The story follows Elmer Bergan at four stages of her life - when she is eight, 18, 28 and 38 - all told in her own voice and in the first person. As she lives through the events of her first thirty years, events, memories, thoughts come in and out of her consciousness at different stages like a river that flows from one experience to the next and back again. Rather than this being a story about the death of a child, it is about obsession, the need...