Our baby, Corey, was red and very small, about the size of a hand. He looked scalded. You could see he shouldn’t be out in the world. Can’t we put him back? I asked that question several times. Isn’t there a way to put him back? No one even answered me.

He had a tight little face, a shrunken face like a mummy dug up after centuries. The pain of thousands of years was in it.

I would sit there, watching him through the glass. He moved like a boiled hand, opening and closing weakly. “We need to turn him,” the nurses would tell me, and I’d move away.

I only took a bump when I couldn’t move or care for the other two without it. I’d think, Just a little one, just enough to get them to school, and I’d take the bump and feel the baby clench up in me.

After Corey died, I was in a psychiatric hospital for months. I just want to die, I’d say, and they’d tell me, You have two girls who need you. And you’re clean, you’ve kicked your habit and your whole life is still ahead of you.

I told my mother, “The doctors say I have to forgive myself or I can’t go on. So I’m trying to do that.” And my mother said, “Forgiving yourself is one thing. Getting God to forgive you is something else.”