The Wrong Family(52)

And then Josalyn became pregnant. She said she didn’t know who the father was, and by then, she was spending the night in a tent and paying for her drugs with sex.

She hardly ever came to group, and she only met with Winnie when she needed something. Winnie tried to appeal to Josalyn on behalf of the baby, offering her programs, help, detox, but she’d wanted to keep her baby.

“It’s mine. I’m keeping it,” she’d said.

“Josalyn, you live in a tent. A tent isn’t a home for a baby. Social Services will get involved. They’ll take the baby from you.”

“No,” Josalyn said flatly. Her eyes were dull like she was checking out. Winnie softened her voice.

“Your family, Josalyn. We can contact someone in your family—they can help.”

That’s when Josalyn’s demeanor changed, terror rising in her eyes instead of tears.

“No,” she said firmly. “Never ever. It’s better to live in a tent than with them.”

When Winnie tried harder to make her see that she wouldn’t be able to keep her baby, Josalyn had run. Winnie tried to find her, going as far as Tacoma, asking shelters about a pregnant, homeless woman with multicolored hair. No one had seen Josalyn, and Winnie’s guilt took on a new corridor in her life.

Winnie rubbed her eyes. She needed to sleep; she couldn’t think clearly anymore. She tossed and turned in her bed. How could anyone know about that night? What she’d done. She had been alone with Josalyn in that tent.

The call had come in the middle of the night and she’d slept through it, since she silenced her phone after 8:00 p.m. She’d woken up to use the bathroom and there was the missed call, lighting up her screen. Winnie had carried the phone into the bathroom and hit play on the voice mail as she peed. Josalyn’s voice came through, shaky, her words as discombobulated as the noises behind her.

“I had the baby. It’s not good, I’m not good. You said you’d help. I’m living in a tent near the overpass in Ravenna. Please...” And then the line had gone dead. Winnie called the number back right away, still sitting on the toilet, but it just rang and rang.

What she remembered vividly were the conditions she’d found them in: the piles of trash, the smell of sick and shit so overpowering Winnie had taken two giant steps back, into the fresh air, and promptly thrown up. When she’d composed herself, washing her mouth with the bottled water she’d put into her bag, she stepped back into Josalyn’s tent. In her attempt to keep the baby warm, Josalyn had made a nest for him out of blankets, wedging him between her own body and that of her dog, who stared at Winnie balefully, unmoving.

Josalyn’s face was pale, almost greenish along her eyes and jaw. She lay very still next to the bundle, a threadbare towel draped over her body. The smell of death was so present that Winnie’s eyes had immediately gone to the baby and stayed there.

The child was her priority; the child had not asked to be put in this dire situation. She had to get him to safety first. She could reach him if she crawled around Josalyn; and so without thinking, Winnie dropped to her knees and crawled over the human and animal waste, the heel of her hand landing in dried vomit. The dog whined from where he lay, one drooping eye watching Winnie.

She closed her eyes, focusing on everything she was feeling on the inside: her desperate need to reach the child, the urgency, the adrenaline that was pounding past her hesitancy. What she was seeing and touching and smelling wasn’t important; the baby was important. When her hand reached to touch the pale cheek of the baby, he stirred, and Winnie felt a mass of joy, thick and sustaining. Alive!

He was tiny, his weight no more than five pounds. Gently unwrapping him from the blankets Josalyn had used, Winnie lifted him from the cocoon and saw that he was wearing an Elmo onesie that was a size too large—relatively clean aside from his bulging diaper. Winnie eased him feetfirst into her jacket until he was pressed against her chest, splayed out like a little turtle. It would have to do until she could get him somewhere warm. Winnie zipped it up around him, leaving enough room for air to get inside. For the first time in her life, she was grateful that she didn’t have huge breasts, which would have been suffocating to this small creature. Still on her hands and knees, she bent her head to peer inside her jacket where the baby lay, curled as if in a hammock; he was breathing, but not deeply. She crawled back out into the twilight, away from the smell and the filth, gulping in the sharp winter air.

It was bitterly cold; she had to get him to her car, and quickly, but it was parked up the steep embankment and nearly a mile away. Her only option was to scale the frost-slicked grass on her hands and knees. Winnie crawled; she was terrified of slipping. Keeping one hand firmly on the bundle against her chest, she picked her way to the top, never once looking down at Josalyn’s tent, which hung in the mist below her, never once thinking about her. When she reached the top, she straddled the metal railing and swung her legs over the side, landing squarely on the asphalt. And then Winnie took off, racing for her crisp white BMW, which still smelled of new car. She was parked along a skiff of grass between a cluster of houses. She could see them up ahead as her breath chuffed out in bursts of white. She wasn’t thinking about anything but the baby when she climbed into the front seat and jerkily pulled the SUV out of the grass.

If she’d just called an ambulance right away.

She’d meant to—as soon as she got the baby safely to the car. But that’s where everything had gone wrong, so wrong...