As I STOOD BY THE INCUBATOR, FEELING AS FLAT NOW AS AN EMPTY COAT, I WATCHED HER CRY AND CRY, CLENCHING HER BODY LIKE A FIST. THIS WAS A CHILD OF MINE. MY HEART, HEALED ONCE FOR DEATH, BROKE OPEN AGAIN. from the basin with a cloth, turning away from the mirror and taking my undergarments off under my gown. And while I was hiding my body from myself, I was figuring ways to avoid taking food into it, by spreading small portions on my plate, picking slowly at the food until the chance came to cover it with my napkin and carry the plate to the trash, where I swiftly wiped it clean. I would throw my sandwich out the window of the truck as I drove, stay late at school and pretend to have eaten there when I got home, hide my mother’s cookies and tarts in a pocket until I could get to the bathroom and drop them in the toilet. “Julie’s looking peaked,” said my mother in June. “You’re studying too much.” But that wasn’t true. I had gotten poor grades in the spring quarter and was going to do as badly in the summer. But I took heart from the fact that she hadn’t said I was looking thick in the middle. I looked at the reflection of my clothed body every chance I got, satisfied that no change was apparent, and from this thinking it wasn’t hard to begin to believe that nothing was happening after all. I got used to my breasts being tender and my stomach soft. It seemed as if what had threatened had been stopped. If only the bleeding would return. I pushed down on my abdomen at night, just above the pelvic bone, trying to press the blood out. Nothing. But I couldn’t be pregnant, I thought through the month of July, and through August too, though I pressed harder and willed my body to dispel whatever it was that had turned me solid within and tender without. There is no way I could be pregnant, I would say in the morning, standing in profile and full dress before the hall mirror. But I was picking certain things to wear, dresses with loose belts, blouses that did not tuck in, pants that had always been too big and that I could still button now. Still I reasoned, if I were pregnant, I would be wearing shifts and smocks. I would be blown up like a balloon. It would be plain to see, and people would know; my mother, who had me, certainly would know. I left the house, my breakfast wrapped in a paper towel to throw by the side of the road. I wasn’t taking classes now but drove to Fayville nearly every day anyway, to use the library, I said, and that is in fact what I did. I had nowhere else to go. There it was easier to sit at a table in my regular clothes, a book open before me, and say, it simply is not possible that I could be pregnant. Something-is wrong, but it isn’t that. In September classes started again, and with some effort I maneuvered myself through registration and began sitting in lectures, taking notes as always, though I hardly registered what the professor said. By now I was feeling movement in my bowels, as if a large bubble was rolling about or someone was drawing a finger back and forth inside. Then I would write furiously on my page, almost verbatim, whatever the lecturer was saying, though I entirely missed the sense of it. One day I imagined that Sheldon was sitting behind me, and I wondered what I should say to him, and if he would notice that I looked different, though of course' he would see that I looked ill. I sat the whole lecture looking rigidly forward, dreading to turn my head and see him there, though of course he was not. “Julie, you look like death warmed over,” my mother said in late September, after the equinox, and I knew the game was up. “We’d better get you to a doctor.” Panic immediately brightened my mind. I can’t go to a doctor, I said to myself in so many words. He Will see that I am six months pregnant at least. No longer could I deny the truth. The days that followed called for bitter planning. I told my mother I was in an exam period and would go with her to the doctor when that was over. With this small respite, I prayed for deliverance as I drove the route back and forth, but the God that knew my father did not know me. What was I going to do? At night I lay awake, my hands rubbing the skin on my stomach and thighs, searching my own body for the answer. The weekends passed in slow motion, my mind divided between the density in my body in which the finger drew slowly back and forth, and Sheldon’s face. I called to him silently for help, to come and take care of me now because I could go no further alone. Sheldon, I thought, Sheldon, I am six months pregnant at least. But he never came, and I never believed he would come. On a Monday in early October it came to me what to do. I was sitting in the library when I decided to end my life in our neighbor’s camping trailer by turning on the propane and going inside. Fred Boardman kept his trailer in an old barn halfway between our two places and only used it in November to go up in the hills and hunt. The trailer had two tanks on the front containing propane for a gas stove and lamp. On Friday, I would drive away as if I were going to school, put the truck behind the abandoned shack up a deadend road called the Hooftrack, go into the trailer and open the jets. The tanks would be empty before anyone even thought of looking for me, and it would probably be the next day before they found the truck or thought of looking in the barn. As this plan unfolded in my mind, I looked through the library window at the sky, which was clear and blue except for a scattering of white clouds. Breathing in the stillness of the sky, I felt my fear turn to peace. The leaves of the young trees in the courtyard were red and gold, the bright colors of their dying, and for the first time I found this kind of beauty in myself as well. The sounds of the students outside did not reach me. It was as if there were only silence now. It was as if I were already somewhere else, looking back through this window at the world. 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