Kaylee's Ghost

fingers. “Lying on the floor like that, you look homeless. I’ll get you as soon as I hear anything.”

Miriam took his hand and let him pull her up. “Ow,” she said. One of her long red curls, now threaded with white, had managed to wind its way around a button of her raincoat. Rory unwound it and pulled her to her feet. Her knees creaked.

She took her rumpled raincoat and went upstairs. There was the couch Rory had told her about, just waiting for her. She felt a pang for abandoning her clients, especially her weekly one, Kaylee, who Miriam could sense was filling up her voicemail with urgent messages to get right back to her, even though it was the middle of the night. But Miriam was too immersed in Cara’s labor and too exhausted to do one thing about it.

She lay down on the couch, too antsy to fall asleep. The waiting room was clean, but she felt like vacuuming the carpet, dusting the end tables. Was she getting the nesting instinct? A volcano of sympathetic labor erupted in her lower back. She had had back labor with Cara. Before three weeks ago, when Cara should have given birth, Miriam had worried about whether her granddaughter would be psychic. Her own mother had worried about the same thing when she was born. Her mother hadn’t wanted a daughter who was a “babushka lady” from the Dark Ages like her father’s mother.

When Miriam was pregnant with Cara, her mother had told her that Bubbie had predicted Miriam would be born with a caul. Miriam’s mother had been scared it was a disease.

“A caul,” Bubbie had explained, “happens when the water sac doesn’t break and you see the baby’s head right through it.”

“See, I was right,” Bubbie had said after Miriam was born. “My granddaughter