A spring hoarfrost has coated the lawn, trees, and fence in magnificent ferny white ice crystals. The driveway is slippery. I carefully get Saul off to school and head to the hospital. My cellphone rings in my purse as I’m parking the car. I shut the engine off and answer. It’s my family doctor with the results of my core biopsy. She gives me my test results while I sit in the hospital parking lot.

“They did get enough of those tiny strands of flesh. It was nothing. It was just calcium deposits,” my doctor says. “Enjoy the rest of your day, Daisy.”

I call Athena. It goes to voice mail, so I leave a message. The phone rings. Ruthie.

“Everything is fine,” I tell her.

I hear Ruth take a deep breath and exhale slowly.

Then she talks: “Wow. Maybe we aren’t cursed.”

Next Ruth cries: “I’m so sorry, Daisy. It’s hard seeing things how you do. Maybe we can have Saul on a weekend in the city so you can have a break. If you’ll trust him with us. I know you’re a good mother. When Mum and Dad die, you’ll be the only one left in the family for me to look up to. I hope you see that.”

What I see is how frightened I’ve always been to be the oldest, to be responsible for others. Worrying how Ruth will never unwind or soften. But we must keep going, even when we’re afraid. This is what it is to be brave, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have one good friend at your side.

I head into the hospital, to the child and maternity unit. When I walk into the new mother’s room with my camera bag, she’s holding the baby, who is swaddled in a delicate crocheted blanket.

I sit in the small chair at the side of the room and take out my camera. It is sometimes luck. Sometimes genetics. Many times there are no reasons that will ever make sense.

The woman holds out her baby with the tiny brown face against the soft blue wool. “I don’t know why she died,” she says. She’s weeping. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Her husband sobs beside her. He wipes his eyes, and his wife’s. He holds his wife as she cradles the infant. Then everything is completely silent for a moment as they gaze at their baby.

“My beauty.”

I hold the camera up to one eye, closing the other, like my mother, adjusting to a new perspective.

Late and Soon

Edmund jumping off the garage roof . . . do you remember? Soaring to the earth and landing with a smile. We wanted to be him, even just for a moment. Edmund and his friend Ian headed off to the barn, leaving the ladder against the garage wall. We climbed and clung to the edge of the garage roof. We were five years old. Edmund, he was nine. We peered down from the roof over the field across the treetops to Cape Blomidon and the Minas Basin at low tide, blue sky plunging into the red mud. The leaves were falling so quickly then.