Mabel is a case study in the psychological impact of a stillborn pregnancy. Mabel never learned how to grieve, how to handle the experience of a child born dead. Years after the trauma, Mabel suffers from depression, anxiety, isolation, and suicidal ideation as she struggles to handle the profound survivor guilt that mothers experience when a child is born dead. To quote Emily Dickinson, her favorite poet, Mabel exists in that harrowing “hour of lead” that defines a heart that is still alive but has stopped beating.

Mabel longs to be a mother. When she and Jack married, they expected many children. But Mabel is now adjusting to the biological certainty that motherhood will not be hers. She has shut down communication with others and with her husband. Her insistence on moving to Alaska was premised on her assumption that she could escape her grief in the frontier wilderness. But she cannot console her broken heart. She blames herself for her child’s death and wants only not to think about it.

After initially responding to Faina as if the mysterious girl were some fairy-tale creature, Mabel begins the psychological healing that she has so long delayed. She makes peace with the reality of her dead child, reconnects with her husband, retaps her creative energies, and opens her heart to allow others in.