Is she here, or there? She’s stopped, subjective, in this shadow play. He found her out. He hauled her back to wordlessness, back into the body they both still inhabit. She holds him over her heart, pressing against her breast and collarbone, feeling the tension in his small body fade at the mere touch of hers. It feels like relief to her also, the wonder of unresistant physical contact. Her own body is a desiccated thing, a bone house, deprived of the elements necessary for its survival. Skin on her skin. Warmth. Sustenance. Could you die from this? she wonders. Could you die if no one ever touches you? She feels corrupt, finding such covert, selfish satisfaction in her baby’s feverish body, the compact comfort, the hot, yeasty loaf. His fat, foreshortened feet dangle at her lowest rib, kicking her lightly; his inexplicably filthy ear blazes against her neck. That heat—it’s life flaming through. At their births, it was her children’s startling heat and heft she was stunned by, their solid human otherness: Frieda’s narrow infant shoulders creamy with vernix, like a channel swimmer’s. Their slow unfolding, over days and weeks, after all that time curled inside her, wrinkled and red as poppies. Their newborn faces, roving in sleep—smiling, frowning, grimacing, eyelids fluttering, trying all the different frequencies of emotion for the first time. Their faces now, so often unreadable, leaving her to guess. “Dat!” Frieda will shout, excited, exasperated, pointing to something she hasn’t yet learned to name. “Dat!” Nick mimics, “dat, dat!” Merely pleased by the form of a sound he can master.

But before language, before words, all they know is corporeal, measured by their bodies and by hers. She should have read it in his torrid little face—at dinner, the post office, before. Nicholas doesn’t sleep but drifts, tensing and digging his jaw into her neck when she falters, stepping even slightly out of the soothing, metronomic dance she’s set in motion, her body their pendulum. She rocks her baby side to side, side to side. Her fingertips memorize the rough spot at the back of his head where his hair has rubbed off. He needs her now. She leaves the poems where they are.

*   *   *

Feverish, a child takes on an eerie, radiant beauty, its skin even more lush, dry with the consuming inner fire of a cinder, velveted as the lips of a foal. With a warm damp cloth sprinkled with rosewater, she swabs Frieda’s forehead, smoothing the fine minky hair at her temples, running the tip of the cloth over the graceful contours of her daughter’s small face. Rosenwasser for Christmas cookies, for handkerchiefs, for a child’s fever. Nicholas is restively asleep beside his sister, his hold on his mother a slackening knot that eased just enough as Sylvia heard Frieda call for her, and gag—