Harlan called me through it, again and again, steady as a metronome, telling me to hold on.

There is a particular helplessness that belongs only to a parent, and I lived inside its purest form for those thirty-six hours.

My whole life as a mother had been organized, without my ever articulating it, around one principle: that I stood between my child and the world’s harm.

When he was a baby I put myself between him and the stairs, the stove, the street.

When he was small I sat up through his fevers and held the world’s sharp edges away from him.

That was the job, the deepest part of it — to be the body between the danger and the child.