And something about the rawness of life with the baby was like the rawness of travel, the way it laid you open to the clear blue nerves. You were the five senses pouring down an unknown street; you were the slap of your shoes and hot paper of your palms, streaming past statues of regional Madonnas. The indelibility of a certain thrift shop in Helsinki, the smell of foreign decades in the lining of one leather coat. The loop of “Desert Island Disk” in a certain coffee shop in Cleveland, where the owner warned her not to have a second detoxifying charcoal latte because it would “flush the pills out of her system and get her pregnant.” The bridges of other cities, where she would watch their drab green rivers buoy up their rainbow-necked ducks, where she would drink espresso until there was a free and frightening exchange between her and the day—she was open, flung open, anything could rush in.