Turn 105 of 233

I go to the doctor and decide to keep the baby. Inform Aleki's family as well

The clinic is on Fourth Street, second floor, above a nail salon. Lena takes the stairs barefoot and the staircase is narrow and her shoulders nearly touch both walls and the tribal ink is dark on her calves and the receptionist looks up and her face does the calculation — five hundred twenty-five pounds, naked, tattooed, grimy, filling the doorway — and then does it again. Lena fills out the paperwork with a pen held in her massive callused hand. The pen is small. The forms are small. She checks the boxes and writes the date and the receptionist doesn't ask for insurance twice.

The doctor is a woman named Dr. Parekh. She is short and precise and her eyes move across Lena's body the way Walt's eyes move across a site — reading the structure, finding the load paths. She doesn't flinch at the tattoos. She doesn't comment on the grime. She presses the cold disc of the ultrasound against Lena's belly — the belly that hangs forward, thick and heavy and wrapped in tribal ink — and the screen is grainy and gray and then the shape appears. Small. Curled. A pulse. A heartbeat. Lena lies on the table and the gel is cold on her skin and the sound is fast and high and it fills the room and Dr. Parekh is quiet and Lena is quiet and the heartbeat is the first sound the baby makes and Lena hears it through a machine in a clinic above a nail salon on Fourth Street.

"Eight weeks," Dr. Parekh says. "Everything looks healthy. The weight is high but the blood pressure is normal. You're strong." She says this the way she says everything — clinical, measured, the data speaking.

"We'll need to monitor closely. The body mass changes the risk profile."

Lena nods. She looks at the screen. The shape is still there — curled, small, the pulse steady. She thinks about framing. About load paths. About the thing the body builds when it builds something it didn't plan for. She thinks about Aleki — his hands, his laugh, the way he ate tuna from a container with his fingers, the way he lay on the balcony concrete and didn't ask to stay. The shape on the screen is half his. The shape on the screen doesn't know he's gone.

"I'm keeping it," Lena says.

Dr. Parekh nods. She prints the ultrasound image and the paper is thin and the image is grainy and Lena holds it in her callused hand and the ink on her fingers is sharp against the gray and white of the print. She folds it once and puts it in her truck and drives to the port.

Finding Aleki's family takes three days. She calls the longshoreman's union hall and they give her a number and the number is his sister, Sina, who lives in a bungalow in Gainesville with her husband and three children. Lena calls on Wednesday evening from the balcony. Sina answers and her voice is deep like Aleki's — the same vowels, the same cadence — and Lena says who she is and Sina is quiet for a long time.

"He talked about you," Sina says. "He said you were the biggest woman he ever met and you could out-eat him and you beat him at everything."

Lena's throat tightens. She sits on the concrete and the phone is pressed to her ear and the fan turns above her.

"I'm pregnant," Lena says. "Eight weeks. It's his. I found out after he died. I wanted him to know."

Sina is quiet again. The quiet is not cold. The quiet is the sound of a woman sitting in a bungalow in Gainesville with her husband and three children and hearing her brother's name attached to something that is still alive.

"Can I see you?" Sina says.

"Yeah," Lena says.

"Come to Gainesville. Bring the ultrasound. I want to see it."

Lena hangs up and sits on the balcony and the sun is gone and the city is lit and the ultrasound is folded in her truck and the baby is eight weeks old and Aleki is dead and the wish is silent and the body is hers and the body is his and the body is theirs and she is comfortable. She is still comfortable. The comfort holds.