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She made a small sound that was supposed to be a word, but it would not come up through her throat. Her parents turned their faces toward her at once. She could not remember when they had looked at her so eagerly. Love, their eyes said.

“Don’t try to talk,” Mammy told her gently. “You’ve had a bad time, but you’re going to be all right. There’s no damage done that won’t mend, the doctor says. You just have to lie still and rest.”

Nuala could not understand why her voice would not work. When she tried to ask about the cat, her throat closed up. At last she did manage to make an awful croaking sound that appalled her, but at least it was a word. A sort of word.

Her parents responded with tears of relief in their eyes.

“If we had lost you, too . . .” Mammy began. Then she put her knuckles in her mouth and turned away. But she said nothing about the Dead Babies, though once she had spoken of nothing else.

Her parents stayed with Nuala until she fell back into the greyness. Her last thought was to wonder if seeing them together like that had been a dream.

It was no dream.Mammy was there when she next woke up, and Nuala’s father came to the hospital every day. He never smelled of drink. His hands shook and his mouth trembled, and sometimes there was an expression in his eyes that she recognized. But then he would smile at her in her bandages, and she knew he would not go out to the pub when he left the hospital.

The sight of his daughter’s living face meant more to him than drink.

Bit by bit, Nuala learned what had happened. The garage had been blown down on top of her.A piece of planking had hit her head, which was why it hurt so. The storm had done much worse damage elsewhere. A tree had fallen across a car and killed a young man. Nuala had been very lucky, everyone said so.

In the house, the big window where she had been sitting had blown in moments after she ran outside. Shards of glass had sliced across the room like knives. If she had stayed where she was, she would have been cut to pieces.

“What on earth made you go outside just then?” Mammy kept asking. But when Nuala tried to explain her throat closed up, and she could not answer.

Her father was looking at his wife as he said, “I’m beginning to realize how much we have to be thankful for, if we don’t let it slip away. And how little it takes to make us happy after all. Like knowing you’re alive.” He turned and smiled down at Nuala.

“My cat!”Nuala cried out at last. Her parents looked startled. She bit her lip, then plunged ahead in a funny rusty voice she hardly recognized.

“The cat I take care of. It was in the garage with me when the roof blew off. I went outside to save it.” Her words began tumbling over one another in their eagerness to be said. “Where is it? Is it all right? You have to find the cat, it will be so frightened and hungry!”

“There was no cat,Nuala,” her mother said soothingly. “You must have dreamed it.” She looked around for a nursing sister; her little girl was becoming too excited.

“But there is a cat. There is!”

“What’s its name, then?” asked her father. “I’ll go home and call the cat and try to find it.”

Nuala felt hot tears burning behind her eyes. “I never gave it a name.” The new tenderness in her father’s voice made her want to cry more than the shouting had ever done. “But I caught it before the garage fell down. I was holding it very tightly; I felt it scratch me because it was afraid. Look, I can show you.”

She tore at her hospital gown and bared her chest. Her parents bent over her.

There were not any scratches.

Her father said, “When we shifted the timbers off of you, we didn’t see any cat.”

“You must have missed it, then.”

He shook his head. “That’s hardly possible.We moved every stick in that garage to get to you.We would have seen a cat if one had been in there. But I’ll go back and look now if it will make you feel any better, if you’ll promise to be quiet until I come back.”

Nuala clasped his hands between hers. “Please.”

Mammy stayed with her while he went to look