Athena cries a little as she drives.

It’s hard to explain to someone who has never lost a child this way. The parents are still parents. It’s still their baby. Their beloved. They existed. Post-mortem photography was commonplace in the Victorian era, even in the early twentieth century. And now pathologists photograph corpses as a routine part of autopsy. And people like me come with a camera and a quiet voice, and capture those first and final moments of love.

My brother-in-law had me photograph their little dead baby. His name was Simon and he was so tiny, born far too soon. Ruthie still can’t talk about him. She looks at the photos, though, my brother-in-law says. Those photos remind her that, even if briefly, she too was a mother.

The day after the upside-down ordeal, my entire breast is swollen and bruised. It’s shocking when I take the bandage off. All night, whenever I roll on it, the throbbing pain wakes me up. The pricks aren’t even visible, they were so tiny, but my breast screams at each assault. When Saul comes barging in I have to cover it up so he won’t be frightened.

Saul goes to school and I go to visit my parents. They don’t know about the mammograms, the core biopsy.

My mother is in the kitchen having a drink. She points at her eye. It’s an ocular occlusion, she says. This is why she’s been seeing things in shades of indigo. The doctor said the vein will occlude. It will collapse. It is going to close off the blood flow. She will lose the sight in the eye and there is nothing they can do. The doctor said she’ll adjust to having vision in only one eye.

Dad is outside burning garbage in the burn barrel. I never argue with him about creating pollution and the diminishing ozone layer. He is a man of his time and will never see things any other way than the way he sees them.

He pokes the fire with a long stick and black smoke curls up into the air. “Your mother drinks too much,” my father says. “That’s what’s wrong with her blood pressure. And her eye. You look, under the sink. All those Mason jars of vinegar she’s got there? That’s not vinegar for cleaning. I don’t put them there. Your mother does. They won’t believe me now, will they, not with half my brain closing down.” He sounds more lucid than he has in weeks.

I leave him stirring his burn barrel and go inside and sniff the vodka in the jars under the sink. My mother comes in from the living room. “I can’t stop him from drinking. It’s not my fault. It’s the only thing he’s got left. Can’t you see what’s going on, Daisy?” The truth is obscured for me. Maybe they’re both drinking out of Mason jars.

A week later, the hospital calls before Saul and I are up for breakfast. They leave a voice mail message to say a woman is in the hospital labouring, and can I come in and take photos. They expect the stillbirth by breakfast time, from the way she’s progressing. The baby died two days earlier; this is the soonest they were able to schedule the inducement.