Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Cradle

Rufus and Henry the VIII both turned their heads toward the brush beside the trail. There was a short bleating sound, and for a moment I wondered if a baby goat had somehow wandered into the bushes. The sound came again, and Rufus bounded toward it. I was right behind him, but this time I knew: It was not a goat.

I circled the end of a line of bushy bougainvillea and jerked Rufus to a stop. A dark-haired woman lay on the ground looking up at us with terror in her eyes. She clutched a newborn baby to her chest. The baby’s skin was bright pink and glistening, its jet black hair wet with blood clinging to its skull. A long umbilical cord trailed from the baby into a dark red pile of blood-soaked leaves.

I said, “Joyce, come here right now.”

The baby let out another cry, and the woman pulled it close. Her arms were as thin as a child’s.

Joyce ran to look, then silently tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

While I rummaged through my backpack for my cell phone, Joyce took Rufus and Henry the VIII over to a stand of saplings nearby and tied them up. They sat side by side without a whimper, as if they knew something very important had happened in the human world.

As soon as I pulled my phone out of my pack, the young woman on the ground started to cry. Her voice was a high desolate keening, her mouth slewed so she looked like a person on drugs, as if she hadn’t had a decent meal or a restful hour’s sleep in a long, long time. Through the tangle of hair falling in front of her face, I could see that she was much younger than I’d realized at first. A teenager.

I dialed 911 as I knelt beside her and put a gentling hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, honey, you’re gonna be okay.”

The 911 operator answered, “911, what is your emergency?”

“A young woman has just given birth in the woods. We need an ambulance.”

“Is the baby breathing?” the operator asked, as if she had this conversation every day.

“Yes.”

“Is the mother hemorrhaging?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How long has it been since she gave birth?”

I looked at the girl. “How long has it been since you had the baby?”

She flailed her head from side to side. “Please no, miss,” she moaned. “Please no, no medicos.”

I cringed. “Do you speak English?”

She hesitated. “A little.”

The operator said, “What is your location, please?”

Joyce knelt down at the girl’s side. “Sweetheart, do you have papers?”

The girl hesitated, then shook her head no. Even non-English-speaking immigrants understand the word “papers.”

I clicked off the phone and looked more closely at the young woman. Her dark eyes stared back at me like a trapped animal’s. Joyce knelt down beside the girl with her sweatshirt ready to swaddle the baby. Our eyes met.

Joyce said, “Don’t tell me.”

“We have to do this ourselves. Either that or let them take her to the ER, where she’ll probably be arrested.” The girl looked from me to Joyce. “Look at her. She’s terrified.”

Recently, in what had become a very famous incident, a local hospital had admitted a young man for emergency treatment, only to find out that he was an illegal alien. The man was treated, but instead of releasing him, the hospital contacted immigration and the man was deported back to his own country. He had a family here, and a job, but none of that mattered. His life was destroyed, and his family was left to fend for themselves.

For a second, Joyce looked as devastated as I felt. Then every fiber of her body seemed to firm up, and I remembered that in her former life Joyce had been a marine.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

Her tone was so authoritative that I was happy to let her take charge. She stood up and brushed off her shorts decisively. For a split second, my mind wandered off, probably to avoid what was about to happen. I should really keep a former marine with me at all times, I thought to myself. They’re quite handy.

Joyce said, “We need to get her inside, but…”

At first I didn’t realize she was talking to me. But then my eyes followed her gaze from the tiny newborn down the umbilical cord to the dark mass of blood and matted leaves lying on the ground.

“That’s gotta be cut.”

I raised my hands up and cupped them over my ears like a “hear no evil” monkey. In the police academy, I’d learned how to deliver a baby and how to cut the cord, but I’d never actually done it.

With just a touch of desperation I said, “Maybe we could leave it? People do that, don’t they? It eventually just falls off, right?”

Joyce shook her head. “Sometimes, but in this case it will be impossible to move them safely. We have to.”

She was right, and I knew it. We sat there for a moment as if frozen in time. Three women brought together by some perverse twist of fate, huddled over a tiny wriggling bloody baby, with no one to witness but the squirrels, the birds, and a couple of dogs tied to a maple sapling. Rufus and Henry the VIII lay side by side, watching our every move with rapt attention, like spectators at a tennis match.

Joyce said, “My shoes have Velcro. Give me your shoelaces.”

I snapped to and pulled the laces from my Keds and handed them to her. She was studying the still-pulsating umbilical cord closely.

“Don’t want to do this too soon,” she said. “Do you have a knife? Or scissors? Or I can run to the house.”

“Pet sitters always have scissors,” I said and dove into my backpack. “I use them for clipping kitten toenails or cutting any number of things stuck in matted dog fur. And here’s a box of baby wipes. I use them for cleaning my hands when I’m traveling, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton swabs.”

I realized I was rambling on nervously, but I couldn’t stop myself. I laid everything out in a row on Joyce’s sweatshirt.

Joyce looked at the scissors and sighed. “They’re not very big, are they?”

“They’re razor sharp, though. And we can anesthetize them with the rubbing alcohol.”

Joyce raised one eyebrow. “You mean sanitize?”

“Yeah, that.”

The young woman was watching us with mounting fear. When she saw the scissors, she whimpered and began scooting backward, trying to get away from us.

Joyce laid a hand on the girl’s ankle. “It’s okay. Trust me, honey, it’s okay.”

But the girl didn’t trust either of us, all she knew was that we were bringing out sharp instruments we might be intending to use on her.

I tried my rudimentary high school Spanish. “ Es necessario que … um, to cut”—I made scissoring motions to illustrate—“ la umbilical.” For the first time, I glanced at the baby’s sex. “ La niña will not have dolor. No pain, te prometo. ”

The girl looked at the umbilical cord and then at me. She didn’t look as if she believed my promise, but something in her eyes told me she understood.

The cord had stopped pulsating. I moved closer to the baby and tied one of my shoelaces around the cord a couple of inches from the baby’s body. The girl watched me intently.

Joyce said, “Por favor.”

With greater trust, the girl laid the baby down so I could more easily tie the other lace closer to the baby’s body. I dabbed alcohol on the cord between the shoelaces, then dipped the scissors’ blades into the bottle of alcohol and swirled it around.

Joyce looked sternly at the young mother. “Hold her steady.”

She seemed to understand. Her hands pushed against the baby’s sides gently to keep the baby from wriggling too much. I slid the blades over the cord.

As if she were giving a demonstration to a medical school class, Joyce said, “The cord is very tough. It’s hard to cut.”