Cautiously, holding her breath, hoping for reprieve, she opens the children’s door from the bright, chill hallway. Nicholas is sitting up in his cot in the dark. Frieda remains resolutely asleep, her long-lashed eyelids clamped together despite Nicky’s wail and the faint, angled blue glow of moon and street lamp cutting across the floor. Nick’s bedding is wet, but with something having the texture of runny, tepid oatmeal. He vomits again as she lifts him out of the crib.

*   *   *

She rocks him, little oven, sponged now and calmed, very slowly, side to side, from her hips, the light low and contained, billowing from the candles left over since moving day. Nick is heavy, limp with fever, sobering as black coffee; he sinks his full weight into her shoulder, into the cradle of her crooked elbow, slowing his mother to the pace he needs. Sylvia lets his weight anchor her. She breathes him in, the unfamiliar odor of sickness on his skin threaded by the sharp fresh scent of soap. The candlelight flares and shrinks with her slow rocking, with the heater’s draft. The candlelight flares and shrinks, throwing its inconstant spotlight in turn on her typewriter, arrested; the welter of smelly crib sheets and pajamas, damp towels piled into the laundry basket; the bed still papered with poems, a random mosaic of pink and white tesserae, blind to each other as kittens.