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Show on the floor and shuttled across the linoleum into an adjoining room. The doctor begins to suture the woman's wounds. How does the story of the unchosen begin? How far back must you travel to understand the decision to let go? One generation? Ten? Or can you never arrive at a place where things come together rather than apart, a point of understanding about, even reconciliation with, your past and your present, higher ground, away from the tides that sweep sheaves of sand back into the ocean and leave the shore altered. What loss is the primal one, the first wound, through which a remaining life is told, one so deep that those who come later carry the ache in their chest? And if you were to find it, name it, turn that moment, that wound, into a story, with all the attendant gains and losses language yields, would that change anything? The woman's wounds are almost closed. Blood loss stemmed, the color returns almost like magic to her cheeks. She will live. Nurses and other doctors shuffle in and out of the room, carrying trays and charts and rubber gloves and tools. Some help to stitch the woman back together at the seams; others begin to scrub the tables and floor. Sometime after 6 p.m. an older green-scrubbed doctor who has recently begun his shift walks through the adjoining room and sees the bucket holding the discarded baby on the floor. Redoes not know that it is a baby. £De just sees a form. Intuition, experience, hope, or the universe nevertheless causes him to stop and wonder. Then, he makes a choice. From what will forever be known in my family as The Dead Baby Bucket, thj^ doctor pulls the baby out. Though bloody and broken and blue from lack of heat and |