It had been sitting in her storage the whole time, waiting for one of us to be brave enough to walk through it.

Three months later I had a healthy baby girl, and I named her Opal, after my mother’s mother.

My mother complained that it was far too old-fashioned a name for a modern child, and then spent the next week telling everyone in Cypress Hollow how beautiful it was.

I have never once told the swamp story as though I were some kind of hero.

When people hear it and call the thing I did brave, I tell them the truth: that I lived because a stubborn old woman refused to believe I wasn’t coming and sent people out to look; because there were doctors ready when the helicopter set me down; and because I happened to carry, by pure chance, the one scrap of knowledge I’d never dreamed I would need to use on myself.