In my hands, the book the rabbi had given me felt as if it were burning. "You hungry?" Bloom asked.

"Starving," I admitted, and I let him lead the way.

June

When I was pregnant with Claire, I was told that I had gestational diabetes. I still don't think that was true, frankly—an hour before I had the test, I'd taken Elizabeth to McDonald's and finished her orange Hi-C drink, which is enough to put anyone into a sugar coma. However, when the obstetrician told me the results, I did what I had to do: stuck to a strict diet that left me hungry all the time, got blood drawn twice a week, held my breath at every visit while my doctor checked the baby's growth. The silver lining? I was treated to numerous ultrasounds.

Long after most moms-to-be had gotten their twenty-week preview of the baby inside them, I continued to get updated portraits. It got to be so commonplace for Kurt and I to see our baby that he stopped coming to the weekly OB visits. He'd watch Elizabeth while I drove to the hospital, lifted up my shirt, and let the wand roll over my belly, illuminating on a monitor a foot, an elbow, the slope of this new child's nose. By then, in my eighth month, the picture wasn't the stick-figure skeleton you see at twenty weeks—you could see her hair, the ridges on her thumb, the curve of her cheek. She looked so real on the ultrasound screen that sometimes I'd forget she was still inside me.

"Not much longer," the technician had said to me that last day as she wiped the gel off my belly with a warm washcloth.

"Easy for you to say," I told her. "You're not the one chasing around a seven-year-old in your eighth month."

"Been there done that," she said, and she reached beneath the screen to hand me that day's printout of the baby's face. When I saw it, I drew in my breath: that's how much this new baby looked like Kurt—completely unlike me, unlike Elizabeth.

This new baby had his wide-set eyes, his dimples, the point of his chin. I folded the picture into my purse so that I could show it to him, and then I drove home.

There were cars backed up on the street leading to mine. I assumed it was construction; they'd been repaving the roads around here. We sat in a line, idling, listening to the radio. After five minutes, I started to worry—Kurt was on duty today, and had taken his lunch break early so that I could go to the ultrasound without dragging Elizabeth along. If I didn't get home soon, he'd be late for work.

"Thank God," I said when the traffic slowly began to move.

But as I drew closer, I saw the detour signs set up at the end of my block, the police car sprawled sideways across the street. I felt that small tumble in my heart, the way you do when you see a fire engine racing toward the general vicinity of your home. Roger, an officer I knew only marginally, was diverting traffic. I unrolled my window. "I live here," I said. "I'm married to Kurt Nea—"

Before I could finish, his face froze, and that was how I knew something had happened. I'd seen Kurt's face do the same thing when he'd told me that my first husband had been killed in the car wreck.

I snapped off my seat belt and pushed my way out of the car, ungainly and awkward in my pregnancy. "Where is she?" I cried, the car still running. "Where's Elizabeth?"

"June," Roger said as he wrapped an arm around me firmly.

"Why don't you just come with me?"

He walked me down the road where I lived, until I could see what I hadn't been able to from the crossroads: the glare of police cruiser lights, blinking like a holiday. The yawning mouths of the ambulances. The door to my house wide open. One officer held

the dog in his arms; when Dudley saw me, he began to bark like mad.

"Elizabeth!" I yelled, and I shoved away from Roger, running as fast as I could given my shape and size. "Elizabeth!!"

I was intercepted by someone who knocked the breath from me—the chief of police. "June," he said softly. "Come with me."

I struggled against Irv—scratching, kicking, pleading. I thought maybe if I put up a fight, it would keep me from hearing what he was about to say. "Elizabeth?" I whispered.

"She's been shot, June."

I waited for him to say But she'll be just fine, except he didn't. He shook his head. Later, I would remember that he had been crying.

"I want to see her," I sobbed.

"There's something else," Irv said, and as I watched, a brace of paramedics wheeled Kurt out on a stretcher. His face was white, leached of blood—all of which seemed to be soaking the makeshift bandage around his midsection.

I reached for Kurt's hand, and he turned toward me, his eyes glassy. "I'm sorry," he choked out. "I'm so sorry."

"What happened?" I shrieked, frantic. "Sorry for what? What happened to her!"

