Effortlessly, she could conjure up the image of the photograph that Rica’s chair leg had punctured and destroyed: how the spring breeze blew at her father’s sparse hair, how a tree branch cast a shadow like a bird’s wing across the stone of her mother’s grave, how the daffodils he was placing in the vase caught the sun like small trumpets and furled against the back of his hand, how his hand itself held the flowers with his fi ngers curled tightly round their stems just as they’d been curling every fifth of April for the last eighteen years. He was fifty-eight years old, her father. He was her only connection of blood and bone.

Deborah gazed at the da Vinci cartoon. Its two female figures would have understood what her husband did not. It was the power the blessing the ineffable awe of a life created and brought forth from one’s own.

I want you to give your body a rest for at least a year, the doctor had told her. This is six miscarriages. Four spontaneous abortions in the last nine months alone. We’re encountering physical stress, a dangerous blood loss, hormonal imbalance, and—

Let me try fertility drugs, she’d said.

You’re not listening to me. That’s beyond consideration at the moment.

In vitro, then.

You know impregnation isn’t the problem, Deborah. Gestation is.

I’ll stay in bed for nine months. I won’t move. I’ll do anything.

Then get on an adoption list, start using contraceptives, and try again this time next year. Because if you continue to carry on in this fashion, you’ll be looking at a hysterectomy before you’re thirty years old.

He wrote out the prescription.

But there has to be a chance, she said, trying to pretend the remark was casual. She couldn’t allow herself to become upset. There must, after all, be no demonstration of mental or emotional stress on the part of the patient. He would note it on the chart, and it would count against her.