Chapter 13

This is the third day.

I know it by the candle more than anything else. I have been marking time by what remains of it, the slow patient diminishment of wax that does not care what is being written beside it or whether it gets finished. The candle does not have opinions about urgency. I have found this either comforting or maddening depending on the hour.

This morning it is comforting.

The fever broke briefly in the night and I woke in the cold clarity that follows and lay very still and took inventory the way I have always taken inventory, systematically, without sentiment.

The hand is worse. I can see it in the writing, the letters less precise than they were two days ago, the lines drifting slightly from the horizontal in ways I correct and then find drifting again. A soldier’s assessment would note that the instrument is failing faster than the mission requires.

I am writing faster.

The child has been still for two days now. I have made my peace with that. I made it in the night during the cold clarity and it held and I am not going to unmake it here because unmaking it serves nothing and I have never been a woman to spend effort on things that serve nothing.

She was here. She moved in the dark on a Caribbean deck and I felt it and I am her mother and I am telling you she was real.