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The necklace had been a way of saying he would remember the week for a long time. Or that he wanted Jane to remember it.
    There’d been a tacit understanding, sealed with the necklace, that nobody would come out of a seriously fun and even deeply affecting week of fucking and eating and drinking fabulous wine and bombing around glaciers on Ski-Doos and putting white mud on their faces in eerie blue hot springs and dancing to live samba music in Iceland—that nobody would come out of that with anything but fond memories.
    There had certainly been an agreement that there would not be a baby or anything remotely like a baby.
    But Jane was six months pregnant. What the hell kind of thing was that to tell him on a cellphone? The little Japanese girl had pulled her candy ring out of her mouth with an audible pop . Jane Downey hung up, and like a fool John said, Hello, hello, and stared at the tiny instrument in his hand and then put it back to his ear.
    Everybody knows wallabies are herbivores, the little girl said. And then: What’s an abortion? John had assumed she didn’t speak English.
    The red Singapore sun shot out a fist and it socked John in the eye. Why couldn’t his mother say that Jane Downey must be inferior in some way, a succubus, an old hag. Or an independent and beautiful woman—he remembered her face exactly: freckled, a wide smile, impish—who would be just fine on her own.
    John wanted his mother to dig deep into the secret womanly knowledge buried in the pheromones and cells and blood of that murky, heady thing he thought of as femininity, and to report back: John, you owe that woman nothing.
    A baby, his mother said.
    . . . . .
    Dawn in St. John’s, November 2008
    HELEN THREW OFF the covers and pulled her cardigan off the hook and put it on over her nightdress. She went downstairs and switched on the fluorescent light while she listened to John on the phone. The kitchen bounced up and fluttered out of the dark.
    She listened to John breathe. Even on a cellphone, calling from the other side of the world, they could let long bouts of silence stretch between them. She would be babysitting her grandson, Timmy, today, and in the early afternoon there would be a trip to Complete Rentals for a staple gun, and then a trip to get skates sharpened. She had a carpenter coming tomorrow. A pork chop thawing on the counter.
    But John had got some girl pregnant. There was going to be a child.
    Two months after the Ocean Ranger sank, Helen’s mother-in-law had told Helen she’d had the dream again about the baby in the tree. It was the same dream Meg had when the rig went down.
    I think you’re pregnant, Meg told her. And Helen realized her mother-in-law was right. She’d been throwing up every morning since Cal’s death.
    It was a beautiful little baby girl in the branches of that tree out there, Meg said. All wrapped in a white blanket, and it was snowing, and I said to Dave, Go out and get her, and he did.
    Helen switched off the overhead light and sat in the alcove in the kitchen with one knee touching the cold window. It had been snowing. The black branches and the telephone wires and all the roofs and the railings of the fences had a white trim.
    God, Johnny, she said. Remember when Gabrielle was born?
    Gabrielle had arrived in late September. Helen’s water had broken on the sidewalk outside Bishop Feild School, where she’d gone to pick up the children. The water leaked into her nylons in a cold, chafing patch. Cathy and Lulu with their Cabbage Patch Kids knapsacks and patent leather shoes; John with a Star Wars light sabre that glowed blue. He ran ahead of them and stopped suddenly, swinging the sword in big circles with both hands, holding off an invisible foe.
    Don’t cross without us, young man, Helen called out. Don’t step off that sidewalk, Johnny. Helen walked mincingly along Bond Street, pausing during the mild contractions. There was a sky piled with gold cloud over the South Side Hills. It