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lullaby had the kind of tune everyone thinks they’ve heard before but can’t remember where. A tune like that floats in the air all the time and now and then you catch it.
    “You like the tune, baby?” Jacinta kissed Wayne’s nose. He looked at her and trusted her with his black eyes that were changing into another colour. “Nothing about you is the way it’s going to be,” Jacinta told him. “Nothing about you will stay the same.” The nurse came out the exit Jacinta had found. She was short, with black hair, around thirty. She stepped over the mud and snow seams and thistles in her white shoes pricked with a hundred breathing holes.
    “Are you all right?”
    Jacinta looked only at her baby.
    “I’m Tana. Are you here for her three-month needle?”
    “No.”
    “Are you okay? Do you want me to take her? Do you want to come in for a cup of coffee while we get her signed in?”
    Jacinta got up and walked with Tana away from the chain-link fence, away from the land that had nothing on it but weeds and stones and drainage pipes. It was not beautiful, but it had space and an undefined air. Everyone was trying to define everything so carefully, Jacinta felt; they wanted to annihilate all questions. As they got close to the door she felt the walls of the hospital lean forward and close in, and she stopped.
    “What are you here for today?” Tana asked. She sounded as if she had to come out onto this waste ground every day and round up bolting mothers. “What’s your name? Which doctor do you have to see?”
    “Dr. Simon Ho.”
    “The surgeon?”
    Jacinta stood on a little pile of rubble and thistles, and Tana put an arm around her. “Do you want me to come with you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I can come.”
    “Okay.”
    Jacinta let Tana bring her along a hallway that had blue footprints leading north and yellow ones facing south. They went through the X-ray section and down a warren of narrow corridors where ancient women and men lay with no one attending them, their toothless mouths open, then through an orange door where there were colours again and a smell of coffee and toast, and brightly lit information desks.
    “What’s your last name?” Tana asked, as if she and Jacinta shared a confidence against the world.
    “Blake.”
    “Wait here and I’ll go see you won’t have to wait in the waiting room.” Tana went behind the information desk and spoke to the woman working there, who lifted her glasses and looked across the lobby at Jacinta. Tana flipped through file cards, picked up a phone and spoke for a few seconds, then came back out of the booth, brought Jacinta to the cafeteria and bought her a coffee, then showed her into a small waiting room with armchairs in it. “I can go,” she said, “or I can wait here with you. Would you like me to wait here with you?” Jacinta looked at the square green stone in Tana’s ring. It was a dull stone. Jacinta liked this better than a stone that glittered.
    “Dr. Ho has you booked for ten thirty,” Tana said. “The good thing about him is that he does only three surgeries a day, one in the morning and two in the afternoon, so you never have to wait.”
    Jacinta looked at a
Pediatrics Today
magazine lying on a table. On its cover was a photograph of a baby with tubes coming out of its nose, arms, and head. Why did hospitals think people coming in with their babies wanted to look at magazines like that? A tiny television hung tilted on a metal arm near the ceiling, and a newscaster proclaimed that forty-seven Chinese coal miners had been suffocated in an explosion earlier in the day. There was footage of their families screaming and banging at the gate of the mine, which officials had locked for their own protection. The wall under the television had a dent in it, and Jacinta wondered if someone had kicked it. A door opened that she had not noticed and a nurse in gelatinous lipstick called, “Jacinta Blake?” in a voice too loud. Tana put her hand on