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Chetta leaned forward and touched the fine skin of Abra’s cheek with the tip of her finger, old flesh
sliding across new. “Those born with il amnio are supposed to have double sight.”
“You don’t actually believe that, do you?” David asked. “A caul is nothing but a scrap of fetal
membrane. It . . .”
He was saying more, but Concetta paid no attention. Abra had opened her eyes. In them was a
universe of poetry, lines too great to ever be written. Or even remembered.
“Never mind,” Concetta said. She raised the baby and kissed the smooth skull where the fontanelle
pulsed, the magic of the mind so close beneath. “What’s done is done.”
5
One night about five months after the not-quite-argument over Abra’s caul, Lucy dreamed her
daughter was crying—crying as if her heart would break. In this dream, Abby was no longer in the
master bedroom of the house on Richland Court but somewhere down a long corridor. Lucy ran in the
direction of the weeping. At first there were doors on both sides, then seats. Blue ones with high
backs. She was on a plane or maybe an Amtrak train. After running for what seemed like miles, she
came to a bathroom door. Her baby was crying behind it. Not a hungry cry, but a frightened cry.
Maybe
(oh God, oh Mary)
a hurt cry.
Lucy was terribly afraid the door would be locked and she would have to break it down—wasn’t
that the kind of thing that always happened in bad dreams?—but the knob twisted and she opened it.
As she did, a new fear struck her: What if Abra was in the toilet? You read about that happening.
Babies in toilets, babies in Dumpsters. What if she were drowning in one of those ugly steel bowls
they had on public conveyances, up to her mouth and nose in disinfected blue water?
But Abra lay on the floor. She was naked. Her eyes, swimming with tears, stared at her mother.
Written on her chest in what looked like blood was the number 11.
6
David Stone dreamed he was chasing his daughter’s cries up an endless escalator that was running—
slowly but inexorably—in the wrong direction. Worse, the escalator was in a mall, and the mall was
on fire. He should have been choking and out of breath long before he reached the top, but there was
no smoke from the fire, only a hell of flames. Nor was there any sound other than Abra’s cries,
although he saw people burning like kerosene-soaked torches. When he finally made it to the top, he
saw Abby lying on the floor like someone’s cast-off garbage. Men and women ran all around her,
unheeding, and in spite of the flames, no one tried to use the escalator even though it was going down.
They simply sprinted aimlessly in all directions, like ants whose hill has been torn open by a farmer’s
harrow. One woman in stilettos almost stepped on his daughter, a thing that would almost surely have
killed her.
Abra was naked. Written on her chest was the number 175.
7