‘ It has taken me so long to believe I am saved. Not from crookedness; I am still to some extent crooked and always too slow. But saved from the abandonment I deserved. It has taken until tonight, in fact.

Leah is in Atlanta now, and that is part of the problem if not the whole of it. Leah with Anatole and their little son Pascal and another child well in progress. Leah majoring in Agronomics and all of them making a noble attempt to plant themselves on American soil. I can see it will not last. When I go with them to the grocery, they are boggled and frightened and secretly scornful, I think. Of course they are. I remember how it was at first: dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our Rachel had been left suddenly in charge of everything.

“What is that, Aunt Adah? And that?” their Pascal asks in his wide-eyed way, pointing through the aisles: a pink jar of cream for removing hair, a can of fragrance to spray on the carpet, stacks of lidded containers the same size as the jars we throw away each day.

“They’re things a person doesn’t really need.”

“But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn’t really need?”

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world. We leave that to Anatole, for he sees it all clearly in an instant. He laughs aloud at the nearly naked women on giant billboards, and befriends the bums who inhibit the street corners of Atlanta, asking them, detailed questions about  where they sleep and how they kill their food. The answers are interesting. You might be surprised to know how many pigeons roosting in the eaves of Atlanta’s Public Library have ended up roasting over fires in Grant Park.

I find an extraordinary kindred spirit in Anatole. We are both marked, I suppose. Freaks at first sight, who have learned to take the world at face value. He was marked early on by his orphaned state, his displacement, his zealous skeptical mind, his aloneness. I have noticed that he, too, reads things backward: what the billboards are really selling, for example. Also where poverty comes from, and where it goes. I shall not covet my sister’s husband, but I shall know him, in my way, better. Anatole and I inhabit the same atmosphere of solitude. The difference between us is he would give up his right arm and leg for Leah, whereas I already did.

Will I lose myself entirely if I lose my limp?

How can I reasonably survive beyond the death of Ruth May and all those children? Will salvation be the death of me?

Here in the hospital I have too much time for questions like these. It occurs to me I have access to an infinite variety of narcotic drugs. Sleep is an absolute possibility. God can’t see you when you’re asleep, Ruth May used to insist. Evil peels no eye on sleep. Live!

Die.

They see a great deal of Mother. Mother last year gave up her floral hermitage in Bethlehem and moved to an apartment in Atlanta, having found a new church of sorts. She marches for civil rights. They pay her to work in an office, but I know she lives for the marches. She is very good at it, and impervious to danger. She came over to my apartment one night, having walked nearly a mile through tear gas, so that I could check her eyes for damage to the cornea. Her eyes were not even red. I think bullets would pass right through her.

It crosses my mind that I may need a religion. Although Mother has one now, and she still suffers. I believe she talks to Ruth May more or less constantly, begging forgiveness when no one is around.

Leah has one: her religion is the suffering.

Rachel doesn’t, and she is plainly the happiest of us all. Though it could be argued that she is, herself, her own brand of goddess.

I am sorry to say I do not see Leah and Anatole as much as I might. Being a medical student, of course, I have an inhuman schedule, and everyone makes allowances for that. Also I am in a different region of the university altogether from married student housing. They are making babies over there, while over here we merely save them.

It has been a difficult month: a rotation in neonatal intensive care. We lost two babies in the last week. And in this past day, Christmas Eve, while the clock made two complete rotations of its own, I watched over three tiny creatures whose lungs struggled like the flat, useless wings of butterflies prematurely emerged. Triplets. I considered Nelson’s view of what ought to be done with twins, and the dreadful consequences of ignoring that tradition. What we had here was worse: a triple calamity fallen on the house of these poor parents. I spoke with the father, a boy of sixteen or so, who gave the clear impression, through the use of the conditional tense when speaking of the parental care required for these damaged children, that he might not stick around. So a plague on the mother alone. While the machines hummed softly in our hospital and white-soled shoes whispered up and down the halls, a catastrophe was roaring down upon this child of a mother. This is her Christmas gift. She will be indentured forever. Never again will her life be free of travail and disappointment in her three blind mice. She may cut off their tails with a carving knife, this husbandless wife, whose school friends are still promenading through their girlhoods.