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blind, you know, more than half the time. Brain-damaged. And sometimes they just die no matter what. But if they live, it’s no kind of life.”
    “So that’s good, then, for your case.”
    “We have to prove it, though. It’s very tough to prove whether a baby was alive when it was born.”
    “Can’t an autopsy look for oxygen in her lungs, something?” This was something we never discussed in medical school.
    “They could still get her for mutilating a corpse.”
    I nodded. “Sure.” Mutilating a corpse.
    “She could get eighteen months just for that.”
    “Well, that’s … better than the alternative.”
    Look, I’d been in the restrooms in the Round Hill Municipal Library. Mint-colored tiles rimmed with black. Old-fashioned pedestal sinks. Lots of mirrors. So I couldn’t help thinking, the stalls — did she use the handicapped stall? — even so, it would have been no larger than a walk-in closet. She probably birthed crouching over the toilet. And then she took the nearest heavy object (or had she come prepared? a hammer? her little brother’s baseball bat?) and cracked in thewailing newborn’s skull. Took it to the Dumpster behind the library. She used a sweatshirt to clean up the blood from the bathroom floor; the sweatshirt was now official property of the state. And although I didn’t want to think about it, I couldn’t stop myself: Where was the baby when she cleaned up the blood? On the floor? In a sink? Was the skull cracked yet? Was it alive? Crying? Twenty-five weeks: The baby was blind, almost certainly in respiratory distress. Lying on a bathroom floor. Its skull as thin as parchment.
    “What are you thinking?” Joe, my oldest friend, asked me.
    “Nothing.” I forked tasteless, ridiculous food into my mouth. I wondered if he’d ever asked her: Was the child alive? I wondered what she’d said, if she’d even known.
    Laura was bleeding profusely: uterine atony, postpartum hemorrhage. She must have been terrified, but she had her wits about her enough to take a cab to the hospital. The cab driver was going to testify for the state that the girl seemed calm, reasonable. The only thing out of the ordinary was the blood. He didn’t ask questions, and Laura didn’t tell anyone the baby’s whereabouts until the next morning. The police waited until the Ativan wore off and the family’s lawyers arrived.
    “We buried her in Iris’s family plot,” Joe said. “Next to Iris’s mother.”
    I swallowed.
    “We had Rabbi Ross come, give a blessing. Iris and I went by ourselves. Laura didn’t want to come. That was fine. My mother stayed with her. Rabbi Ross came out, said a few words. Maybe we’ll put up a headstone some day. I don’t know.”
    “Well,” I said, while secretly I was thinking, But won’t they need the body for evidence? I was thinking, Is that even legal? To bury the victim before the verdict? But isn’t the baby in New Jersey’s protection now? What I knew about the law you could fit in a teaspoon.
    Lying in the sink of the Round Hill Municipal Library. Waiting for its skull to be crushed in like a can.
    “We gave her a name.”
    I blinked stupidly.
    “The rabbi asked if we wanted to. I didn’t know what to say, but Iris said yes, we did. She said it was the right thing to do.”
    He was whispering again, in that fluorescent-lit diner. Our big-bosomed waitress dipped by with her coffeepot, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap crooned on someone else’s jukebox, eggs cooled in front of us, New Jersey rush hour traffic whizzed outside. But in our booth, all was still.
    “We couldn’t let her go to heaven as Baby Girl Stern,” Joe whispered. “We just couldn’t let that happen. She needed a name. Iris was right.”
    “Heaven, Joe?”
    “We named her Sara,” he said. “That was Iris’s mother’s name.”
    “Well,” I said. “Well, that’s a nice name.”
    Although I desperately wanted to, I couldn’t look away, so I watched a tear leak from his eyes and