.

the sofa, took my food from me, and lifted the pink lump from Darlene.

      I took the baby as I would an armload of firewood, like a log in a forklift’s grip, cradled.

      “Be sure to hold her head,” said Darlene, her hands outstretched as if to steady me.

      But I knew this baby rule, that they had soft and lolling heads, and if you didn’t hold them right, you’d snap their necks or make them brain damaged. This baby, the one mouthing the air with milk-lips, arched her back, clenched her fists near her cheeks, and stuttered out a cry.

      “Are you pinching the baby?” said Aunt Sharon. She gave me a stern eye, hands on hips, then laughed.

      “She’s just gassy,” said Darlene. The baby’s rear end rumbled against my forearm.

      “You can have her back,” I said, and inched forward on the sofa cushion, but Darlene said, it’s okay, you can hold her for as long as you want. Just rub her back, said an aunt, pat her bum, hum to her, but hold her head, they said, her neck is weak, and put this blanket on your shoulder just in case she barfs.

      THE NEXT DAY, on the bus ride home from school, I slid in beside my assigned seatmate, Tasha Penner. She was a year older, attended the public school up the road, and wasn’t forced to wear a navy-blue polyester jumper every day. But she, too, was Mennonite, so we knew we were probably related, somehow, way back on our fathers’ sides. Tasha was loud, large-limbed, the kind of girl my mother called “a handful,” and she was completely unafraid of the older boys who hissed names at us from the back of the bus and shot their spitballs through drinking straws when Mr. Jordan, the driver, wasn’t watching.

      “I got to hold a baby last night,” I said. “Newborn.”

      Tasha hunched down in the seat and leaned in close. “You know how babies are born, right?” she said.

      I nodded. I knew. “From bellies?”

      I’d seen the swollen stomachs of my aunts and the ladies at church, standing with a hand pressed to the growing roundness or against the small of the back, their pregnant shapes belling out inside their vast dresses as they shuffled. And when the baby showed up, their bellies, like risen bread dough punched down, sagged back into place, hidden beneath generous folds of fabric.

      “Nope,” Tasha said. “Not from bellies. My sister Candace just had a baby, and she had to push it out.” Here, Tasha thrust her face right close to mine, her breath hot and smelling like tuna sandwich. She whispered, the words coming out in rhythmic pulses: “She had to push it out her bum.”

      Revelation in childhood comes in strange and unexpected ways, like a pair of metal scissors jammed blades-first in an electrical outlet—a shock, a spray of sparks, and a bright shudder that, for hours after, leaves the body abuzz.

      “Her bum?” My voice came out thin, choked.

      “You have to push a baby out of your butthole. You have to push really hard,” said Tasha. “Like when you have to go really big. You have to push even harder than that. Way harder.” She leaned back and nodded.

      I tried to picture it. A woman on a toilet, and a baby easing out into the dirty flush and swirl. Then I tried to not picture it. Impossible, I thought. I’d held the newborn, Nicole. Her floppy pink head was bigger than an orange, bigger than a grapefruit, too big to fit.

      “It’s true,” said Tasha. “That’s what my sister Candace had to do. She had to push Bradley out her bum.”

      On that ride home, with the late-September sun cooking the bus to stuffiness and sticky vinyl seats, dressed in holy uniform like all the other Christian-school girls, suddenly carsick and sweltering in my polyester jumper, white knee socks, and Buster Brown shoes, I vowed I’d never have a baby, never let one grow inside my belly, and never push one out that hole.

      “HOW WAS SCHOOL?” my mother asked. I set my orange Muppets lunch kit on the counter, opened it, took out the balled-up waxed paper, and chucked it in the trash.

      “Fine.” I said. “How was I born?”

      “How were you born?” My mother paused at the kitchen sink, her hands still dunked in the suds. “What do you mean, ‘how were you born’?”

      “How did it happen?” I wanted to hear her side of the story, her version of events.

      “Well,” she said. “I guess I went to the hospital. Your aunt Carol dropped me off. And then—well, then you were born.”

      I waited for more details, but she gave up nothing.

      “That’s it?” I said. “I was just born?”

      “Then Dad drove back from bush camp and came to the hospital.”

      This part of the story I knew well. My dad told it often, especially in the presence of dinner guests and at family gatherings.

      “I looked through the window where all the babies were sleeping,” he’d say, “and I said to the nurse, ‘That one can’t be mine! She’s the ugliest one in the nursery!’” And then he’d laugh and laugh, and an uncle would say, “Is that right, Zusa?”—a play on my middle name, Sue, and the Low German word for sugar.

      In the living room, I sat on the rug in front of the bookcase, pulled out the photo album with the red and black velvety flowers—my album—and opened to the first page of pictures. Me, pink-faced, fat, hairless, swaddled in a white blanket and lying on a pillow next to a vase of red carnations.

      My mother stood over me. “Your father sent those flowers.”

      In the next photograph, he sat on a dining room chair and held me on his lap, a box of Corn Flakes foregrounded on the table beside him, as if we were a Kellogg’s breakfast ad. More photographs of me blue-eyed and bald, smiling into space, chewing on a pink stuffed cat, grabbing at my brother’s face. But no further clues as to the birth. No pictures of my mother clutching her swollen stomach. None of her grimacing on a hospital bed. No toilet. Nothing to confirm or deny Tasha’s story.

      My mother sat down on the couch and turned on the TV for the last half of The Young and the Restless. “What are you looking for?” she said.

      In cartoons, a flapping stork dropped its bundle on a doorstep, through a bedroom window, or right into a crib—a fairy-tale joke, I understood, but why the secrecy, and why the lowered voices at the edge of the kitchen where all the pregnant aunts clustered together whenever the family gathered? They rubbed their bellies, fat with the knowledge of how we all arrived.

      Where I came from began with that first damp patch of Genesis earth, God scooping and sculpting that dirt to make a creature, then blowing his breath into it to turn it human. But that origin was bound to another story that had bloomed in my mind, one of babies floating around in Heaven like balloons without strings, waiting to be born. All it took was a husband and a wife to say, “We’re having a baby,” and somehow—and this had been the mystery until now—somehow, God plucked a floating baby from the air and fired it down through the clouds, the way we chucked stuffed animals down Grandma’s laundry chute. Out the baby came, into the arms of its mother, but first, the pushing. Oh, the pushing.

      “Did you have to—” the words stuck. “Push me out?”

      My mother cough-sniffed, muted the TV, and looked over at me and the open album. “Push you out?” A series of other noises sputtered forth—pffft, chk, uhf—and finally, “Well, yes, I—I guess I did—push you out. And then you were born. Do you want some cookies and a glass of milk?”

      NO PHOTO SHOWED her pregnant. In one, she stood in a white dress at the front of Gospel Chapel, clutching a bouquet of roses, her long brown hair beneath a gauzy veil, my dad beside her in his skinny black suit and thick black-rimmed glasses, his thinning hair slicked back, ducktailed. When I flipped the page, she stood next to him again, this time in a purple flowered dress, my brother balanced between them on the shiny chrome bumper of my dad’s new logging