When Janie's car hit the boy, what went through Janie's mind was the word oof. Oof spelled itself out in her brain, in super-slow-motion like on sports shows, letter by letter, O, O, F. Then a big puffy exclamation point that shimmered bright to shadow, bright to shadow.

It was Saturday morning, and she had been driving home from the grocery store on Willamette. She turned her head – just for a second – to check a garage sale on the side of the street, and when she turned forward again this little kid was right there in front of her car, and she hit him. She had been going about 38 in a 35 miles per hour zone.

The police came pretty fast, but the boy didn't have a chance. He didn't even make it to the hospital. They put Janie in an ambulance, too, just to make sure she was okay, even though it was perfectly obvious that she was fine.

When the doctors wanted to do x-rays, Janie had to tell them that she was three months pregnant. It was the first time she had said it out loud to anyone.

When she got home, she called her doctor's office, and changed one kind of appointment for another kind. She wrote the new information down in the calendar she kept by the phone.

* * *

Janie went to the funeral for the little boy, whose name was Aaron McCormick. She wasn't sure what the etiquette of such a situation was. Should she ask the McCormicks if they minded? Should she show up in disguise?

The McCormicks were really nice. They had been really nice about everything at the hospital, filling out the forms and all that. They had four other children, three younger than Aaron and one older. The mother had cried the whole time, but with an apologetic expression, as if she were saying "Never mind me, I just get like this sometimes." The father had cried too, but only a little bit.

At the funeral they were subdued. Maybe they were on valium. Aaron had been six years old. They had told Janie and the police that he had run into the street once before, a year earlier, and that he had almost been hit by a car then, but the driver was able to brake in time. They had punished Aaron by not letting him watch any TV that day or the next. For six weeks, they had drilled him every morning:

"What do you do before you cross the street?"

"Look both ways."

"That's right!"

After six weeks they thought they could ease up on him. He'd gotten a sarcastic tone in his voice with the answer and they were tired of hearing it.

They didn't talk about any of this at the funeral, of course. At the funeral it was all praise and sadness. People stood up and told stories about Aaron, about cute things he had done or said. Janie sat in the back hoping no one would notice her, but people up front occasionally nudged each other and gave her a furtive stare. Well, of course, she thought to herself. I would do the same.

She imagined that after the funeral the press would stick a microphone in her face and ask about the accident. She pictured a woman with flipped blonde hair asking "So what went through your mind at the moment of impact?" and herself answering, explaining how the letters O, O, F and the puffy exclamation point had painted themselves huge across her eyes.

But no one asked. There was no press outside.

* * *

That was the last time Janie saw the McCormicks, officially. Unofficially she continued to drive by their house on Willamette almost every day, using that street as her route to work.

They had two cars, but as far as Janie could tell, Mrs. McCormick did not have a job. Mr. McCormick left for work before Janie drove by, so she got up extra early one morning to find out where he went. His destination was an office building about twenty minutes away. According to the faux-wood sign at the entrance to the parking lot, the building housed an insurance company, a beauty spa, a software company, and a printer's shop. Janie hoped he worked at the printer's shop. The other possibilities seemed boring.

Janie knew about boring jobs; she did filing for a telemarketing company. It was dreary but the pay was not bad. The guy she had been living with until recently, Darren, was one of the telemarketers. He was consistently in the top 5% of sales and often won little bonuses. The telemarketers worked in the evening, though, and Janie worked in the day, so she didn't see Darren any more. This was good because he would have noticed she was getting bigger and wearing loose maternity-style dresses.

She didn't want him to know about the baby because he might try to marry her. She knew he would try to talk her into it the way he talked total strangers into buying things they didn't need, home security systems and subscriptions to magazines. He might even wear her down after a while, but she knew she didn't want to marry him.

Janie certainly hadn't meant to get pregnant. They had always used condoms, well, pretty much always. She had been sure that the times they'd gone without were safe times. But she must have read the calendar wrong, or miscounted.

* * *

The McCormicks' house was big and old and had a front porch. It was painted yellow with white trim. When Janie had the accident and hit Aaron, they had a rainbow windsock hanging from a hook on the porch, but they didn't have that any more. They still had some wind chimes, though, one made of shells and one made of metal.

