Seven Minutes to Noon

hot as deep summer.
    Divers. Alice felt her stomach rumble, an onslaught of nausea threatening to force itself up.
    Finally, in the distance, the water eddied and the back of a dark dry suit emerged. About five feet farther out, a second diver’s head surfaced. Facing each other, the swimmers appeared to be synchronizing their efforts toward the bank of the canal. Alice watched them move slowly against the weight of the water, goggles fogged over, breathing apparatus strapped to their backs. Then, with a surge against gravity, she appeared.
    Lauren was bloated and her skin was mottled gray and blue. Her eyes were open, filmed with algae. Her long brown hair had been chopped off. Her face looked plastic, masklike, strangely serene. A riotously colorful tent of a maternity sundress clung to her stalklike body. Her belly appeared to have reversed itself; instead of pregnant, her middle looked scooped out, emptied.
    The divers dragged Lauren onto the craggy incline that served as shore. When they shifted her body to keep her from buckling into the canal, Alice saw the back of her head. It was crushed. Two officers hustled over and covered her with a bright yellow plastic tarp.
    Alice collapsed forward at the waist, falling to her knees. The palms of her hands caught the concrete and she held herself up on shaky arms. The sour smell of her own vomit hit her in waves. Weeping, Maggie knelt beside Alice, holding her hair out of her face.
    Finally Alice collected herself, drawing a breath of the fetid air. She knew Maggie had to be thinking the same thing.
    Alice summoned her voice and said it first: “Where is the baby?”

Chapter 9
    The effort to dredge the canal and find the baby became furious in the hours to follow. Dental records confirmed the body to be Lauren’s. The media latched on to the possibility that Lauren’s baby — it — might have been spontaneously borne of the underwater phenomenon known as coffin birth.
    It. Ivy was not an it.
    Last spring, Alice had bought two tiny dresses, one with a matching bonnet. They were Ivy’s dresses and Alice would hold them for her, for when she was found. Lauren’s death was confirmed, but Ivy could still be out there somewhere, alive.
    The canal was an enclosed water system with a grate at the ocean end. Nothing as big as a full-term baby could possibly get through. If the baby was there, they would find her.
    Alice learned many things that awful Monday, three days after Lauren disappeared. The day her wrecked body was found. She learned about the steep incline of grief. She learned how to stay alive in a state of half consciousness, barely breathing. And she learned that loss, violent loss, was merciless. Merciless and hungry, devouring hope and future and love in a single gulp.
    Simon had heard the news around the neighborhood and hurried over to the canal to bring Alice and Maggie to his house. Mike was summoned home from his workshop. The store was closed. All the children were putunder Sylvie’s care at Maggie’s apartment while the adults gathered at Simon’s and prepared themselves to visit Tim and Austin, whose teacher had personally brought him home.
    The men silently bolstered the women as they walked numbly through the neighborhood to Lauren and Tim’s building. Alice felt deeply, wrongly contradicted by Lauren’s death, herself obliterated, floating through an everyday world she had no right to inhabit as if things were normal. Through her numb heart she felt exploding droplets of poison anger. She wished she could fly backward through time to just that morning, when she was firm in her refusal to believe the worst. She wished she could turn to Mike and tell him, You were right. There was no reason to worry. If anyone tried to make her accept this new truth, she would shut her eyes. Tell them no. She would not embrace this thing she had seen for herself. There would have to be two worlds, two truths. Before and after. The problem was right now.
    Alice had no idea what time it was when they got to Tim’s. There was daylight. Warm summery air. He met them at the door himself, pale and automatic. Let them in without speaking. He exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath waiting for them, and allowed each friend to hug him in turn.
    Gina — Austin and Peter’s teacher — was sitting on Lauren’s favorite antique wingback chair. The purple one in which she used to read. Austin was sprawled on the floor playing with his blocks, building them