The narrator sees her existence as owing to three dramatic and unlikely moments: her mother saving her own life, her parents meeting in the hospital, and her mother saving her from the house fire. The first and third of these actions are dramatic and emphasize the various contingencies that facilitated Anna’s or the narrator’s survival. The narrator notes, for example, that the gutter Anna leaped toward to reach the narrator’s room was “new […] put in that year” (Paragraph 24). If the gutter had instead been missing or too old to bear Anna’s weight, the narrator might have died in the fire.

The second event the narrator discusses—her parents’ meeting—is much quieter. Yet its inclusion in the story suggests that it is no less miraculous than the narrow escapes of the lightning strike and house fire; if the circumstances that allow a person to survive are sometimes unlikely, they are no more so than the circumstances that allow that person to live at all. The presence of the narrator’s stillborn sister is a reminder of the many people who might have come into existence instead of the narrator, but it is in the shortest paragraph in the story, just three sentences, that Erdrich most clearly develops the theme: “I owe my existence, the second time then, to the two of them and the hospital that brought them together.