Part 2
Walt tore off his other glove and pressed two fingers gently against the baby’s neck, just below the jaw, where June had once taught him to feel for life in a child too small for panic. For one terrible second, there was nothing but wind and the faint buzzing of the television inside the trailer. Then he felt it: a flutter so weak he almost missed it.
“He’s alive,” Walt said, though Hank was too far down the road to hear him.
Boone gave a sound that might have been a sigh and might have been pain. The dog’s front legs trembled, then slipped, but he still tried to keep his shoulder over the child as Walt slid both hands beneath the blanket. Walt had carried lumber, cabinets, doors, sacks of concrete, and once, years ago, June after she fainted in the garden. He had never held anything that made him more afraid of his own hands.
The baby was frighteningly light.
“Easy, little man,” Walt whispered. “I’ve got you.”
Boone tried to stand when Walt lifted the child. His paws scraped against the boards, but his back legs failed him. Walt tucked the baby inside his coat, against his flannel shirt and the old thermal vest June had bought him the Christmas before she got sick. The cold went through him where the wet blanket touched his chest.
He did not care.
“Hank!” he shouted. “Tell them he’s breathing!”
Down by the truck, Hank had one boot on the road and one in the snowbank, phone pressed to his ear. “I got ’em!” he yelled back. “I got dispatch!”
“Tell them newborn. Hypothermia. Tell them Leah’s not answering.”
“I’m telling them!”
Walt looked at the trailer door. He should get inside. He should put the baby near heat. But there might not be heat, and the door was locked, and every second on the porch felt stolen from a clock that was already running out.
He kicked the bottom of the door hard enough to hurt his hip. “Leah! Open up!”
The television answered with canned applause.
Walt kicked again. Nothing.
He turned toward Hank. “Truck!”
Hank was still talking to dispatch, his free hand waving wildly as if the dispatcher could see him. “We need an ambulance on Morgan Creek Road, last trailer before the creek. Yes, a baby. A baby, do you understand me? No, we don’t know how long. No, the mother’s not—hold on.” He lowered the phone. “They say don’t warm him too fast. Skin-to-skin if you can. Ambulance is coming from the south road.”
“Clinic’s closer.”
“Dispatcher says roads are bad.”
“Marlene’s at the clinic tonight.”
“She said ambulance—”
“Marlene’s closer,” Walt said, and Hank heard the old command in his voice, the one Walt used to have on job sites when a wall was leaning wrong and everybody else was still arguing.
Hank did not argue after that. He ran for the truck, opened the passenger door, and threw everything off the seat with one sweep of his arm: a coil of rope, two empty coffee cups, a box of screws. Walt came down the steps with the baby inside his coat, moving carefully and too fast at the same time.
Behind him, Boone dragged himself to the top step.
The dog tried to follow.
“Boone,” Walt said, stopping despite the cold. “Stay.”
But Boone did not understand stay, or else he understood and refused it. He came down one step, slipped, and landed hard in the snow. He did not yelp. He only got up again, shaking, and stumbled toward Walt with the kind of stubbornness that made Hank look away.
“Put him in,” Hank said. “We’ll come back for the dog.”
Walt looked at Boone, then at the baby’s face beneath his coat. The child’s mouth moved again, silent as a fish beneath ice.
“No,” Walt said. “We won’t.”
Hank stared at him. “Walt, we don’t have time.”
“Then move fast.”
Hank opened the back door. Boone was too weak to jump. Hank bent, muttering under his breath, and lifted the dog’s front half while Walt kept one arm tight around the baby and helped guide Boone’s back legs into the truck with the other. Boone collapsed on the back seat, leaving a wet, dirty smear across the old upholstery.
Hank shut the door and ran around to the driver’s side. “If that dog pukes in my truck, I’m blaming you.”
“If that baby breathes in your truck, you’ll live with it.”
Hank turned the key. The engine complained, caught, and roared too loudly in the frozen yard. Walt climbed in, cradling the child against his chest, and Hank gunned the truck toward Alder Creek with the dispatcher still talking through the phone on speaker.
The road was white and narrow, the snow coming sideways in the headlights. Hank drove with both hands locked on the wheel. Walt bowed his head over the baby and kept his coat open just enough to watch the child’s mouth.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Just keep doing that. Just keep trying.”
The clinic in Alder Creek was not a hospital. It was a low brick building beside the volunteer fire station, with three exam rooms, a tiny lab, an old X-ray machine that worked when it felt like it, and Marlene Price, who had delivered calves before she became a nurse practitioner and still treated most emergencies with a steady voice and sleeves rolled to the elbow.
She met them at the side entrance before Hank had the truck fully stopped.
“Inside,” she said. “Now.”
Walt stepped out and nearly fell. His legs had stiffened in the short drive, and the baby seemed even smaller now that light spilled from the clinic doorway. Marlene took one look at the bundle inside his coat and did not waste a word.
“Exam room one. Hank, get that heated blanket from the cabinet. Walt, sit before you drop.”
“I’m not dropping him.”
“I didn’t ask.”
She guided him through the hall. Boone barked once from the back seat, a hoarse, broken sound. Walt turned.
“Bring him in too,” he said.
Marlene’s eyes flicked toward the truck, then back to the baby. “Hank.”
“I’m getting the blanket.”
“Then get the dog after.”
Within seconds, the baby was on the exam table, still wrapped in Walt’s coat. Marlene moved with frightening calm. She checked his airway, listened to his chest, took his temperature, peeled away the wet blanket in small increments so the warmth would not shock him. Walt stood beside the table, hands open and useless, his fingers shaking now that they had nothing to hold.
The baby made a tiny sound.
Not a cry. More like a complaint from very far away.
Marlene’s face tightened.
“That’s good,” Walt said, needing it to be true.
“It’s something,” she said. “Hank, call dispatch back. Tell them I need transport to County General and I need them to notify the ER. Possible hypothermia, dehydration, neglect. Newborn male, maybe two weeks old.”
Walt swallowed. “Neglect?”
Marlene did not look at him. She lifted the baby’s cap and saw the rash along his neck, the dried milk crusted near one ear, the diaper that had been wet too long. Her hands stayed gentle, but her mouth became a hard line. “The cold didn’t start this tonight,” she said. – Then she pulled the blanket back another inch and went completely still…
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