OF ALL THE things she told me about limbs and wombs and bodies, Mama did not tell me what it felt like to feel life within your own.

Within a month of the time in the graveyard, I felt it. The women in Mama’s care had always described it as a flutter, but this felt more like a determined, persistent churning. As if a current was gathering inside me. The first time I felt it was in the parlor, while Ella lectured. She had been so enamored of her own words she did not see my expression, or note when I left the room. By the end of the month, the wave was steady and predictable. I imagined the child there, as faceless as the skin of the ocean, as formless as a wave.

Emmanuel was afraid I would lose it. He was convinced that what we had wished for, for so long, could be snatched from this world. It was as if all those deaths of his childhood—his mother, his brothers—were around him again and he saw winding sheets and sorrow everywhere. He said it was now too dangerous for me to leave the house, even for church, even for the daily walk to the market.

“I can manage,” I said. “I can help you in your work.”

But he was not convinced. “It is too dangerous. You could lose it. I would not want to lose it.”

“I will be as likely to lose it in this house as I am on the streets.”

“This is the one thing I ask of you, Libertie,” he said. “I have not asked that much.”

And I thought, This is a lie. But he truly does not know it. And I thought, He really has been a kind husband to you, Libertie. He could be crueler. And I thought, again, that I was as gormless as the wave inside me if I could not make sense of any of this.

It was easier, in the end, to acquiesce. I did not think I could live in that house with everyone except for Ti Me angry with me.

“I will stay in, for now,” I said.

And he smiled and kissed the top of my head. “It’s lovely when you’re stubborn,” he said.

For the first week of my confinement, I kept my usual schedule. That is, I sat with Ella in the parlor room and the two of us pretended to work, while the other women—American and Haitian—moved in and out of the house, to Bishop Chase’s study for instruction and approval.

“Emmanuel tells me you are with child?” Ella said the first morning.

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” Ella said. “Your work is done.”

I thought we could reach a kind of peace. That, even in her madness, she would retreat in the face of this.

But Ella was cunning. She began to smother me with nostalgia. Now, alongside talk of the justice and blood she and Emmanuel had witnessed so long ago, she told me story after story of their childhood.

“When we were six, we had a pet goat who disliked me but loved Emmanuel.”

“When we were fifteen, Emmanuel learned to swim and tried to teach me, but I was a lady enough to refuse,” she said pointedly.

“When we were twenty, Emmanuel wished me to marry, but I asked him who was worthy, and he said, ‘No one.’ Just like that, my brother said, ‘No one.’ He has always understood me.”

It seemed such a lonely way to be twins, I thought, Emmanuel always faced out to a future he was sure he could dream into existence, and Ella always turned back to a past that had meaning only for her.

For relief, I sometimes sat in the stoop of the inner courtyard, watching the hens walk across the dirt, watching them eat the dust out of boredom. But even that was not free of Ella. “Emmanuel and I had pet chickens. Two of them. They were black with red speckles, and Emmanuel loved his, but he hated mine, and he tried to pluck her feathers while she was still crowing, and …”

My escape was the cooking shed itself. Ella refused to enter it. “When we were ten, Ti Me told us to never enter it,” she said.

“You are not ten anymore,” I said.

But Ella was adamant. The shed, she was not allowed to enter.

It was quiet in there. The only sound was Ti Me’s feet shuffling across the dirt and occasionally the clank of a spoon on a pot. It was hot, but when it got to be too much, I sat in the doorway and looked back at the main house. By the time I’d found the safety of the shed, my stomach and thighs had grown so much that my knees spread apart when I sat down. A rash of spots had appeared on my skin, and my underarms were always slick. I wore the same tan smock every day while Ella went about sewing me a new dress, with the waist dropped, for my final months. And still I had not heard a word from my mother.

“Have you ever been with child, Ti Me?” I said.

