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father had been cheerful about medical facts, sometimes inappropriately so. When a foundry exploded in Emeryville, my father removed sixty-four steel fragments from the abdominal cavity of the plant foreman. When I asked, my father made his wry smile and said that of course his patient lived. But the foreman died a few months later, in a car accident. This was life to my father, triumph and disaster decorated with the Christmas-tree ornaments of a surgeon’s self-esteem.
    When blood is exposed to air it changes into a gel. Calcium and blood proteins, aided by adrenalin, change from water to clay. Look at all those, my father would say, scooting off the metal chair, away from the microscope so I could see the metropolis of flying saucers, red blood cells.
    â€œWhat we need are next of kin,” said a voice, a cop, a man I knew.
    He gave me a few seconds but I could not think.
    â€œParents, siblings,” he prompted.
    â€œPennant,” I said. I had never considered what a jaunty name it was. Her surname sounded disembodied, the entire conversation having the rude crispness of a search warrant, the residence and curtilage of Rebecca Mary Pennant , her womb, her flesh. Some of the semen was mine, I wanted to say. Some of it was my own act of love still living inside her.
    Her brother looked nothing like her, short, slender, much younger. Her parents were compact, weathered people in well-pressed, simple clothes, graceful as she was—as she had been. They wore glasses. All three of them. I could not help noticing this, or noticing the way her brother did not meet my eyes while her mother took both my hands.
    â€œThank you so much for everything,” said her mother. “She used to say she had a new friend.” I recognized the giddy emotional state, a woman not knowing how to behave now that so much of her life was gone.
    â€œDon’t go in,” I said. I turned to her brother. “You should go in first.” Go in first and make sure they have covered her, make sure they have washed away some of the blood . He wore glasses that were ardently unstylish, owlish, round.
    â€œYes, Simon, you go in,” Rebecca’s mother was saying.
    Simon looked up at me and I could see how much he resembled her after all, the way he was considering before he said anything, the way he saw something in me I was not aware of myself, some reason to trust me.
    Her father had a small gray mustache. “What do you know?” he asked. “Tell us.”
    I couldn’t tell him.
    â€œI want to hear what happened, Richard. I want an explanation.” He had a slight Scottish accent, and seemed both brisk and badly shaken.
    He was ready to blame me, if only because I was the messenger. Neither parent really understood. Her father was abruptly inquisitive, her mother sweetly vague. But neither of them could accept what was happening. And maybe they were right. Maybe the force of disbelief would work a miracle.
    I turned to her brother and put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go in with you,” I said.
    Afterward we came out into the corridor again. Simon put his arms around his mother, not saying anything. She whispered something and he nodded, and I could not bear to see the expression in her eyes. Her father stood apart, a wiry man leaning into a breeze, but there was no wind in the corridor, only what was happening.
    â€œI’m all right,” I said.
    â€œBut I still take you all the way down,” the orderly said. He was a tall, stout man, shaved perfectly bald, his tobacco-brown skin glistening. At six feet and one-hundred and eighty plus I was hardly a weakling, but he looked down at me with an air of self-assurance.
    â€œIt’s okay,” I said.
    He pointed at the wheelchair. This was not a casual contest of preferences. How many centuries of hospital lore had led up to this policy—they can fall and break their heads open in the parking lot, but not in