“Come here,” Ruth whispered. “Let me feel.”
Sarah sat on the edge of the bed. She took Ruth’s hand and put it on her belly. Right where the baby had been kicking all morning.
The baby kicked.
Ruth’s whole face lit up. She laughed. A real laugh. The first one I’d heard from her.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, he’s strong.”
“She,” Sarah said, smiling. “It’s a girl. We just found out last week.”
Ruth looked up at me. Her eyes were shining.
“A girl,” she said.
On the fourth day, the sun came out for real. The rain finally moved off to the east, and the sky was a clean, washed blue. And in the courtyard outside Room 214, on the bare branches of my grandfather’s cherry tree, little green buds had started to show.
Ruth could barely talk by then. She was sleeping most of the time. But when she was awake, she looked at that window.
