When I Found You (3 page)

Flora was asleep when he rose the next morning. Which meant there would be no coffee.

Never sure about the coffee situation, other than his role in drinking it, he felt hesitant to take on the job. It seemed better to make instant coffee for himself, even knowing it would be dreadful. That seemed preferable, somehow, to anticipating good coffee and then being disappointed by his own failure in that department.

The instant coffee was even more dreadful than he had imagined, though, because he didn’t allow the water to boil fully.

He took two or three tentative sips, made a face, and poured it down the sink drain.

Then he called the hospital and spoke to Dr. Wilburn. Deeply braced against potential tragedy.

“Ah, yes,” Wilburn said. “I’ve been expecting your call. Well, he’s breathing. And that’s good. Trouble is, we don’t really like
the way
he’s breathing. We’re going to suction out his lungs and see if the situation improves. He’s awfully young to survive pneumonia. If that’s what’s going on. But he’s still kicking. What can I say? He’s practically a miracle already. But complications are a definite possibility, and I’m afraid they’re beginning to rear their ugly heads. Sorry to say he’s not out of the woods yet.” A long pause, then a huge snort of laughter. “Well, at least he is
literally
. Sorry. I know you probably think it’s not very funny.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Nathan said. Not betraying his thoughts on the subject.

Then he rang off.

Mrs. MacElroy usually offered him a cup of coffee, and when she did it was always superb. He made a wish that today would be one of those days.

•  •  •

“Oh, Nathan,” she said. The moment she opened the door. She’d only recently taken to calling him by his first name, since her husband’s death, and he found it mildly unnerving. “Tell me. Was it you?”

“Excuse me?”

She stepped back to allow him in.

She was a handsome woman, Nathan felt. More handsome than traditionally beautiful. About Nathan’s age, she had a dignified way of dressing and carrying herself, and he admired that. None of this mincing about, pretending to be a woman half her age. She had some sense of decorum.

He stepped into her living room.

“I just had a feeling it might have been you. Just an intuitive feeling, I guess. Of course, you did tell me you were planning on going duck-hunting …”

Nathan briefly grieved his lack of morning coffee. The resulting absence of mental clarity certainly wasn’t helping him now.

“I’m not sure I know what you’re referring to, actually,” he said.

“Well, the headline in the paper this morning, of course. I know you must have seen it. Everybody’s buzzing about it. Already I’ve gotten calls from my friend Elsie and my manicurist, and it’s barely nine
A.M.
It isn’t often something so momentous happens around here.”

“I’m guessing,” Nathan said, “that the headline you’re referring to was about the abandoned newborn. So then, yes. It was me.”

“Oh, Nathan. I just knew it.”

A cold feeling gripped his stomach. “What else did the article say? I left the house this morning without benefit of coffee or the morning paper.”

“Oh, I have it around here somewhere. What did I do with it?”

She began to bustle. Or, at least, Nathan decided that bustling would be a good word to describe her actions. She wore a dark-navy shirtwaist dress, mid-calf length, with an attractive woven leather belt. As if she were going off to a front-office job in a good firm, rather than just opening the door for her bookkeeper. Her thick hair was pulled into a loose bun.

He sat on the couch, wishing she had caught his hint about the coffee. And also wishing the tight feeling in his stomach would ease.

“Did it say anything about custody? That is, did it indicate who would get custody? If the baby has family, I mean? That is, if his mother is never found.”

She had bustled off into the kitchen, but now her head appeared from around the door jamb. “Oh, but she
was
found. I thought you knew. Now I know I grabbed it and took it to the phone with me when Elsie called. But I don’t see— Oh, here it is.”

She hurried out into the living room again, extending a folded section of the morning paper in his direction. He accepted it, and dug into his suit coat pocket for his reading glasses. Noting that his hand trembled ever so slightly.

He skimmed as quickly as he could, in search of the most relevant information. The part that would settle his stomach. Or not.

The baby’s eighteen-year-old mother, a Miss Lenora Bates, had been located. That comprised the bulk of the article. She had attempted to cross a state line with her boyfriend, Richard A. Ford, presumably the child’s father, but had instead ended up in an emergency room, hemorrhaging. She and Ford had both been arrested, though not yet arraigned, and it was still under consideration, at the district attorney’s office, what charges should be brought. She might face charges of reckless endangerment, or reckless disregard for human life. Or she might even be charged with attempted infanticide, or conspiracy to commit infanticide.

The article also said that the child, if and when he ever recovered enough to leave the hospital, would be given into the custodial care of his grandmother, Mrs. Ertha Bates, mother of the troubled girl.

The news dropped into the waiting place in Nathan’s stomach and found … nothing.

The sensation was similar to that of dropping a heavy object into a bottomless well, and then waiting for it to make a sound. The news made no sound. The feeling of aliveness that had opened in Nathan only twenty-four hours earlier, in front of the hospital coffee machine, closed. And that was all.

It was almost a comfort to have his familiar blankness back.

He glanced back down at the article.

In conclusion it noted that the infant had been found in the woods by a man on a duck-hunting outing with his dog.

Nathan folded up the paper, set it to rest on the end table near the couch, and sat a moment, digesting this new information.

He thought about lighting a cigarette. An open box of them sat on the coffee table. But he’d gone to the trouble to quit them several years ago, and didn’t fancy going through all that again.

He shook the urge away.

