But they were all so young: their first child in every instance, and they developed complications, or struggled through hours and hours of labor, prolonged by drugs that lessened pain and contractions both; they cursed and pressed down and sweated and prayed and called for their mothers as shot soldiers do. So much to remember, and she would remember too, but only by saving it in words, which dried up and grew light over time like leaves. And the pain passed from her anyway, just as Sister said it would.

Finally they gave up on her and cut her open to get out the child. It was a boy, and he had a grievous hole in his heart and an incomplete intestine. He was baptized, and lived only a few hours.

She didn’t think of it as grieving. She knew that in some places women tore their garments or cast ashes on their heads in grief, but she wasn’t thinking of them when she cut her hair off with shears taken from the sewing closet. She cut and cut, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror above the line of stained sinks. She had started thinking incessantly about sharp things, about broken glass and scalpels and the blades of the big kitchen disposal, into which now and then on kitchen duty they would toss a broken drinking glass and then duck down for fear of flying shards and listen to it be eaten, crunched and then ground and then whirred away to nothing. That was all she thought of while she cut.

She could still walk only with difficulty. The nuns had told her how to care for her wound and how she should do no lifting and she stared at them not even nodding yes. She wanted to say I wish it was you who died and not him. She made them call her parents and have them come to get her immediately. Stay and rest, rest they said but she couldn’t rest, couldn’t sleep, and if she did sleep couldn’t wake. Hours before George and Marion were to arrive she went out into the hall with her Samsonite bag and sat on a bench there, as far from the delivery rooms and operating rooms as possible.

“Pixie,” her mother said, touching her ruined head. “You remind me of somebody, with your hair like that. I can’t think who.”

That was all. They took a plane and then drove home from the city airport across the farmlands. It was October and smelled of fruit and the first days of school. At first they kept her between them in the front seat, but at a gas stop she said she was tired and got in the back alone. Her mother tried to tell her stories of home, activities, relatives she’d heard from. Nothing more. They arrived home. “Here we are,” said Marion.

It ought to have been not only possible but easy to say, to tell them that she was so hurt inside, that she had almost died there, that she felt entirely alone and unbearably crowded at the same time, that she was sorry and afraid. But she couldn’t speak, and was somehow not even aware that she couldn’t. What was the name of the thing that kept her, poor ghost, from speaking? The words were the words and there was no prohibition on saying them. She has looked backward sometimes on herself sitting in her room in that house, on her bed, knees drawn up to her chin, and wanted to say to herself Just go tell them what’s in your heart; speak, and they’ll answer.

Grief laid too deep for speech might have been written down in poems; she’d used to believe that was how poems came to be. But she had lost or surrendered that, not even thinking about it, a traveler who’s forgotten a bag on a bench in a city he won’t return to, unable to remember even what it contained. For a time she went on reading poems, and would sometimes write down a bit of someone else’s. But such a tide as moving seems asleep Too full for sound or foam When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

Wasn’t it they, though, George and Marion, who should have spoken? Shouldn’t they have found some way to ask? Sitting on either side of her at the kitchen table or in front of the TV, in rooms too warm for Kit, they seemed to be clothed in impenetrable wrappings or wadding of kindness and goodwill, but unable to feel or be touched through the thicknesses. No: no, it wasn’t their fault either. After a month’s silence they made an appointment for her with a psychologist, Dr. Biencouli, in a stuffy office downtown whose waiting room was decorated with things from the sea: a big aquarium, and a fisherman’s net, in which balls of colored glass were caught.

All those girls of her generation, sent to do penance with these peculiar men, talking away or refusing to talk as the doctors too of course refused, calm and unresponsive as idols or twitchy and weird. Dr. Biencouli kept opening his desk drawer, fiddling with whatever it contained and shutting it again, only to open it again a few minutes later. Falin said the interrogators of the KGB asked their prisoners Do you know why you’re here? Dr. Biencouli asked her Do you know why you’re here? because like them he didn’t know. And you gave them nothing, or gave them nothing in the guise of giving them everything.

Would it have been different if he had been different, if the practice of his art or craft had been different, as it would in time become different? Maybe if someone could just have spoken to her soul in kindness she would not have borne all the rest of her life those faint hatchings or hash marks on her wrists: badges of that doctor’s failure, or her own, or no one’s.

It was a Sunday morning, and she’d refused to go to church, which Marion decided was because her tummy still hurt. And maybe it was just the sudden silence of the house and the November day: she felt solid and foreign to herself, as though she had no insides except a watching eye. She wandered in rooms and then into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet with repulsion and fascination mixed; then she opened the door.

Always the little surprise (she’d felt it first long before as a child) to find, behind her face, not the contents of herself but only this stuff. Bactine and Band-Aids and aspirin and medicines once prescribed and not all taken, little brown bottles, maybe one with a genie in it. Take two as needed for sleep; but how many to sleep for good? Brylcreem and Barbasol on the masculine side, and a safety razor, and the Blue Blades too, a night-blue box written on in black. Each blade inside the box was wrapped again in greasy paper; she had watched how carefully her father had put it in and screwed up the razor’s little trapdoors, and after, how he took the old blade and slid it through the little slot at the cabinet’s back.

Once, walking to school in some city, she had passed a house being dismantled, the roof off and the walls coming down. The bathroom was open for all to see, the tub askew and the dusty toilet; and in the wall behind the sink—piled up behind the bared slats between the studs—were all the Blue Blades ever dropped into that slot. A treasure, revolting and amazing.

Blue, it really was blue; slick, fresh as a peeled fruit.

In dreams we do things and then awaken in the awful relief of finding we haven’t done them after all. She had dreamed recently that, preparing to mow the lawn herself now that Ben was gone, she had lifted the can of oil and gas mixed and instead of pouring it into the machine had drunk it. It seemed in the dream a dumb but natural error. But she could get no one to help her, not her mother at work ironing vast white sheets, nor her father, distracted and dim, who kidded her and put her off.

She thought This is dumb even as she struck the blade hard and swift across her left wrist. Immediately the blood scrambled out all along the slit she’d made as though eager to be free. It didn’t hurt, but it had run all over her hand, which was now too slippery to hold the blade to do the other wrist. She saw in horror that she had cut her fingers with the opposite edge of the blade, and at that almost stopped, but she gripped hard and made a weak slash and then another, crying out a little growl, with teeth bared.