The elevator doors opened, and Daisy said, “Sandy, we have a babyfound in a dumpster here! I’m going to take her to Room 307 to examine her and get her cleaned up.”
Sandy, apparently, a bespectacled middle-aged woman in scrubs, walked toward me and peeked behind my hand. “Oh, my good Lord. I thought I’d seen everything.” Then, to Daisy, she said, “I’m going to get the formula.”
I followed Daisy into a room with a hospital bed, a chair in the corner, and a plastic crib-looking thing beside the bed. Finally, she took the baby from me. She was so small and very still, but her eyes were open wide, taking in the room.
“Hey there, little girl,” Daisy crooned to the baby, putting her down gently. “Miss Daisy’s going to get you all cleaned up, and then we’re going to get you a good bottle.” She shook her head. “Kind of weird to clean up a baby in a delivery room when she wasn’t here for the delivery.”
A man in a white lab coat that I took to be the doctor skittered in, and Daisy handed me a handful of wipes, which I realized were for my chest. Looking at the residue clinging to my skin, I suddenly felt sick. Drew looked pale, so he must have been feeling the same. I got up and put my arm around him, leading him out of the room. Our work here was done. We had done something good. Whether it worked or not, we had at leasttriedto save this baby.
“You good?” I asked Drew in the hall.
“Do you think the baby is going to live?” he whispered.
“I don’t know, bud.”
Then he asked the question that, until this very moment, had not even occurred to me. “Whose baby do you think it is?”
Duh. It was someone’s baby. “It would have to be a student, right?” I asked. “Someone too scared to take the baby to the authorities or a place that could take care of it?”
Drew nodded. “I don’t know. I guess. But damn. Don’t you leave it at, like, the fire station or something?”
These were things that, as a high school teacher if not as a human on the earth, I should know the answers to. So I answered, honestly, “You know, Drew, this has never really come up. I can’t one hundred percent say.” I paused, then asked the obvious question: “Do you know of anyone at school who was pregnant?”
Cape Carolina High was a midsized high school. It bordered between 3A and 4A, flipping back and forth every few years. It was big enough that I didn’t know every student, and I was sure Drew didn’t either.
“I mean, not that I know of,” he said. He looked ashamed, and I could read that shame. It was the same shame that, had this been me in high school, I would have felt too. Kids like Drew and me—athletic, popular—we didn’t really concern ourselves with the dramas and traumas of kids outside our specific sphere of influence. It had been one of the most eye-opening parts of being in a school again as an adult, realizing that there were so many kids who had so much to offer who didn’t fit the mold of what mattered to me when I was a student.
I was a better man now; I saw the world—and the people in it—in such a different way.
I knew that this was changing Drew. It would be a formative life experience that would attune him to the real world in a way I’d been sheltered from.
“Are you scarred for life?” I asked.
He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, I’m never having sex again. I can tell you that much.”
I raised my eyebrow. “That will be a valiant effort.”
“Should we, like, go now?” Drew asked.
I chewed the inside of my lip. “You know what? You go. Take mycar back to school. Go home and get some rest. We have a really early morning.”
“We’re still going fishing?”
I shrugged. “I mean, yeah. Not much else for us to do.”
He nodded. “How will you get home?”
“I’ll Uber.” I paused. “I think I need to see how this turns out or something.”
“Text me?”
I nodded.
A policeman I knew well stepped off the elevator, and I mouthed,Go. Now.Another thing I hadn’t thought of… We’d found an abandoned baby in a dumpster. The police were going to get involved. As the officer walked to the nurses’ station, and Drew beelined for the opposite hallway, I went back to check on the baby.
Daisy was holding her, in a rocking chair, feeding her a bottle. She was wrapped in the blanket with the multicolored feet I remembered from my niece and nephew, with a striped hat on her head, eyes still wide open. Daisy didn’t notice me, just stared down at the baby, rubbing her cheek with her thumb and whispering to her.
I love women. I always have. But the sight of one had never overwhelmed me quite like this. I just wanted to be near her.