"Ma'am," a paramedic said, "we've got to get him to a hospital."

Another paramedic pulled me back. I watched them take Kurt away from me.

As Irv led me to the steps of another ambulance, he spoke, words that at the time felt as solid and square as bricks, layered sentence upon sentence to build a wall between life as I'd known it and the one I would now be forced to lead. Kurt gave us a statement ... found the carpenter sexually abusing Elizabeth ... standoff... shots were fired ... Elizabeth got in the way. Elizabeth, I used to say, when she was following me around the tiny kitchen as I cooked dinner, I'm tripping over you. Elizabeth, your father and I are trying to have a conversation. Elizabeth, not now. Never.

My legs were numb as Irv led me into a second ambulance.

"She's the mother," he said as one of the paramedics came forward.

A small form lay on a stretcher in the central cavity of the ambulance, covered with a thick gray blanket. I reached out, shaking, and pulled the cloth down. As soon as I saw Elizabeth, my knees gave out; if not for Irv, I would have fallen.

She looked like she was sleeping. Her hands were tucked on either side of her body; her cheeks were flushed. They'd made a mistake, that was all.

I leaned over the stretcher, touching her face. Her skin was still warm. "Elizabeth," I whispered, the way I did on school days to wake her. "Elizabeth, time to get up."

But she didn't stir; she didn't hear me. I broke down over her body, pulling her against me. The blood on her chest was garish. I tried to draw her closer, but I couldn't—this baby inside me was in the way. "Don't go," I whispered. "Please don't go."

"June," Irv said, touching my shoulder. "You can ride with them if you want, but you'll have to put her down."

I did not understand the great hurry to take her to a hospital; later, I would learn that only a doctor could pronounce Elizabeth dead, no matter how obvious it was.

The paramedics gently strapped Elizabeth to the gurney and offered me a seat beside it. "Wait," I said, and I unclasped a barrette from my hair. "She doesn't like her bangs in her eyes," I murmured, and I clipped them back. I left my hand on her forehead for a moment, a benediction.

On the interminable ride to the hospital, I looked down at my shirt. It was stained with blood, a Rorschach of loss. But I was not the only one who had been marked, permanently changed. It was no surprise when a month later I gave birth to Claire—an infant who looked nothing like her father, as she had that day at the ultrasound, but who instead was the spitting image of the sister she would never meet.

Maggie

Oliver and I were enjoying a glass of Yellow Tail and a TiVo'd Grey's Anatomy when there was a knock on the door. Now, this was alarming on several counts:

1. It was Friday night, and no one ever stopped by on Friday night.

2. People who ring the doorbell at ten p.m. are either

a. stranded with a dead battery in their car

b. serial killers

c. all of the above

3. I was in my pajamas.

4. The ones with a hole on the butt, so that my underwear showed.

I looked at the rabbit. "Let's not get it," I said, but Oliver hopped off my lap and began to sniff around the bottom of the door.

"Maggie?" I heard. "I know you're in there."

"Daddy?" I got off the couch and unlocked the door to let him in.

"Shouldn't you be at services?"

He took off his coat and hung it on an antique rack that my mother had given me for my birthday one year, and that I really hated, but that she looked for every time she came to my house (Oh, Maggie, I'm so glad you've still got this!). "I stayed for the important parts. Your mother's kibitzing with Carol; I'll probably make it home before she will."

Carol was the cantor—a woman with a voice that made me think of falling asleep in the summertime sun: strong, steady utterly relaxing. When she wasn't singing, she collected thimbles. She went to conventions as far away as Seattle to trade them, and had one entire forty-foot wall of her house divvied up by a contractor into minuscule display shelves. Mom said that Carol had more than five thousand thimbles. I didn't think I had five thousand of anything, except maybe daily calories.

He walked into the living room and glanced at the television. "I wish that skinny girl would just ditch McDreamy."

"You watch Grey's Anatomy

"Your mother watches. I absorb by osmosis." He sat down on the couch, while I mulled over the fact that I actually did have something in common with my mother.

"I liked your friend the priest," my father said.

"He's not my friend. We work together."

"I can still like him, can't I?"