She sucked at her teeth, and I realized I had offended her. I felt a pang of embarrassment. I saw, in the corner of the kitchen hut, the straw pallet where Ti Me slept.

I tried again. “It feels as though my body is not my own. It feels like it belongs to whatever’s growing in there.”

Ti Me shifted a pot from one end of her worktable to the other. And then she began to tell me about the last time she had been ridden by lwa yo. It was a few weeks ago, she said, and she was so tired afterward she nearly did not make breakfast the next morning. Yon lwa who had mounted her turns her devotees into unruly children, begging everyone for sweets, curving their backs against the swats to come. Ti Me had stood in the circle and cried like a baby, crawled on her knees and stuffed her fingers into her mouth while the spirit acted through her.

“It isn’t frightening when that happens?”

Ti Me cracked a nut on the worktable. “Why would I be scared?”

“Because you have no control over yourself. You lose yourself. You lost your freedom and died in the spirit of something else.”

“Eh,” Ti Me said. “Everything born dies, no?”

Emmanuel came back to me at night, but it was no longer only to me. It was a mirror of the lessons we had learned on the boat to Haiti, except that now, instead of talking to me of flowers, he manipulated the skin of my stomach, pressing hard.

“Do you remember,” I said, “not so long ago, teaching me to swim?”

“Of course,” he said. He was watching my stomach rise and fall with my breath.

“You could touch me like that, again, if you wished.”

“The time for that is over for now,” he said.

At dinner each night, as Bishop Chase and Ella listened, he questioned what I had done with my days indoors.

“What did you eat?”

“Which cistern did you drink from?”

“How many hours did you rest?”

“Did you walk the length of the hall three times, or ten?”

“I do not think,” I said after the fourth night of this, “that your father and Ella want to hear every detail of my confinement.”

“On that we agree,” Ella said cheerfully. “I do not.”

“Ella, stop.” Emmanuel turned to me. “It is something we should be proud of. And it is their future, too.”

“It is not,” I said in a rush of anger. “It is mine.”

There was a silence while Emmanuel looked down at his plate, chastened.

“You will explain to her?” Bishop Chase was speaking to Emmanuel. Never to me.

“There’s nothing to explain,” I said.

Bishop Chase kept chewing slowly, then swallowed and took a sip from his glass. “Ti Me, a bit more please.”

“Libertie,” Emmanuel said, “I will resolve it later.”

I pushed myself back from the table as best I could and walked to the courtyard stoop, to stare at the night sky.

It was not clear if the face of the moon that looked down on me now was the same one that looked down on my mother. And in that loneliness, I felt a longing for her so violent that it made me rise up from the stoop and begin to pace.

“You know,” I heard. “Emmanuel really does love you.”

I looked up. It was Ella, standing in the light from the doorway.

“I suppose.”

“You know,” Ella said, “when we were sixteen—”

“I do not wish to hear childhood stories right now, Ella.”

“When we were sixteen,” she said, “I saw my father stick his finger in the coo coo of every serving girl up and down this street, including Ti Me. I told Emmanuel what I saw, and he said not to lie, never to lie. I told Papa what I saw, and he struck me and told me if I did not behave, I would have to stay in the house forever.

“Emmanuel said then to me what he said to you. That he would fix it with Papa. And then I knew he loved me. He told me to try very hard to forgive Papa, and he would fix it. And I did.

“Emmanuel told Papa I was sick. He told everyone I was sick. My friends have believed I was sick since we were sixteen. But he told me just to pretend. And it has been a little secret between us. I did not want you to know. You are so young, and I did not think you would understand. But you should. The world thinks you are mad … It’s the greatest freedom I’ve ever known. Emmanuel gave that to me.

“I say whatever I wish to anyone. What colored woman in this world has that? Not a one, not a one anywhere on this Earth. You felt it when you first came, no? I can sew it into a million little words. I am free to speak my mind. Emmanuel did that for me, and he’ll do it for you.

Ella held out her hand. “Because he really loves you.”