“Her?” Carlynn tried not to look as stunned as she felt.

“It’s nothing here,” Penny said. “Everyone sleeps with everyone.”

“You’re on the Pill, I hope.”

“Of course,” Penny said. “Although, I was thinking that if I never get my voice back, I could just stay here and have babies. It’s so natural and beautiful, having babies here. There’ve been two born since I arrived. The fathers actually help deliver them. And there’s another one due soon.” Leaning forward again, she nodded in the direction of a very young dark-haired woman, huge with child, who was laughing at something one of her tablemates had said. Even from the next table, though, Carlynn could see a strain in that laugh. Whether the woman was in physical—or perhaps emotional—pain, she didn’t know, but something was troubling her.

“Her old man is the guy sitting over there.” Penny pointed. “Johnny Angel.”

“Johnny Angel?” Carlynn tried not to laugh.

“His real name is something else, but that’s what everyone calls him,” Penny said. “I’ve slept with him a few times, too. He’s very young, but the young ones can go all night long, if you know what I mean.”

“You slept with him while his wife is pregnant?”

“Her suggestion,” Penny said. “It’s a different world here, Carly.”

A large woman with long, frizzy gray hair walked into the cabin and climbed over the bench to sit next to Penny.

“How’s your voice today, Penny?” the woman asked.

“Same as always,” Penny said. “Felicia, this is my old friend Carlynn. Felicia’s the midwife here. She’ll be delivering Ellen’s baby.”

“How far along is she?” Carlynn asked the midwife.

“Carlynn’s a doctor,” Penny whispered to Felicia.

“She’s thirty-eight weeks.” Felicia’s voice was loud and commanding. She dished a large serving of vegetables and rice onto her plate. “I think she’s going to be early, though,” she added. “She said she was having some back pain today.”

Carlynn nodded. That explained the halfhearted laughter.

Felicia looked across the table at her as she began to eat. “Do you have any antibiotics on you?” she asked. “River has the clap and he ran out.”

“No, sorry, I don’t,” she said, although she had brought some just in case she needed them to treat Penny. She would leave them for the guy with gonorrhea if Penny didn’t need them.

“Hey, Pen!” Terence called from one of the other tables. “Since you have company tonight, would you like to sleep at my cabin? Give your friend some privacy?”

“No, thanks,” Penny said as loudly as she could, to be heard over the chatter and crying babies. “I want to be with her.”

“Oh, I get it.” Terence smiled, and Carlynn grimaced.

“It’s not like that,” she said to the man. “I’m a married woman.”

Everyone laughed as though she’d said something hilarious, and she smiled.

“Let me start treating you,” Carlynn said when she and Penny had returned to Cornflower. She was anxious to see how Penny would respond to her touch. “I’d feel so good if I could get you back to New York and into that beauty parlor musical.”

“Beauty parlor musical?” Penny frowned at her.

“Didn’t you say you were going to be in a musical about—”

“Oh, Hair!” Penny interrupted her, laughing. “Oh my God, Carlynn, a beauty parlor musical! You’re too much.” She could hardly catch her breath for laughing, and Carlynn joined in, not sure what the joke was.

“Hair is about Vietnam, and love and diversity and people taking care of each other. It is decidedly not about a beauty parlor. God, I love you, Carly.”

“Now don’t start that.” Carlynn laughed. “I am not sleeping with you. No lesbian stuff.”

“Right, you’re a married woman.”

“Are you making fun of me?” Carlynn grinned. She was a fish out of water, but felt no discomfort at being the brunt of the jokes, as long as Penny was the joker. “Come here,” she said, pointing to one of the mattresses on the bedroom floor. “Lie down and get comfortable.”

Penny lay down and Carlynn sat on the mattress next to her, taking her hands. “Tell me about when it started.”

“Is this how you do it?” Penny asked. “You talk, like a shrink? I’ve been to a shrink already. He was useless.”

“I’m not a shrink, honey,” Carlynn said. “Now just talk to me. How did it start?”

Penny cried as she reported waking up one morning without a voice. Carlynn tuned out the outside world, the shouts of children, the occasional laughter from an adult, the guitar music that was floating in through the window from somewhere nearby. Closing her eyes, she let Penny’s words come inside her. This was going to work. She could feel it in Penny’s hands, in the absolute concentration in her face. Thank God. She did not want to disappoint her old friend. It might take some time, but Penny would get her voice back.

