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decide on doctors right now, Becky. I’ll probably miscarry anyway.”
    “Well, isn’t that all the more reason to be under the care of one?” she asked.
    She was probably right. But at that moment, it just didn’t motivate me.
    “I won’t wait too long, Beck. I promise.”
    “I’m going to keep you to that,” she said. “You sound tired. I’ll hang up and let you get to bed.”
    I suddenly needed reassurance from another woman—someone I trusted to give me a straight answer—that I wasn’t being a fool.
    “Becky, if you were me... if this were happening to you, what would you do?”
    She was quiet for a moment.
    “All day long I’ve been asking myself that very question, Claire,” she finally said. “I know what I’d like to think I would do. I’d like to think I would be as brave as you.”
    “I’m not so brave,” I said. “I’m counting on a miscarriage.”
    “Yes, you are brave, Claire,” she said emphatically. “Because you know you may not have a miscarriage. I know you know it. That’s why you asked me what I would do. It takes tremendous courage to do what you believe is right when you know many others would choose to do something different.”
    “Then why do I feel foolish?” I said, in not much more than a whisper.
    “Maybe it’s not foolishness you feel. Maybe you just feel alone,” she said. “But you’re not alone. You do know that, don’t you?”
    At that moment, my two messages from God, in spite of the thirty-four years between them, merged in a way difficult to describe.
    The day my dad died, God had somehow communicated to me that he didn’t want me to be afraid. On this October morning three decades later, he had told me the same thing. The first message, which I cannot remember in words but rather in sensation, traveled through time to the moment I was on the phone with Becky, and the second one, the one I had been given that same morning, touched it. And together they folded me into their embrace:
    I was not alone, and I did not need to fear the future.

 
    7
     
    When I was still a child, I used to imagine that my father had not been killed in a war in Korea, but that he had just gotten lost there. I had a hard time imagining the place where he had been, and I actually had a hard time remembering him. I could not picture him or his surroundings in any colors except black and white. In fact, I could only picture him one way: immobile and in shades of gray, like the photograph of him. I had on my dresser.
    I would mentally place him on a dusty road along a river’s edge, looking for his way home. His black and white body, face frozen in a careful grin, moved along the path in my mind like I moved my dolls across the floor of my room. Sometimes I pictured him stopping to rest or ask for directions. I often imagined him kissing me good night, bending over my bed with his black and white face. Even now I can only see my dad’s face in black and white.
    I really only remember snatches of the day my father died, mere snapshots. I remember the morning I woke up with heavenly whispers in my ear. I remember Matt in his highchair, eating little rectangles of buttered toast; I can recall the picture window in our living room, the black car pulling into our driveway, and the man who looked like my dad but wasn’t my dad and who carried no duffel bag. I don’t remember our move from Los Angeles to Minnesota the week after my father’s funeral.
    My next memories are of kindergarten in a Saint Cloud classroom, a broken wrist when I was six, and my lingering daydream that Daddy was lost somewhere in Korea.
    Later I would learn that my dad had died just weeks before the war ended. This would explain much about why it took my mother so long to get over his death. It seemed so terribly unfair. Another few weeks and he would have been on his way home. And she was deeply in love with him. It would be nearly fourteen years before she would even look at another man.
    My father died