“But I heard him crying, Mama. I heard him. I could tell he needed help. I couldn’t just leave him.”
Mama looks closer at the baby. She sees how weak he is, smells his skin and spit-up. She makes a face, a sad one.
“The door to his house was open and he was just lying in a cradle in the front room,” I say. “His mother was in the bedroom and she wasdead.” For the first time since I’d found the baby, tears are forming in my eyes. They are hot and they sting.
Mama’s face goes pale. She is no doubt thinking she should never have brought me with her. “Show me where you found him.”
I grab her basket and we turn to walk the way I’d come. I begin to worry that Mama is going to put the baby back. She almost looks like she is mad at me for finding him, even though I know she isn’t. How can she be? I was meant to find him. I was supposed to have come with Mama today. That baby would have died if I hadn’t come.
I don’t want to take Mama back to the baby’s house. I don’t want to see his dead mother and dying sister, but I know I must prove to Mama that this baby needs us. We near the stoop with the half-open door and I glance in the broken front window.
What I see makes me freeze.
The girl who’d been lying on the sofa is gone.
She isn’t there.
“What’s the matter?” Mama says, her question pricking me like a stick.
I only have a second to decide what to do. It’s not a very long time when there’s so much to ponder. That girl was near to dead. I am sure of it. That’s all I can think of. She was dying. Is dying. We aren’t.
“I... I don’t think this is the right alley,” I say.
“What color was the front door? Think.”
“I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t remember.” I move away from that first stoop to the second one, to the third one. To one across the alley.
“Well?” Mama says.
“I don’t think this is the right alley.”
We make our way back out to the street and then down the next alley. The alleys all look alike. Even Mama can see this.
“I don’t know which one it is now,” I say, thinking only that I was meant to find this baby.
He is crying in Mama’s arms now, but it is a frail cry, like a sighing wind.
“We’ve got to get him some food and attention,” she says. “Come on.”
I follow her back out to South Street and Mama hails a taxicab that is driving by.
We settle into the seat in the back and Mama draws the baby close to her chest to shush him. He smells even worse inside the taxi. Mama looks at me and her face softens a bit. “It’s all right, Maggie. We’ll figure out where he belongs. One thing at a time.”
Her words echo in my head the whole time we’re in the cab. I can’t seem to understand what she said. It isn’t until we’re getting out of the taxi at the funeral parlor that I realize I decided the moment I first held him that I will never let this child go.
