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bag she had prepared—containing diapers, a thermos bottle of warmed formula—over her shoulder, picked up the box with the baby, and entered the building. Lights of leaded glass, long unpolished, flanked the door on either side. There was an interior door with frosted glass and then a foyer, dark oak. Hot air, redolent with the scents of cooking—carrots and onions and potatoes—rushed and swirled around her. Caroline walked tentatively, floorboards creaking with every step, but no one appeared. A strip of threadbare carpet led across a wide-planked floor and into the back of the house to a waiting room with tall windows and heavy draperies. She sat on the edge of a worn velvet sofa, the box close by her side, and waited.
    The room was overheated. She unbuttoned her coat. She was still wearing her white nurse’s uniform, and when she touched her hair she realized she was still wearing her sharp white cap, too. She had risen at once when Dr. Henry called, dressing quickly and traveling out into the snowy night, and she had not stopped since. She unpinned the cap, folded it carefully, and closed her eyes. Distantly, silverware clattered and voices hummed. Above her, footsteps moved and echoed. She half dreamed of her mother, preparing a holiday meal while her father worked in the woodshop. Her childhood had been solitary, sometimes very lonely, but still she had these memories: a special quilt held close, a rug with roses beneath her feet, the weave of voices that belonged to her alone.
    Distantly, a bell rang, twice. I need you here right now, Dr. Henry had called, strain and urgency in his voice. And Caroline had hurried, fashioning that awkward bed out of pillows, holding the mask on Mrs. Henry’s face as the second twin, this little girl, slid into the world, setting something into motion.
    Into motion. Yes, it could not be contained. Even sitting here on this sofa in the stillness of this place, even waiting, Caroline was troubled by the feeling that the world was shimmering, that things would not be still. This? was the refrain in her mind. This now, after all these years?
    For Caroline Gill was thirty-one, and she had been waiting a long time for her real life to begin. Not that she had ever put it that way to herself. But she had felt since childhood that her life would not be ordinary. A moment would come—she would know it when she saw it—and everything would change. She’d dreamed of being a great pianist, but the lights of the high school stage were too different from the lights at home, and she froze in their glare. Then, in her twenties, as her friends from nursing school began to marry and have their families, Caroline too had found young men to admire, one especially, with dark hair and pale skin and a deep laugh. For a dreamy time she imagined that he—and, when he didn’t call, that someone else—would transform her life. When years passed she gradually turned her attention to her work, again without despair. She had faith in herself and her own capabilities. She was not a person who ever got halfway to a destination and paused, wondering if she’d left an iron on and if the house was burning down. She kept on working. She waited.
    She read, too, Pearl Buck’s novels first and then everything she could find about life in China and Burma and Laos. Sometimes she let the books slip from her hands and gazed dreamily out the window of her plain little apartment on the edge of town. She saw herself moving through another life, an exotic, difficult, satisfying life. Her clinic would be simple, set in a lush jungle, perhaps near the sea. It would have white walls; it would gleam like a pearl. People would line up outside, squatting beneath coconut trees as they waited. She, Caroline, would tend to them all; she would heal them. She would transform their lives and hers.
    Consumed by this vision, she had applied, in a great rush of fervor and excitement, to become a medical missionary. One brilliant