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not begun to crawl. Though she could wiggle herself to an edge if she wanted to.
    I put on my coat, my scarf, and my gloves, made sure I had my keys, and went out into the night, closing the door behind me. The cold was motionless—it hurt just to breathe. The lurid green neon script that had read
Gateway
earlier in the evening had been turned off. I had no idea what time it was. I didn't have a watch with me. I walked to the edge of the parking lot, crossed the road, and went into the woods. Only by starlight and a stingy sliver of moon could I keep my eye on the door to the motel room.
    I touched the prickly needles of a nearly invisible pine tree. Already the cold had begun to seep into my boots. I thought I could smell, on the thin air, the ocean, or the scent of salt flats at low tide. Far off I could hear the cry of a gull or an animal, something inhuman.
    My insides felt hollow. I was still hungry despite the coffee cake. When I looked at the motel, the baby seemed far away. The distance caught me by surprise, as if I had just discovered that the boat I was on was moving away from the dock. I saw an angry, rigid face, a woman hitting the wall with her back, her arms outstretched to protect her head. I heard a baby cry and was momentarily confused: Was the cry coming from the motel room or the waking dream?
    I remembered then a woman I had been in labor with when Caroline was coming. She had occupied the cubicle next to mine on the labor-and-delivery floor, and I hadn't seen her face, but I had never forgotten the sound that had come from her room. It was an otherworldly sound, heard through the wall, like that of an animal afraid for its life, and if I hadn't known that this cry, this howling, had to come from a woman, I would not have been able to identify the sound as belonging either to a male or to a female. The cries grew deeper and louder, and seemed to rock the woman from side to side. The nurses on the labor floor were quiet. Even the other women, in their own cubicles, who had been moaning with their own pains, became silent out of fear and respect for the sound. The woman's doctor, who sounded frightened himself, tried to bring his patient back to reason by calling her name in sharp, angry bursts, but you could tell his presence was nothing to her, less than nothing. I heard the howling and began to shiver. I wanted to talk about the woman, but no one would discuss her with me, as if the howling were too personal to be shared with strangers.
    Yet it was pain, pure pain, and nothing more. And it was, I thought then, a useful measure against all future pain, a standard against which I would always be able to quantify my own, even though I knew I would not be able to howl with the freedom of the woman I heard that night. I never saw the woman, but I knew I would never forget her face as I had imagined it to be.
    I stomped my feet in the snow and pulled my coat tightly around me. It is possible I heard, on the edge of the silence, the ceaseless ebb and flow of the ocean against a rocky shoreline. I looked across at the motel and pictured my baby sleeping behind the pine-paneled wall.

    I have been wondering—you won't mind my asking you this?—are you the sort of writer who changes the quotes? In the early days, when we used to talk, Harrold and I would debate this question endlessly. I was, I suppose, more literal-minded than he was. I thought one ought to report what a person had said, exactly as the person had said it, even if the words were awkward, or had no rhythm, or didn't fit, or didn't precisely say what you knew the person actually meant. But Harrold, who was more used to entitlement than myself, believed in license. He would find the nuggets in a transcript or a file, and keep these kernels, but would embroider the rest, so that his quotes, and thus his stories, would have insight, wit, momentum, even brilliance. Yes, especially brilliance, like rough-cut stones made into polished gems. And