Janie had liked the windsock. Darren didn't like things like that, so when they lived together at his house their porch had been bare. Now, in her new apartment, Janie hung a windsock like the McCormicks' out her window. It was green and purple and looked like a fish. She bought a small wind chime at the flea market and hung it in her kitchen, too. There was no wind there so she batted it with her hand when she walked through, to make it jingle.

She was trying to eat healthy, for the baby. She read every pregnancy book they had at the library and followed some of the advice, like the thing about eating six small meals a day instead of three big ones. She had two breakfasts, two lunches, dinner, and a snack. She ate the second breakfast and lunch on her fifteen-minute breaks at work – usually yogurt and fruit for the morning break and a cheese sandwich for the afternoon break. Her kitchen was full of food high in fiber.

Janie didn't buy any baby supplies, though. No crib, no carseat. One day in the seventh month she went to Target and walked up and down the aisle of baby clothes. They had all kinds of things there, velcro sneakers for tiny feet and little "onesies" pajama sets with pictures of Big Bird. She left the store.
* * *

Janie delivered at St. Joseph's. It took nine hours, which was average for a first baby, the nurses said. Janie pretended her husband was away on business, and faked a phone call to him after the baby came. She dialed 1-800-MATTRES and told a very confused salesperson that the baby weighed 7 pounds 8 ounces and was a girl. "She's so tiny!" Janie said. On the other end of the line, the salesperson said "Honey, I think you've got the wrong number."

"I'm perfectly fine, really," Janie said. "Don't worry about me. I'll see you when you get home tomorrow."

The hospital gave her a supply of disposable diapers, two mini cotton t-shirts, and a funny pink hat to keep the baby's head warm.

* * *

When the baby was three weeks old, on a Sunday afternoon, Janie took it to the McCormicks' house. She knocked on the door with the baby wrapped in a blanket. Mrs. McCormick answered the door and stood there with her mouth open. "You're, you're ... You're the woman who, you're Janie."

They all sat in the living room together, and Janie explained it. "I want you to have this baby," she said. "I took yours, so you can have mine."

The McCormicks shook their heads. Mrs. McCormick patted Janie on the shoulder and said that it was absolutely impossible. She brought out some cookies on a plate and offered lemonade or iced tea. There were kids' toys all over the place. Janie kept trying to hand them the baby. "I'm sorry it's not a boy," she said. "It would have been better if I could give you a boy, like Aaron."

Finally she put the baby on the couch, where it began to cry. Janie folded her arms over her breasts and looked at Mrs. McCormick, then Mr. McCormick.

"You have to understand," she said. "I don't want it." There was a pause. "I never wanted it. You have to take it. I only had it to give it to you. If I keep it, I won't treat it correctly. It will have failure to thrive," she said, remembering the words she had read in one of the pregnancy books.

The baby began wailing now, and Mrs. McCormick picked it up. "You will have to put your daughter up for adoption, then," she said. "You can't just give her to us."

"What if I had just left her on your doorstep?" Janie said. She was beginning to worry that this was not going to work. "Then you would have taken care of her. You're nice people, I know you are, and you would have taken care of her."

"That's probably true," said Mr. McCormick, "But we would have had to go to the police, and they would have taken the baby away."

"See, this is so much better," Janie said. "You know where the baby came from, you know I'm giving her to you on purpose, and you can just keep her." She got up to leave. Mrs. McCormick was still holding the baby.

"Maybe just for a little while," said Mr. McCormick, looking at his wife. "You'll change your mind and come back for her. I know you will miss her and want her back. You wouldn't do anything to hurt her."

"Maybe I will come back," said Janie. She saw this was her one chance. "Maybe I just need some time to get used to the idea of being a mother."

"We'll take good care of her until we see you again," said Mrs. McCormick.

* * *

Janie drove back to her apartment, where all her things were packed into boxes. Tomorrow, she thought, I will load the car. She lay down on the bare futon on the floor, using a soft suitcase as a pillow. All the space that the baby had taken up was hers again, to fill any way she wanted. She felt so wonderfully tired.

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