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The midwife in his sorrow threw himself on Edward. Who knocked him aside again, saying, “Pas maintenant.” Not now. My nice husband, who could not say simply, Stop, or No, or nothing at all. Poor midwife, who needed such comfort. Like anyone else in the profession he’d become a midwife for the babies, for the quotidian miracle of human reproduction. He was very young. This was probably his first death.

“Sweetheart,” Edward kept saying. “It will be all right. We’re going to be OK.”

And I thought what a good man he was, that he was so understanding, because, and this made me weep harder, because I knew, I knew, that this was all my fault. My essential reaction was grief, but somehow the words that floated to the surface of my brain were: people are going to be mad at me.

Then the male midwife’s head floated away from his body like a balloon and traveled up my torso. It said, “Ce n’est pas ta faute!”

It’s not your fault.

It was my fault.

Edward turned to the doctor. “Et maintenant?” he asked.

The doctor shrugged, and spoke his second two words.

He said, “Le travail.”

The work.

I would have to go through labor. I knew that already, the minute the doctor had shaken his head and said Non. The baby was dead, but he still had to be born. I knew this because my friend Wendy’s sister had lost two late-term children to placenta previa. Before Wendy explained it, stillbirth to me was what happened in black-and-white engravings, in iron beds with nearby pitchers, and it was always a grim surprise. The baby was born. The attending physician shook his head. When Wendy explained it to me, I was shocked. I don’t know how I supposed you got a late-term baby out.

“That’s the worst thing in the world,” I said to Wendy when she told me about her sister.

Now I understand. Of course it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world had already happened. He was dead. Everything else was easy.

I leaned on Edward. On the other side of the door was a waiting room full of pregnant women and their partners. On my side of the door, I thought, Don’t catch anyone’s eye.

I was not in shock. I was certainly not in denial. I was thinking quite clearly. I could remember what it was like to be pregnant and hopeful. That was minutes ago, though already in the remotest past. I had been shot out of a cannon since then, I was gone, but I knew: the women outside didn’t deserve to see me, but they would. I had been hustled past them; I had disappeared and wailed; whenever a door opens into a waiting room, all eyes go to see who’s behind it. In this case, me, the intact ruin. From the neck down I looked, like any heavily pregnant woman, like a monument to life. I knew where I was and what I was: bad luck for any pregnant woman to see. I was thirteen black cats. I was all the spilled salt in the world, a thousand smashed mirrors —

No. I was a dropped and dropping mirror. Look at me and see your reflection, for one clear instant before the disaster.

I unfocused my eyes and leaned harder on Edward and let him take me through the waiting room, past the lilacs, and back to the hospital proper.

The little midwife asked if I wanted a tranquilizer. Yes, please. He went running out of the room. We never saw him again.

A while later Sylvie, the delivering midwife, appeared in the room, and said —

Edward and I disagree about what she said. In a little while she would do something we couldn’t forgive her for, but at that moment I still loved her. Even now, I don’t hate her with the hot passion that Edward does, though I don’t remember her with fondness. At any rate: I might in my confusion and sorrow have misheard her; Edward, in his sorrow and anger, might misremember. Everything, of course, is shrouded by our lack of fluency, since she spoke only French.

I thought she said, Elizabeth, what has happened to your baby?

Edward remembers, Elizabeth, what have you done to your baby?

I burst into tears.

You may add that detail into the description of the next five days approximately every four