I have held the hands of a great many frightened mothers and told them, in the steadiest voice I own, that we were going to get through this together.

What I had never done, in fifteen years, was be the frightened mother — and I found, in that tilting cab with the smell of my own leg rising around me, that it is an entirely different thing from the inside.

The fear for yourself is manageable; I had made a kind of peace, over the years, with my own body being expendable, with the real possibility that my mother’s prophecy would come true and something would take me out in some wild place.

But the fear for her, for the small stubborn life gone quiet under my hand, was a different order of thing altogether.