the one before, and soon Ciba was unable to walk at all. She fell against a birch tree, clinging to it. She panted and sobbed, trying to breathe. The baby was coming.
“Uma,” she gasped.
I looked past her, toward the village. It was so close I could see the slate roofs. If I ran, I could be back in a few minutes. But a lot could happen in those minutes.
“There isn’t time,” I said. “I’ll stay and help you.”
She whimpered as another contraction shook through her. “Go,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Please.”
I ran to the village as fast as I could. Aki wasn’t in the hut, but I found Uma right away, and soon we were running back up the path, rotting blackberries staining the ground. I heard Ciba cry out ahead. Every second seemed long and distended, thick as a minute. When we finally made it back, Ciba wasn’t where I left her. She had crawled into the blackberry bushes, where she lay on a bed of crushed berries. She was giving birth. I heard her sharp breathing and her cries of pain.
Uma turned to me. “Water,” she said. “Go back to my hut. Bring water and towels, a needle and thread. There is a scalpel. Get that, too.”
I ran to the village again, collected the towels, found the scalpel in Uma’s supplies, filled a jar with water, grabbed the sewing kit, and ran back up the path. I hadn’t wasted a second, but as I reached the blackberry bushes, I knew something was terribly wrong. Ciba was still. There was blood everywhere. Pooled over the berries, around Ciba’s legs. Soaked into her tunic. Blood on Uma’s hands. Blood. Blood. So much blood that my stomach turned. There had not been nearly so much blood during the birth of my son.
I squatted at Ciba’s side. I took her hand. “Ciba,” I said. Ciba. Ciba. I said her name over and over. She didn’t move. She didn’t respond. I shook her shoulders, touched her forehead, tried everything I could to reach her. Her eyes were fixed open, and she stared up into the blue sky, lifeless.
Tears filled my eyes, so that the blood seemed to swirl at my feet, a hot magma burning around us. I had to leave. I couldn’t see her that way another moment. My heart would break. I couldn’t bear to see another dead baby.
That is when I saw it: a tiny foot. Bloody, thick with tissue, the foot was flat and wide, with a hooked second toe. The baby had arrived feetfirst, which had caused the problem. I put my hand on Ciba’s arm, to steady myself, when, to my astonishment, the tiny foot twitched. A delicate toe flexed. I caught my breath. Ciba had died, but the baby was still alive.
Uma jumped up and grabbed the scalpel. I watched, frozen with disbelief, as the blade sliced into Ciba’s abdomen, cutting through skin and muscle. The incision was wide, gaping. Blood spilled through the cut, over Uma’s fingers. I looked to Ciba’s face, half expecting an expression of pain, but it was waxen and still. Uma peeled Ciba’s body open like the skin of a fruit and, pulling gently, removed the baby from her body.
Uma poured water over the baby, washing the blood away. It was not a boy, as Ciba had predicted, but a girl. A beautiful girl, white-skinned and shriveled, stunned to silence by light and atmosphere. Uma gave her to me and I held her close. She was warm and still, watchful. She didn’t cry, only blinked in the sunlight. Then she turned her gaze to me, and I saw that this little being was a miracle, a creation so perfect that I couldn’t help but believe her to be the highest expression of all who had come before her.
Something in my mind shifted, and I recalled Eleanor’s account of Vita’s birth—the monstrous teeth, the exposed spine. I couldn’t help but remember my own child, dead in my arms, its body covered with hair, the sweet expression on its monstrous face. I looked for signs of these deformities in the baby. She had none of them—the spine was straight. The skin hairless. The only evidence of her lineage was the albino coloring and her large, flat feet with the hooked second toes. Soon, she would be hungry. Soon, she would need more than my arms. But at that moment, as we stood there together, the baby taking her first breaths,