It all seemed so simple to me, I remember thinking. If I were God, I’d put a stop to it. Just like that.
But now as I step inside the quiet church, I suddenly realize sometimes things aren’t simple. Sometimes you do a bad thing for good reasons. Sometimes you do a good thing for bad reasons. The full weight of what I had done this morning seems to root me to the holy floor for a moment. I lied to Mama about not knowing which house I’d foundthe baby in and I didn’t tell her that a sick girl had been there with him. But what if I had? What if I had shown her the dead mother and the dying sister? What would it have changed? We wouldn’t have left the baby there. We still would have taken him. And he’d still need a home now. He would still need a family that could love him and take care of him and give him a place to grow up in. Why shouldn’t it be with us? He had been born in the part of the city where the poor lived with hardly anything to call their own. Even before the flu came, it was a sad, dirty place to live. Why shouldn’t we give him what every little baby deserves?
As my eyes adjust to the dimness, I see that there are a handful of other people in the sanctuary. They are scattered across the pews, bent over in prayer, doing what the reverend asked us to do. I ease my way to one of the rows and sit down. I look up at the altar, shimmering in the half-light, and I clasp my hands together. I keep my eyes open as I whisper my prayer to God.
“I don’t know why you took Henry,” I say. “You shouldn’t have. He was just a baby. But you gave us this child now. We’re going to give him everything we would’ve given Henry. I won’t be mad at you anymore after this.”
I start to say, “Amen,” but then I add that he needs to keep Willa safe as part of the deal. I close my eyes at that part because it seems the right thing to do.
I get out of the pew and go to the front of the church. A door to the left of the big altar leads to a hallway where all the church offices are. A woman in an emerald green dress is coming through it just as I get close.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“I need to find Mrs. Arnold. It’s important,” I reply.
“I don’t know if she’s still here, but we can check in the kitchen.” She asks my name and I tell her.
I follow the woman down a long hallway and then through the meeting hall to a large kitchen that smells like grease and soap andlemons. Two women in aprons are drying soup pots and a third woman is talking to a man holding a box of jars with towels in between to keep them from jostling. This third woman is tiny, like a little bird, but her voice and mannerisms are quick and purposeful, as though if she really did have a beak, she’d know how to poke you with it.
“Those are all for Chinatown,” the birdlike woman says. “Make sure they understand the jars need to come back tonight so we can send them out again tomorrow.” She opens a door for the man, and sunlight spills into the room as he turns and heads outside with the box. “And do be sure not to let the jars knock into each other and break!” she calls out after him. The man grunts something I can’t hear.
“Mrs. Arnold, I have a young lady here who needs to see you,” says the woman in the green dress.
Mrs. Arnold the Bird turns to me.
“This is Maggie Bright,” says the woman who’d brought me.
“Good heavens!” Mrs. Arnold blinks at me wide-eyed. “Is your mother finished already? She didn’t have to send you over with the jars. Did your mother not remember that? I have Mr. Porter coming around later today for all of them.” She looks at my empty hands. “Where are your jars?”
“We didn’t get the chance to finish handing them out,” I reply.
“We? Did your mother take you with her?” Mrs. Arnold says.
“I just kept her company while she walked down there.”
“Well, what happened? Why couldn’t your mother deliver the soup? Were the jars broken? Did the driver break her jars?”
“No,” I say. “I... We found a little baby near one of the houses on your list. His mother was dead inside his house. He’d been lying in his dirty diaper and crying for a long time. We brought him home with us because there was no one else there. Mama asked that I come tell you.”
“A baby? Land sakes, is your mother home with him, then? Did you notify the health services people or the Red Cross or the police?”
“I think my uncle told the police.”
“Did you show them where you found him? Do they know there’s a dead mother there?”
“I... uh... no. I came here to tell you.”
“Oh dear, oh dear. Come on, then—let’s see if we can’t find someone who knows who the child belongs to.” She brushes past me and speaks to the woman in the green dress. “We need to find my driver, Heloise. I need to get back down to South Street lickety-split.” She motions for me to follow her.
“I think he’s an orphan,” I say, rushing to keep up with them. “I don’t think he belongs to anyone.”
“I assure you another orphan is the last thing the city needs right now,” Mrs. Arnold says, glancing back at me. “He’s bound to have other family. Is his house off South Street?”
“It’s in an alley. I couldn’t remember which one when we went back.”
Mrs. Arnold stops and I nearly run into her. “What do you mean, when you went back?”
My heart skips a beat. “I mean, I’m the one who found the baby. I picked him up and took him to my mother, who was on another street visiting a lady on your list. We went back, but I couldn’t remember which alley it was. They all look alike.”
