droplet seemed to hiss against her face, to sizzle against her hands, with which she 
tightly gripped her swollen abdomen as if she could deny Death the baby that it had come 
to collect.
  As one of the two paramedics hurried to the ambulance van and scrambled into the 
driver's seat, Agnes suffered another contraction so severe that for a tremulous moment, 
at the peak of the agony, she almost lost consciousness.
  The second medic wheeled the gurney to the rear of the van, calling for one of the 
policemen to accompany him to the hospital. Apparently, he needed help if he was to 
deliver the baby and also stabilize Apes while en route.
  She only half understood their frantic conversation, partly because the ability to 
concentrate was draining from her along with her lifeblood, but also because she was 
distracted by Joey. He was no longer in the wreck, but standing at the open rear door of 
the ambulance.
  He wasn't torn and broken any longer. His clothes weren't bloodstained.
  Indeed, the winter storm had dampened neither his hair nor his clothes. The rain 
appeared to slide away from him a millimeter before contact, as though the water and the 
man were composed of matter and antimatter that must either repel each other or, on 
contact, trigger a cataclysmic blast that would shatter the very foundation of the 
universe.
  Joey was in his Worry Bear mode, brows furrowed, eyes pinched at the comers.
  Agnes wanted to reach out and touch him, but she found that she didn't have the 
strength to raise her arm. She was no longer holding her belly, either. Both hands lay at 
her sides, palms up, and even the simple act of curling her fingers required surprising 
effort and concentration.
  When she tried to speak to him, she could no more easily raise her voice than she could 
extend a hand to him.
  A policeman scrambled into the back of the van.
  As the paramedic shoved the gurney across the step-notched bumper, its collapsible legs 
scissored down. Agnes was rolled headfirst into the ambulance.
  Click-click. The wheeled stretcher locked in place.
  Either operating on first-aid knowledge of his own or responding to an instruction from 
the medic, the cop slipped a foam pillow under Agnes's head.
  Without the pillow, she wouldn't have been able to lift her head to look toward the 
back of the ambulance.
  Joey was standing just outside, gazing in at her. His blue eyes were seas where sorrow 
sailed.
  Or perhaps the sorrow was less sadness than yearning. He had to move on, but he was 
loath to begin this strange journey without her.
  As the storm failed to dampen Joey, so the rotating red-and-white beacons on the 
surrounding police vehicles did not touch him. The  falling raindrops were diamonds and 
then rubies, diamonds and then rubies.
  Joey was not illuminated by the light of this world. Agnes realized that he was 
translucent, his skin like fine milk glass through which shone a light from elsewhere.
  The paramedic pulled shut the door, leaving Joey outside in the night, in the storm, in 
the wind between worlds.
  With a jolt, the ambulance shifted gears, and they were rolling.
  Great hobnailed wheels of pain turned through Agnes, driving her into darkness for a 
moment.
  When pale light came to her eyes again, she heard the paramedic and the cop talking 
anxiously as they worked on her, but she couldn't understand their words. They seemed to 
be speaking not just a foreign tongue but an ancient language unheard on earth for a 
thousand years.
  Embarrassment flushed her when she realized that the paramedic had cut away the pants 
of her jogging suit. She was naked from the waist down.
  Into her fevered mind came an image of a milk-glass infant, as translucent as Joey at 
the back door of the ambulance. Fearing that this vision meant her child would be 
stillborn, she said, My baby, but no sound escaped her.
  Pain again, but not a mere contraction. Such an excruciation, unendurable. The 
hobnailed wheels ground through her once more, as though she were being broken on a 
medieval torture device.
  
  She could see the two men talking, their rain-wet faces serious and  scarred with 
worry, but she was no longer able to hear their voices.
  In fact, she could hear nothing at all: not the shrieking siren, not  the hum of the 
tires, not the click-tick-rattle of the equipment packed  into the storage shelves and 
the cabinets to the right of her. She was as  deaf as the dead.
  Instead of falling down, down into another brief darkness, as she expected, Agnes found 
herself drifting up. A frightening sense of weightlessness overcame her.
  She had never thought of herself as being tied to her body, as being  knotted to bone 
and muscle, but now she felt tethers snapping. Suddenly  she was buoyant, unrestrained, 
floating up from the padded stretcher, until she was  looking down on her body from the 
ceiling of the ambulance.
  Acute terror suffused her, a humbling perception that she was a  fragile construct, 
something less substantial than mist, small and weak  and helpless. She was filled with 
the panicky apprehension that she  would be diffused like the molecules of a scent, 
dispersed into such a  vast volume of air that she would cease to exist.
  Her fear was fed, too, by the sight of the blood that saturated the  padding of the 
stretcher on which her body lay. So much blood. Oceans.
  Into the eerie hush came a voice. No other sound. No siren. No  hum or swish of tires 
on rain-washed pavement. Only the voice of the  paramedic: "Her heart's stopped."
  Far below Agnes, down there in the land of the living, light glimmered along the barrel 
of a hypodermic syringe in the hand of the paramedic, glinted from the tip of the needle.
  The cop had unzipped the top of her jogging suit and pulled up the roomy T-shirt she 
wore under it, exposing her breasts.
  The paramedic put aside the needle, having used it, and grabbed the paddles of a 
defibrillator.
  Agnes wanted to tell them that all their efforts would be to no avail, that they should 
cease and desist, be kind and let her go. She had no reason to stay here anymore. She was 
moving on to be with her dead husband and her dead baby, moving on to a place where there 
was no pain, where no one was as poor as Maria Elena Gonzalez, where no one lived with 
fear like her brothers Edom and Jacob, where everyone spoke a single language and had all 
the blueberry pies they needed.
  She embraced the darkness.
  
  Chapter 13
  AFTER DR. PARKHURST departed, a silence lay on the hospital  room, heavier and colder 
than the ice bags that were draped across Junior's midsection.
  After a while, he dared to crack his eyelids. Pressing against his eyes was a blackness 
as smooth and as unrelenting as any known by a blind man. Not even a ghost of light 
haunted the night beyond the window, and the slats of the venetian blind were as hidden