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bright red lips—her mother pulled Trudi onto her knees.
    “Wouldn’t you like a real baby, a little brother or sister?” she asked, beaming as if she were already seeing a child who was perfect.
    “No,” Trudi said.
    “A baby brother or sister who—”
    “No!”
    “Gertrud—” Trudi’s father started.
    “Storks adore sugar.” Her mother’s voice was joyful. “And they bring babies to houses where people leave sugar cubes for them on the windowsill. That’s how the storks know where to take the babies.”
    Trudi dug her chin into her collarbone, wondering if storks ever made mistakes. Like with her. Slipping from her mother’s knees, she ran past the stand with the potted ferns and the stuffed squirrel to the front door of the house. Her forehead against the cold glass panel, she stared into the fine whirls of snow. In the middle of the street stood the man-who-touches-his-heart. He raised his right index finger to his heart, his left index finger to his nose, and touched both at the same instant. Smiling as if satisfied that he’d accomplished that, he dropped his hands and raised them again, reversing the ritual: left to his nose, right to his heart. Before the war he used to be a biology teacher, but being a soldier had turned something within him. It was said that the man-who-touches-his-heart had seen his whole battalion die. Now he lived with various relatives, staying with one for a while before being sent on to the next.
    But what if you had no relatives? Trudi shivered. Maybe the stork had been on his way to drop her off in a country where everyone had short arms and legs. Maybe she’d been brought by a cuckoo instead of a stork. Cuckoos left their eggs in the nests of other birds, letting them do all the work of sitting on the eggs. But when the young cuckoos broke through the shells, they were pushed from the nest. So far, her parents had kept her, even if she was the wrong baby. But what would happen if the stork brought them the right baby?
    She felt her father’s hand on her hair. “You haven’t opened all your presents, Trudi.”
    When he carried her back into the living room, her mother was winding a red ribbon around and around her wrist. She laughed when she saw Trudi, and as she held out her arms for her, the ribbon sprang free and coiled at her feet like a blood-covered snake. That night, her mother did not talk about the baby again. She helped Trudi to fit together her new building-block puzzle. Each side of a block had a picture fragment of a fairy tale, and when you set them all on a flat surface and matched them, you could make six pictures, including
Hansel und Gretel, Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge, Rumpelstilzchen
, and
Dornröschen
, who’d slept a hundred years.
    Her mother played
“Stille Nacht”
on the upright piano and Trudi sang along. Whenever her voice merged with her mother’s in one of the long notes, her body felt measureless and warm. But when her parents kissed her good night in her room and settled a wrapped warm water bottle by her feet, they laid the stiff baby doll next to her. After the house became silent and dark, Trudi pushed the doll under her bed, but she could sense the presence of its porcelain body through her mattress. The following evening, her mother folded Trudi’s fingers around two sugar cubes and lifted her to the wide windowsill in the kitchen, where she made her lay the sugar on a saucer for the stork.
    As soon as she woke up the next morning, Trudi rushed to the window. Though it was closed, the saucer was empty. She pulled aside the lace curtain, but the only animal outside was the baker’s dog, who kept barking at the clothesline behind the house, where the frost had turned the laundry into stiff people shapes.
    “The stork must have been here,” her mother sang, a flush to her cheeks.
    Her father glanced up from his newspaper, his face grave.
    Trudi could tell he didn’t want the new baby either. But if they kept leaving