This was the moment that all changed.
DAISYA Good Story
Thick pink frosting on a white Piggly Wiggly sheet cake proclaimed: “Welcome to Cape Carolina, Daisy!” As I looked at Head Nurse Sandy and the other nurses in the break room at Cape Carolina Regional Medical Center, I almost squealed. It might as well have been one of those wedding cakes that cost as much as a decent used car for how excited that cake made me. Because I had dreamed of living here, where, when I stepped out the door, everything smelled of the sea, all my life. Well, twenty-nine years of it at least, since I was five years old and my parents brought me here on vacation. As a kid from a landlocked small town in North Carolina, I didn’t know that beauty like this existed. The Cape Carolina beaches were white and smooth, and the moonlight danced through the marsh grass on the sound side like an ephemeral daydream. But the way my mother acted when she was here is what sold me. As a little kid, sometimes we can’t reason things out, but wesensethem. And I could sense, snuggled up to my mother on the beach, watching the sun set and the stars dance, that whatever had felt so unsettled in her felt settled here. I knew then, with all my heart, that I was meant to live in Cape Carolina.
Was it practical? No. But now I was living out my childhood dream.
“Y’all are just too much,” I said, as Sandy handed me a slice of sheet cake. Sandy was kind but no-nonsense, and everything about her appearance reflected her personality. Clean white scrubs, pristine black clogs, shoulder-length black hair tucked behind her ears. She wore small gold stud earrings. No makeup. No perfume.
“Well, things aren’t always quite this sleepy around here,” Sandy said. “So don’t expect a party every day.” She sounded stern, but she smiled. We had only two patients right now, so there wasn’t much to do but eat cake, apparently. Which I did. Say what you want. Try to be fancy. But there is nothing quite as delicious as a lard-based sheet cake from the Pig.
“The ED girls chipped in too,” Laura, a nurse who looked to be a couple years older than I was, in hot-pink scrubs with Labradors on them and thick, stylish black glasses, said.
“Sandy? Is it okay if I go down and thank the emergency department nurses?”
She swallowed her bite and said, “Sure thing. Not like there’s anything going on here.”
I walked down the back staff staircase and took a deep breath. It had been a quiet, easy first day. I had totally made the right call. Money was just money. Quality of life was everything. This job was going to be a breeze. I made my way into the bright, sunny atrium and over to Bernice, who worked front reception at the hospital. “Y’all were so sweet to get that cake for me,” I said. “I just feel so—”
Before I could say “welcome,” the automatic doors slid open, and a frantic man screamed, “Someone help us!”
A teenage boy, who also looked panicked but seemed fine physically, was behind him, and, for a second, I thought the man wasreallyoverreacting. Until he got close enough for me to see what was behind his hand. “Follow me,” I said, immediately taking charge. There was a story here; there was always a story. And I loved a good story. But first we saved the patient. Then we got the story. The elevator doors opened. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Everything is going to be just fine.”
I didn’t know if everything was going to be fine. In fact, I had been reminded all too recently that sometimes, everything was decidedlynotfine. But you had to say it anyway. Because sometimes, just believing something can get you halfway there.
MASONA Valiant Effort
Is she…” I gulped as the woman in the emergency room led me into the elevator. My breath was getting short. Was I panicking? I must have been because the woman was rubbing my back, saying, “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be just fine. I’m Daisy, and I’m going to help you, okay?” I couldn’t respond. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Mason,” I managed.
“You did the right thing,” she said, soothingly. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Tell her about it… I wasn’t sure I could find the words to explain the past twenty minutes. It had all seemed so ordinary. Until it wasn’t. But I guessed that was life in a nutshell.
The only newborn babies I had ever held were Greer and George, my plump, full-sized niece and nephew. And that was in the regular way, in this very hospital I found myself in now, when they were clean and swaddled in blankets wearing hats knitted by the Junior League.
Now, I said to Daisy, “When I saw her in the dumpster, she was so covered with white gunk and blood that it took me a minute to realize she was a baby.”
Daisy nodded. “Yeah. They look different before they’re cleaned up.”
“When I saw her, Drew held my feet, and I dove in and grabbed her.” I shook my head. “I don’t know why I put her in my shirt.”
Daisy nodded and patted my arm. “Your body heat might have kept her alive.”
I had considered calling 911, but, since we were only two miles from the hospital, it would take them way longer to get to us than it would to just drive. So I tossed my keys to Drew and said, “You’re going to drive to the hospital.”
He nodded, looking a little like a deer in headlights. As we ran beside each other, me still holding tight to the baby, I realized that we had practiced for this. “Drew,” I said, still running. “You’re my man. This is the bottom of the ninth, the bases are loaded, and I need you to strike out the other team’s best batter. You hear me?”
He nodded again and threw open my car door, then his, and started the car. The mewling had stopped. Was she dead? Had we been too late?
As Drew drove in the direction of the hospital, I realized that I was too freaked out to look.
“We probably shouldn’t have driven her without a car seat,” Drew said now, reminding me he was here too. “But I guess we weren’t the ones who left a baby in adumpster.”
Daisy nodded. “Hey, you guys were just going on instinct.”
Going on instinct. That was something Drew and I had in common. With the other guys, I coached them within an inch of my life. But not Drew. Drew was like me in that, on that field, he could read the energy, the batter, the crowd. He felt it in his bones—just like I had. “Instinct,” I repeated now.
