The Lowland

physically; waking up from the dream, in the apartment in which they were living both together and separately, he could no longer deny that he’d inherited that also.
    3.
    As summer approached she began spending more time at the library, which was air-conditioned. A place where she was expected to be anonymous and industrious, concentrating on the pages before her, nothing more.
    At her side was a long rectangular window, from floor to ceiling, looking out at the campus. Sunlight streamed in over treetops that had turned green and lush in a matter of weeks. From her desk she could see the surrounding woods and fields. The quadrangle was demarcated now by lengths of white rope, where folding white chairs were being arranged in rows for the commencement ceremony.
    By June there was no one. After classes finished and the undergraduates vanished, hardly a sound. Only the melodic chime of the campus clock in its stone tower, reminding her that another hour had passed. In the library, the squeaking rubber wheels of a wooden cart, stopping here and there so that an absent book could be returned to its place.
    Often she had a whole floor of the library to herself. The atmosphere, in its order and cleanliness, was like that of a hospital, only benign. The stairwell rose through the center of the building. The shallow steps, coated with rubber, easy to climb, seemed disconnected from one another, leading all the way to the top.
    She sat close to the philosophy section, browsing randomly in the stacks, reading Hobbes, Hannah Arendt, taking notes, always returning the books to the spots where they belonged. She was steadied by the quiet buzz of the lights, the fluorescent panels above her like giant versions of the ice cube trays in the freezer. Hemmed in from the waist up by the three sides of the carrel, facing the blank white enclosure, the hard wood of the chair pressing into the small of her back. The baby nestled inside her, providing company but also leaving her be.
    By July, within minutes of stepping outside, for the brief walk back to the apartment, she was coated in sweat, feeling it traveling down the center of her back. The air was heavy with humidity, the sky sometimes threatening but refusing to release rain. The purity of the heat seeming to silence other sounds.
    She had grown up in such weather. But here, where just months ago it was cold enough for her to see her breath when she walked outside, it came as a shock, as something almost unnatural.
    Because the semester had ended, certain campus buildings, certain dormitories and administrative offices, were closed. Often she was able to walk through campus, from the library back to the apartment, and not cross paths with anyone. As if a strike were in effect, or a curfew in place. She heard the mechanical shriek of the locusts that lived in the trees. Their rising sound was like an intermittent siren, the only element of distress in that otherwise uneventful place.
    The contractions began in the library, three days before Dr. Flynn had predicted. A pressure between her legs, the baby’s head like a ball of lead suddenly ten times its weight. She returned to the apartment and packed her bag. Then she waited for Subhash, knowing he would be home soon enough.
    The cramps caused her to double over, clutching the towel bar in the bathroom so that it threatened to loosen from the wall. He put his arm around her when he came, escorting her to the car, standing with her when she was forced to stop because of a contraction, allowing her to clamp her hand around his wrist.
    Grasping the dashboard, as if to push it away; this was the only way she could bear the ride to the hospital, her body threatening to split apart unless she held herself in that position.
    Now the sky released a hot pouring summer rain. It forced Subhash to slow down, unable to see more than a few feet in front of him through the window, in spite of the windshield wipers pumping back and forth. She imagined the car spinning out of control, skidding into the opposite lane of oncoming cars.
    She remembered the fog on the way to the airport, the night she was leaving Calcutta. That night she had been desperate to move through it, to get out. Now, in spite of the pain, in spite of the urgency, part of her wanted the car to stop. Part of her wanted the pregnancy simply to continue, for the pain to subside but for the baby not to be born. To delay, if only for a little longer, its arrival.
    But