immense eye before us.

I tell Athena about the photos I took of Clara’s little daughter. How she had died in utero the day before she was born. Clara was induced and gave birth to her dead little girl. They called me in. I came and took portraits of the baby, bundled up. And the baby in her parents’ arms. It isn’t technical skill you need as much as compassion and empathy, an ability to see beauty in unexpected places. To see the baby as a baby, not as a corpse.