CHAPTER 23
Maggie
I never would have heard the baby if I hadn’t followed the cat to the street corner and the front window of the row house hadn’t been broken.
The infant’s little cries were like the yowls newborn kittens make or a creaky step at the top of the stairs or a little bird in a far-off tree. But I knew the second I heard it that it wasn’t a kitten or a stair or a bird that made that noise. I knew it was a baby. It was as if that sunken part that had been a sister to Henry suddenly burst out of me and swirled around like a waterspout, reminding me what that sound was.
I didn’t think to call out to Mama, who was still inside the woman’s house. I just turned toward those cries like I was a fish hooked on a line. It drew me down a side alley with tall, skinny houses on either side and front doors with all their paint peeling off. Trash was strewn about and there were little pots of dead plants and rusted bicycle parts and broken glass and the sour smell of pee. No one was in the alley, not even a dog, even though there was dog poop everywhere.
The baby’s cries tugged me to the first stoop on the left, where thefront door was ajar. I walked toward it and saw through a busted front window that a girl about Willa’s age, maybe, lay on a sofa, sprawled out like she’d been tossed there. The baby cried out to me again as I looked at her.
I pushed the door open the rest of the way. There were stairs to the upper floors with sacks of trash on them, and another door; this one was half-open also and led into the room where the girl on the sofa was.
I didn’t stop to think if I should; I just stepped inside. The room stank like garbage and outhouses, even with my mask on. I turned to the girl. She was whitish blue like someone had painted her that color. Dots of blood had pooled below her nose, like a mustache. Her eyes were closed and I couldn’t tell if she was breathing. My own breath started to come in short gasps and I turned away. Across the tiny front room was a cradle and the baby who had called out to me. I crossed the room in only a few steps.
The baby looked to be nearly the age Henry had been just before he got sick. Four months or so. The baby had curls the color of dark caramel and the same sweet rosebud mouth Henry had. His eyes were half-open as I drew near and the baby poked a little fist at me as if to say, “What took you so long?” The rag that had been pinned around the baby’s bottom hadn’t been changed in probably days and the weight of it had made it slide down around his knees. I moved a tiny corner of the soiled blanket half covering the baby. He was a boy. He had a little birthmark shaped like a heart by his belly button.
I tossed my coat to the floor, and in one swift move I had that baby out of his filthy bed and wrapped in the folds of my coat. His disgusting diaper fell off at my feet. I scooped him and my coat into my arms and cuddled him against my neck. I didn’t stop to consider that perhaps he was sick with the flu. But his skin felt cool to mine, so I was sure he had no fever.
For a couple moments, I just stood there in that little house and held the baby in my arms like it was the most natural thing in theworld. I didn’t think about the girl on the sofa behind me or where this baby’s parents were or what I was even going to do next. I just held him and swayed a little bit with him, the way Henry had liked.
I would have stayed that way a little bit longer, but I suddenly remembered Mama would expect me to stay where she had left me. I turned toward a door by the kitchen area that I figured led to a bedroom. I tiptoed toward the half-closed door to see if there was a mother inside who was simply too weak from illness to get to her child. I poked the door open. On the bed, curled up like a rag doll, was a woman. Her splotchy skin was gray and her open eyes were unblinking. The front of her nightgown was covered in black goo that I knew she had coughed up from her lungs. Uncle Fred’s bodies had been arriving wrapped in sheets, with the arms and legs neatly tucked in. Sometimes their heads weren’t covered but their eyes were always closed. His bodies were dead people whom other, living people had noticed and taken care of. This woman was dead and forgotten. Her hands clutched at her nightgown like she knew she was dying all alone and her children lay in the other room. There were no signs that a father lived in this house. No boots in the corner, no coveralls draped over a chair, no can of shaving powder atop the bureau. Something deep inside me was roiling about and I knew I had to get the baby out of this house of death before I threw up on him.
I turned from the baby’s dead mother and went back into the main room. I looked at the girl on the sofa one last time and, to my surprise, her glassy eyes were now open. I stood there for a second, staring at her because Papa had told me sometimes the eyes of the dead inch open as the body starts to decay.
Then the girl blinked, slowly. She was still alive.
Our eyes held each other’s for a moment.
I wondered if she knew her mother was dead.
I wondered if she knew she was also dying.
Had she staggered to her front door earlier this morning to open it, hoping someone would hear her baby brother crying?
She lifted a finger toward me and pointed at the bundle I held in my arms. Poor thing. I knew the sister love that was breaking her heart in two.
“He’s safe with me,” I whispered, one sister to another.
And then the girl closed her eyes, and her chest seemed to heave a little. Her hand fell limp.
I couldn’t get out of that house fast enough.
•••
When I get back to the step where Mama told me to wait, I can see her way up the street, calling for me. She sounds both mad and scared. I start running toward her, but I don’t want to shout to her because the baby has fallen asleep against me.
I am out of breath when I finally reach her and when I call for her in a gasp, Mama whirls around like she is a ballroom dancer and her eyes are as wide as I’ve ever seen them.
“I told you to stay right there and wait for me!” she says in a half yell because there are a few other people about now, and she glances at them at the same time she is glaring at me. But the very next second she sees the bundle in my arms. “What have you got there?”
“It’s a little baby, Mama. His mother is dead,” I say, still out of breath.
“Good Lord!” Mama heaves her basket to the ground and snatches the baby and my coat out of my arms. He makes a little sound, like he’s not happy about leaving my arms for hers.
“He’s not sick,” I say. “He doesn’t have it.”
“You don’t know that! I told you to stay right on the step!”
