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Twice now I have heard the story of someone who knows someone who’s had a stillborn child since Pudding has died, and it’s all I can do not to book a flight immediately, to show up somewhere I’m not wanted, just so that I can say, It happened to me, too, because it meant so much to me to hear it. It happened to me, too, meant: It’s not your fault. And You are not a freak of nature. And This does not have to be a secret.

That’s how it works. When a baby dies, other dead children become suddenly visible: Daughters and sons. First cousins. The neighbor kid. The first child. The last child. Your older brother. Some of their names have been forgotten; some never had names in the first place. They disappeared under heaps of advice. Don’t dwell. Have another child, a makeup baby. Life is for the living. But then another baby dies, and here they are again, in stories, and you will love them all, and — if you are the mother of a dead child yourself — they will keep coming to you. A couple I know just lost their baby. And you will know that your lost child has appeared somewhere else in the world. I know a couple . . .

All those dead children. Who knows what they want?

In our better moments, we surely understand that the dead do not need anything. Afterlife, no afterlife: the dead have their needs taken care of. Oh, but isn’t wanting things something else again, and don’t we talk about it all the time. It’s what he would have wanted. Her last wishes. Thank God for the dead; thank God someone is capable of making a decision in the worst of times: He would have liked it that way.

But a baby. Who’s to say? Babies are born needing everything. They’re a state of emergency. That’s what they’re for. Dead, there’s nothing we can do for them, and we don’t know what they’d want, we can’t even guess. I can pretend that I knew Pudding. No, I did know him, not with my brain but with my body, and yet I know nothing about him, not even the simplest thing: I have no idea of what he’d want. And so in my grief I understand that mourning is a kind of ventriloquism; we put words into the mouths of our bereavers, but of course it’s all entirely about us, our wants, our needs, the dead are satisfied, we are greedy, greedy, greedy, unseemly, self-obsessed. If your child did not survive his birth, everyone can see that clearly. I want. I need. Not him. No pretending.

I thought stillbirth was a thing of history, and then it happened to me, and yet now when I hear of a baby dying I’m just as incredulous. You mean they still haven’t figured this out? I want to hear about every dead baby, everywhere in the world. I want to know their names, Christopher, Strick, Jonathan. I want their mothers to know about Pudding.

The dead don’t need anything. The rest of us could use some company.

When I was about thirty-six weeks pregnant the second time, Edward mentioned that his grandmother had been named Mabel. I’d known this, of course, but forgotten.

“Mabel,” I said. “Mabel. Mabel!”

We’d scarcely discussed names at all. In the back of our heads, we remembered the boy names we’d come up with for Pudding, both of us leaning toward the names we’d rejected early in the process, like Moses and George. For five minutes we’d discussed girl names and come up with Lucy, Beatrix, and Penelope. That was all we could manage. We didn’t joke about names the way we had the first time — Fatty Harvey, Phineas T. Harvey, Charles Laughton Harvey. We didn’t joke much at all. All of the jokes we’d made when I was pregnant with Pudding had to be retired, and it was hard to come up with new ones.

But now Mabel was in my head, and I was a little in love with it. I called Ann and Lib and got their reactions. (They loved it, or at least said they did. Lib declared that she would call our baby Mabel no matter the gender.) Mabel, I thought. I pictured a little girl named Mabel — not necessarily our little girl named Mabel, but an ordinary everyday Mabel. You had to love a little girl named Mabel. I hadn’t felt this way about any of the other little-girl names. I’d never