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on Brodie’s mother’s rug. I wake, dreaming of Houdini, of magical escape. Toss until dawn burns crimson the morning sky. Magicians, the doctors. They hold the big trick in the bag.
    I look around my house this banished week, at my novels, my vases, my mismatched towels, my photo albums, my knickknacks from our trip to Venice, my scented candles, my paintings on the wall, with the frightening clarity of someone who could just walk out. Abandon. Leave it all behind.
    For seven days Brodie dutifully gathers information, accumulates detail, speaks. We were just wondering, um, if there is any news?
    The doctor stands in light, skin smooth and fine, eyes bland, waiting for this new dad to finish so he can pick up sushi, make a phone call, carry out another procedure, attend the Philharmonic, work on his stamp collection, watch his daughter’s soccer game, practise his Italian, sleep.
    There are moments, rare, but moments when we forget. Me, on waking, Brodie, shovelling the walk. The phone rings. A friend, a minister, a second cousin on my mother’s side.
    Hello?
    Maggie .
    The pregnant pause.
    How are you?
    And I turn and look out on bleak November streets, the threads of my dress sucking through my skin to infiltrate my cells, my tissues, bloodstream.
    I learn not to look ahead. There’s nothing out there. My body belongs nowhere, not at the hospital with the baby, not at home without the baby. My body has betrayed me, thinned. I want its outline to say, I have a baby, and for that to be an ordinary sentence. Instead, I look out on a snow-fused world from this body that bears no inscriptions of punishment, no sagging stomach, no rounded milk breasts, no angry stretch marks. My father, shortly before he died, the cancer diminishing his body until he took up no space at all, opened his eyes one evening and said so quietly, I’d like to live. He insisted on clearing the rolling table on which he kept his books and papers for the hair-netted worker each time she brought his meal, as if affording her a kind of pity for witnessing his demise. He lost his life, people say. Misplaced it.
    To lose. Webster’s New Ninth Collegiate . To loosen and dissolve. Almost six weeks have passed and the detail is all wrong. The baby’s lungs won’t breathe without pumped-in oxygen, her heart won’t course blood into the proper arteries, her muscles won’t summon the strength to lift her head; her skin is blue. My body perfects itself while the baby’s scars and bruises write themselves on skin.
    My body isn’t acting like a mother’s body. Mothers don’t cry, they take care of the crying. Mothers hold babies in their arms. I shouldn’t have had that second piece of chocolate cheesecake in my third month, I shouldn’t have jogged so much, I should have jogged more, I should have read more books on birthing. The hooks behind the kitchen door fill me with empty rage. I’m tied to people I wouldn’t look at twice. Receptionists. Lab technicians. Doctors. Nurses. An early winter.
    Snow crying to the ground.

It’s not a question of lowering our expectations. On the radio, driving to the hospital, a man says, Humans have to have a culture in order to survive. You don’t have to be cruel to be a torturer, he says, you just have to be obedient. Seven p.m. A long, bleak night. The baby’s intravenous went interstitial again. She’s aspirated again. They’ve had to turn up her oxygen. Babies go blind from too much oxygen. Mottled green bruises lace her scalp and hands. Six needles plucked from her scalp in a twenty-minute period. Let’s try this again! the hearty nurse says.
    The man on the radio said, We have to believe the things that matter to us are going to survive.
    I remember studying the word believe for a spelling test, mixing the e and the i .
    There’s a lie in believe, Maggie, my mother said.

You tuck your blue-and-green checked shirt — a