First, I was born. People from all around rushed to see, and as always, they expected everything from me: I took on the hardest part of the job, and my mother remained, let's just say, uninvolved.

Any other day, they would have seen her outside, on the veranda of the prefab house, the good neighbors who always keep an eye out, having absorbed misfortune along with their mother's milk. In the heatwaves of the late summer and autumn, glancing towards the mountain, they always saw her there, a blonde little girl smoking her Pall Malls hanging on the railing, like a captain on her ship that perhaps had now come the time to sink. We're talking about an eighteen-year-old girl, completely alone and as pregnant as can be. The day she didn't show up, the lot fell to Nance Peggot to go knock on her door, rush inside and find her unconscious on the bathroom floor with trash everywhere and me already emerging.

A slippery captive, bluish like a fish, gathering sand from the plastic tile, crawling like a worm, pushing forward, because I am still inside the sack where babies swim, in their pre-real life. Mr. Peggot was outside, with his truck idling. He was going to vespers, and perhaps he was thinking about how much of his life he had wasted waiting for women. His wife must have told him that his crossing himself could wait a minute, first he had to see if the pregnant girl next door had passed out again.

Mrs. Peggot is a woman who doesn't back down in tough times, and if necessary, she could even order Jesus Christ to hide in the corner and not make a sound. She jumped out shouting at him to call 911, a poor baby in the bathroom was fighting with punches and fists to get out of the sack. Like a little bruised boxer. These are the words she would later use, without any shame in mentioning the worst day of my mother's life.