When the nurse tells her what it was the thing like a ping growing, filling the space completely, the tiny circle turning blue in a doctor's waiting room and her friend's by now ex waiting wondering with a ring and an address in his pocket which one it would be, when she tells her what it was Laura cannot decide and so waits too long than is good. It's too late now, her friend his ex says in flat American, it's done with you can have him and bon voyage. Laura got a diploma by mail and marriage by court and afterwards her mother and father give her a party in the hall by the new pool with drinks served by new black men in white coats, guests looking to see if she showed but smiling when they spoke. Her mother who knew her said in private she had let it, she lived with her eyes closed, it was bound, she said, to come.

It began coming at last after months and two extra weeks of waiting and Laura shuts her eyes and watches it come. The way down is small and dark and no help from the doctors' voices -- come on now they tell her go on -- and Laura can see it making its way down blind, come on now, go on, her legs a triangle, her husband with the hairy back and arms outstretched like a priest behind the doctor making the base, and Jesus that noise, it is her own noise; she opens her eyes and looks down to the mirror held up to the triangle her legs and in between where they have shaved she sees the liquid and the head. She can hardly tell what it is now that it is out in the light. It is coming out of the triangle and she hardly knows what it was she is looking at, so used to the dark blind passage of this it that so completely fills the space. The face when she sees it in the mirror is not young. She did not think she would see such a face.

-- Baby! the husband with the hairy back says, his arms outstretched in blessing or in fear that it would fall to the hard floor below.

-- Can't stop now, the doctor says.

The face when she sees it and when she sees what it is is not a young face, not a face that knows nothing. Not a face like her brother's which was --God! -- what she had feared all those months, her brother whom she should not lead by the hand to teach him some independence her father now says.