Today

 Today there were two beginnings. Today there was one end.

 Frantic, Caleb says, the father was when he showed up at the workshop. Frantic and hard to understand. Only pleadings to come out to the road because his wife was delivering his child out there, out there in the midday sun on our windy airstrip. Difficult to comprehend why they were bringing her to us in the first place, rather than calling for Donna as they usually do. Enough words traded in time to find out that she was only 7 months along, sent over by the local midwife across the river, perhaps in hopesthat Donna could stop labor. Too late for stopping, life is in motion. Donna reaches her as one baby slides out, the mother crouching in the dirt, shaded with a cloth held over her. But that isn't the end. Her belly held not onlythe girl, but her brother as well. Dick is sent back to the house to get thestretcher and to pick me up, telling me on the way, "It's twins, if there's time enough, we'll bring her back to the house before the second one comes."

We hit the end of the airstrip and Donna is holding an impossibly small bundle. She hands the girl to me and they move the mother onto the stretcherand into the back of the truck. I cradle three pounds of life in my hands and don't know what to do, except tell her over and over that she can, in fact, do this. Come into this world with the sun blazing down and live to walk in it. She can't quit on me because I know in my heart that I cannot be the one to be holding her if she decides that sticking around isn't something she's willing to do.

We get back and within 10 minutes her smaller brother makes his debut with his feet first. I fumble with the bulb syringe, knowing that this is the only thing I can offer him--to suction out his too small, too early mouth.There's no warm bed to place him in, there's no tube to slide down his throat to help him breathe, there's no artificial surfactant to coat his underdeveloped lungs. I hold him gently and watch his intercostal spaces retracting with each breath, hear his grunts with each rise and fall of his chest. This one. This one will not make it.

 And I cannot hold him either. I curl him up next to his sister and will someof her strength into his body. What little we can do is not enough. Not for one too small and too early.

 Caleb's mom is amazing. Her ability to think and act when all I can do is stare at the little faces and think of all I cannot do.

What is it like? To be un-twinned at the same moment you are born a twin?Will she carry him with her throughout her life? Will her mom tell her that she shared her space and traded her first kicks with a tiny boy? What is it like? To have two brought forth from your body and take only one home withyou? These questions, I don't know. I never will know.

They went home at 5 this evening, carrying their tiny daughter and a bag with a medicine dropper and formula. Hopefully this--this small thing--isenough. Enough to see her through so that she can walk upright in the sun that burned heavy on the day she was born.