The next day, when the world was again white with fog, Ellen Liszt’s cries filled the commune, and everyone knew she was in labor.

“Should I help?” Carlynn asked Penny as she stared out the bedroom window in the direction of the cries.

Penny shook her head. “No. Believe me, they don’t want a doctor in there,” she said. “They don’t particularly trust doctors here.”

Except to hand out antibiotics when they contract a sexually transmitted disease, Carlynn thought.

She spent the morning working with Penny some more, listening to her and gently placing her hands on her throat. At lunch that afternoon, Penny said something in a perfectly natural voice and everyone turned to look at her. Instantly, the whisper was back, but Penny got up and did a little jig across the wood-plank floor of the cabin.

Walking back to Cornflower, they passed Rainbow Cabin and could hear an occasional cry, more of a scream really, from the mother-to-be inside. Johnny Angel chopped wood at the side of the cabin without seeming to notice the two women passing by.

“I thought you said the men help deliver their babies?” Carlynn asked.

“Most do,” Penny said. “But Johnny’s freaking out, I think. Poor kid.”

She worked with Penny’s voice for an hour, then sat with her on the sofa in the small living room, sewing patches on several pairs of Penny’s well-worn jeans. Suddenly, there was the sound of steps on the front porch, and Johnny Angel burst into the cabin. His face was ashen, his hands raised in panic.

“The baby’s not breathing!” he said.

Carlynn dropped her sewing and ran toward the door, Penny and Johnny close behind her. “Which way?” she asked as she stepped off the porch into the fog.

Johnny grabbed her arm and ran with her toward the cabin he shared with his young girlfriend, but he stopped, frozen at the front steps.

“In there.” He pointed inside.

Carlynn looked at him squarely. “Your girlfriend will need you,” she said, taking him by the wrist and nearly dragging him inside with her.

Felicia was on her knees on the mattress, crouched between the young mother’s legs, holding a bluish baby. Carlynn dropped to her own knees beside her.

“The cord was wrapped around her neck,” Felicia said, handing the infant to her.

Carlynn placed the baby girl on the bloodstained newspapers that covered the mattress, then bent over her to perform CPR, covering the tiny nose and mouth with her own mouth, gently blowing air into her lungs, then pressing with two of her fingers on the infant’s breastbone.

“I’ve tried CPR,” said Felicia, but Carlynn continued puffing and pressing. After a moment, she felt Felicia’s hand on her shoulder.

“She’s gone,” Felicia said gently. “She’s gone.”

“No!” Ellen cried from the bed, struggling to raise herself up, trying to see. “No, please!”

Holding the baby with one hand on her back, the other against her chest, Carlynn lifted her until her own lips touched the infant’s temple. Shutting her eyes, she willed every ounce of her strength and energy and breath and life into the child. Her body began to rock, very slowly, in time with her breathing. She couldn’t have said how long she sat that way, rocking, breathing, holding the child between her hands, but after a while, she felt a flutter beneath her right hand, a twisting of tiny muscles beneath her left, and when she opened her eyes, the baby girl let out a whimper, then a wail. Carlynn became aware of her surroundings again as if rising up from a dream, and by the time she wrapped the baby in the flannel blanket Felicia handed her, the child was pink and beautiful.

She found herself strangely reluctant to relinquish the baby, and she held her for another moment, running her hand over the infant’s dark hair before reaching forward to hand her to Ellen. Then she walked outside, still dazed and a little dizzy from her efforts, to find that the fog had burned off, and sunlight followed her to Penny’s cabin.

She slept the rest of that afternoon and most of the following day, and when she awakened, the air outside the window was growing dark. Penny sat on the other mattress and told her the baby was nursing well and appeared healthy.

“They named her Shanti Joy Angel,” she said, her voice a whisper.

Carlynn giggled.

“They’re all on to you now, Carly,” Penny said. “A few of them had heard of Carlynn Shire, but they hadn’t made the connection to you till now. They were all ready to come to you with their sniffles and rashes and bellyaches, but I told them that’s not what you’re here for.”

“Thanks,” Carlynn said. “I’m sorry, though, that I lost time for treating you.”

“That hardly matters in light of things,” Penny said. “You must be starving. You haven’t eaten since yesterday. I brought you some food from dinner. Does it always take this much out of you? The healing?”