Mrs. MacElroy spoke, startling him. “Why the woods? Why not a hospital or an orphanage?”

“I can’t imagine,” Nathan said.

He made a mental notation: do a little research into how hard it would be to locate this Mrs. Ertha Bates.

“Well, it certainly does make you the big hero.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Why, that child would be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“They should have mentioned your name.”

“Oh, nonsense. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, too. It was a huge thing you did. You deserve credit.”

“I don’t need credit. It was the same thing anybody would have done.”

“I keep thinking of my own son when he was just born. Thinking of him left to fend for himself out in that dark forest. It just makes my blood run cold.”

“I can’t imagine how anyone could do such a thing,” Nathan said.

The conversation sounded and felt distant and removed to him, the way voices in the next room sound just before you drop off to sleep.

“May I get you a cup of coffee before we start?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Nathan said. “Thank you. Coffee would be just the thing.”

•  •  •

When Nathan arrived home, Flora was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and eating three fried eggs, despite the fact that it was late for breakfast. Nearly eleven.

The article sat folded next to her plate.

“Please don’t say it,” Nathan said.

“I told you that boy might have family.”

“I asked you not to say it.”

“Oh, is that what you wanted me not to say? How was I to know that? I’m not a mind-reader, you know.”

He ducked out of the kitchen again. Sat near the living room phone and picked up the local directory. It was the first and most obvious step in the task of seeing how hard it would be to locate Mrs. Ertha Bates.

As it turned out, finding her was not destined to be difficult at all.

He noted her address in his appointment book.

He looked up to see Flora watching him from the kitchen doorway. He quickly put the appointment book away in his pocket again.

“What are you up to?” she asked.

“I’m not up to anything,” he said. “I just needed to look up an address. I just needed an address out of the phone book. That’s all.”

She disappeared again, and he sat a moment, lost in thought.

Today? he wondered. No. Not today. Not for several days.

It would be unconscionable to discuss his situation with Mrs. Bates until they knew for a fact whether the child would even survive.

•  •  •

He mixed up Sadie’s midday meal — canned and kibbled dog food with a little broth — and carried it out to her run in the yard. He stood and watched her while she ate. Leaning on the chain-link and talking to her.

“So, I guess that was our little brush with fame, eh, girl?”

The comfortable crunching sound of her deliberate chewing.

“Eleanor MacElroy thinks I should have been mentioned in the paper by name. She thinks it was a great accomplishment. But all I did was look where you were looking. And I’d bet anything that even if they had mentioned my name they wouldn’t have mentioned yours. But you wouldn’t care, would you? You probably care less about credit than I do.”

She glanced up at him briefly between bites.

“Who knew that child had a grandmother willing to take him? Then why didn’t that girl abandon her baby at its grandmother’s house?”

She chewed the last kibble and licked the bowl with her wide tongue. Then she looked up at him thoughtfully, her head tilted to one side.

“Oh, so you don’t understand it either, eh?”

Though he knew the dog was really curious about whether Nathan had anything besides lunch to offer her.

He felt a sudden pang of regret for not stopping to buy her a rawhide or some other nice treat. Something to reward her for what she had done.

Instead he let her out into the yard so he could throw the ball for her.

He ran a hand through the tight ringlet curls on her chocolate-colored neck.

“So why was I so sure how that was going to turn out, then?” he asked her.

But her eyes were fixed on the ball he had just picked up from its hiding place on top of the fence.

And a better question, Nathan thought. How could I have been so preposterously wrong?

But he didn’t ask that one out loud.

Right through lunch he played ball with her. Almost until it was time for his afternoon appointments.

5 October 1960   

The home of Mrs. Ertha Bates was kept tidy, but it was old. Autumn leaves had gathered in great piles on the roof, and in the rain gutter. Nathan stood at the curb, taking in his surroundings. Thinking she should sweep those off before the first snows threatened. Nathan certainly would have had them off by now, if this had been his house. But he supposed she had no one to do the work for her.

That tight feeling had returned to his stomach again. And he didn’t enjoy it one bit. It was fear, plain and simple, and Nathan knew there was no point in denying or recasting it. His grandfather probably would have said that all men feel fear, but cowardly men deny it. Or perhaps he even
had
said that at some point.

But the truth was, Nathan did not ordinarily feel fear. This morning was only the second time in many decades. In as long as he could even remember. It seemed odd, and he wondered at the significance of it. It was as though only in the last few days had he had anything too important to risk losing.

The porch boards creaked and sagged under Nathan’s weight.

He rapped on the front door, into which was set an arrangement of tear-drop-shaped glass panes forming a half circle.

A curtain slid aside, and part of a woman’s face peered through.

Then the door opened, and the whole of the woman appeared. Nathan could only assume it was Mrs. Ertha Bates.

She stood on the sill, did not invite him in. She was a woman perhaps his own age or a bit younger — forty-something — but old-looking, as though used too roughly, with graying hair, a faded-but-clean dress, and a plain white apron.

“Yes?” she said.

Nathan held his hat in front of him.

“I’m the man who found your baby grandson in the woods.”

“I see.”

“Is that all you have to say to me? ‘I see’?”

He immediately regretted speaking to her that way. Although he had not raised his voice or betrayed anger. Still, there was a rudeness, an effrontery, to his comments. It had just come out that way, unbidden. Because he had anticipated some specific reaction, and not received it. Somehow he had expected more.