Afterward, the sobbing, effortless collapse, a matter of minutes. She should have known. She could have guessed. Part of her did know—once both babies were in their cots, she simply didn’t take the sleeping pill. A glass of brandy imported up the stairs and her papers hurriedly fanned out on the bed: the typed final drafts of the new poems, the ones still bound for the manuscript, spread over the coverlet to be sorted. A working table of contents, mostly blank, and the ledger of those she’d already sent to magazines or sold open on her desk before the window; a set of carbons to submit, and her latest maroon journal for updating. Too much for one night, even with a second wind. But she willed it, books and brandy and papers arrayed around her, warding off interruption. She picked off the easy targets first: matching poems to the magazines most likely to buy them. She banged out letters at the same time, nothing before her but her own pale, hectic ghost on the black glass, raindrops trailing silver down the panes. The worn, rewound end of the typewriter ribbon grew fainter with each keystroke. The words faded, barely brushing the surface of the bond. She hit the keys harder, her stiff fingers icy. She crammed every last cheery reassurance and breezy, tactical quip onto the pages, manually aligning the sheets when they got too close to the paper’s edge to advance on the rubber platen, filling in words by hand around the aerogram spaces left for her mother’s address or Mrs. Prouty’s. She warmed to the shell game of poem sequence playing in her head. She was no failure—look: The New Yorker has taken “Amnesiac,” The Observer would publish “Ariel” and “Event,” Punch wants an essay. The stack of letters and submissions grew as the tide line in her brandy glass receded: fat envelopes addressed to her family, London Magazine, the New Statesman, The Atlantic, the Third Programme, all efficiently stamped and ready to be posted tomorrow. I’m here, they all announced; here’s proof. And finally, with mathematical predictability—a cry, but odd.

She could have guessed. She feels it in her nerves before he even stirs. Still that primordial instinct remains intact, the one that so many times before had gotten her up and shambling from the bed, the bodice of her nightgown dampening within from the fine milky spray aroused by the mere rustle of a wakening baby.