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and toppled in the john—the band members used the john like a bucket. The rats fled the basement and along came the mice with their paper scraps and hair they found and cobs of corn and chicken bones and they lived in the walls at Mickey and Bird’s and in the dumbwaiter shaft. When the band played, a veil of paint flickered down from the walls.
    Water streamed down the walls and from the ceiling when the up-neighbors filled their tub. The pipes leaked; the joists softened with rot. The voodoo drummer lived upstairs now and pulled his pod in the tub. They heard him grinding on his ass while the tub drained out, his baby in the kitchen, whimpering. He named her Precious—who had been squeezed out into life in that tub.
    The mother cut the cord and swaddled the baby and left it in the kitchen sink. She had a bag already packed. She pushed through the door, tripped on the stoop, drove the shorn end of a railing pipe hard into her brain.
    A clean bargain, a swap. No one spoke of it.
    At last the days, grown cold, grew colder still. The band members cast down their instruments and went elsewhere to keep warm.
    Good thinking, Bird thought. Move along.
    But Bird and Mickey stayed put and watched the leaden skies of winter spit the first hard knots of snow.
    When the shorn-off curls of the Hasidim boys came blowing down the street, Bird picked one out to ransom. A rat came to them, hissing, dragging the trap that had snapped on its haunches.
    These were signs, Bird knew, legible enough, if a person meant to read them.
    â€œWe should go,” Bird ventured, but they didn’t. To go would mean something was over—that first bright febrile feeling.
    Bird wrote a letter to her mother, and addressed it to her father, and stood in line at the post office to buy a tropical stamp. A man in his hat stood behind her, a stone in robes, a band of fur, his child in the carriage asleep. Bird was dressed in a breezy skirt. She dressed for the way the day had looked when she looked out through the window. She dressed for sun, for girls with chapping midriffs, for boys with no socks and shaved heads.
    The man in his robes stood behind her, with his wife in her wig behind him, with next his sickly girls. His cane was polished. He used it to bring Bird’s skirt up, thrust it between her legs. He tapped her once, tamped at her.
    â€œDirty goy,” he whispered.
    Dirty, dirty Jew.
    Bird bought a pregnancy test on her way home. She would bathe when she got home and wake Mickey. She would run a bath scalding hot and listen for birds in the airshaft—creaking dullards that stayed behind when all the singing pretties flew south. He would feed her cantaloupe in the bathtub how he used to. And she would tell him. She would show him the stick she had peed on—the watery bands of blue.
    Part way home, Bird broke into a run and ran past their stoop and around the block—once, and twice again. She was limber then, her blood moving. She would kiss Mickey awake and tell him everything she knew.
    But he was gone. For days he was gone, no note that said where.
    The note in the kitchen said: Let me when I come home to you slowly unbraid your hair. Please please please please.
    And in the bedroom: Please please please maybe marry me.
    Bird sat on the bed waiting, the pregnancy stick in his coffee cup by the bedside for him to find. If an ambulance passed, she pedaled after it to be sure it wasn’t him.
    It wasn’t him.
    A week passed, two. It wasn’t him.
    And then it was.
    Contusions, concussion—they called Bird to come to the ER. Mickey had stepped onto an elevator that wasn’t there and fallen three floors down the airshaft. He was sobbing when she got there: the doctors had opened him up, he swore, and found nothing but sticks and leaves.
    â€œYou’ll be fine,” Bird said. “It’s all fine, you’ll see. We could marry. I will never use your comb.”
    â€œWe could what?”