He Phoned My Sister From The Altar So She Would Hear The Bells And She Told Him She Was In The Maternity Ward

My name is Maya Ruiz and Elena is my younger sister by four years. What follows is an account of six years, and I was in the room for perhaps a third of it; the rest I have from her, from transcripts, from two depositions and from a very long conversation with an old man in a palliative care bed who wanted somebody to write it down. Where I was not there I have said so. It begins on the eleventh of December at eleven minutes past two in the afternoon, with a telephone ringing in a maternity suite at Lenox Hill.