“I know who it is,” Christian heard Kurt say. “It’s that woman from near the school. It’s Christian Lange’s mother.”
Christian pushed in front of the other boys, shoving them so hard that one of them fell, cutting his hands on the fragmented milk bottle shards that were all around the loading area of the mess hall.
Christian, his shirt and pants wet from the washing, looked at his mother lying on the ground. She was faceup, her legs dirty and limp, her eyes closed. Terrified, he held his breath as if he were about to plunge into a pool before he dropped down next to her. He put his hands on her face and checked to make sure there was breath. It was faint but there. His eyes traveled down, and he saw that there was blood all over the bottom of her dress.
A daytime guard, one of the many who patrolled the camp in their big blue pickups, stood there. He bent down next to Christian, his stiff blue jeans full of dust, his hands dirty. “I didn’t see her,” he said, frantically. “She just came out of nowhere. I don’t know what happened. I just didn’t see her.” He put his ear against Helene’s nose to see if she was breathing.
“She’s pregnant!” screamed Christian, pushing the guard away from his mother. “How the hell can you not see a pregnant woman?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t,” said the patrolman again. He had taken off his cowboy hat and was holding it over his stomach. “I swear I didn’t swerve to hit her, I just didn’t see her.” He kept repeating his line to the boys around him while Christian tried to wake up his mother.
“She’s not lying in the middle of the road!” Christian screamed from his position on the ground after he had gently shaken Helene again. “She’s on the side, she’s where she should be, but you hit her anyway! You might have killed her and the baby.”
“Shit,” said the guard, looking at Helene’s protruding belly and the blood on her dress. “Let’s put her in the back of the truck. Quickly. I can get her to the hospital faster than they can get up here.”
Christian kneeled down again and picked up his unconscious mother with the help of the guard and Beringer. They loaded her onto the truck’s flat bed and Christian sat next to her battered body. “They could both die,” he said softly. The baby his parents had wanted for years, the mother he had never successfully detached from: they could both be dead.
“What can I do?” asked Kurt.
“Find my father,” said Christian. “Franz Lange. Get him to the hospital. Tell him what happened. Q section, duplex Q-45-B. We share with the Kalbs.”
Kurt took off running while the truck sped away and Christian held his mother’s slack hand. “They could both die,” Christian repeated to the guard.
“Your mother is alive,” said a nurse once they had arrived at the hospital and his mother was unloaded onto a stretcher by the staff.
She walked him inside the small hospital to a chair near the front door. “You can’t come in with her, but we will find you as soon as we know anything, I promise.” She’d explained to Christian that she was a nurse from the United States Public Health Service, as was Dr. Oliver, the physician in charge. Christian saw some young Japanese-American women in white uniforms go into his mother’s room and the nurse explained that they had trained some of the internees as orderlies and nurses’ aides. “We’ve had more illnesses than we imagined and they make things run smoother. Don’t worry, your mother is in qualified hands.”
When Christian’s father arrived fifteen minutes later, sprinting to the hospital door, the nurse said she would bring him straight back to Helene’s room. He didn’t stop and comfort his son, just shouted his wife’s name until the nurse quieted him and let him through.
Christian sat in the tiny waiting room for an hour, but when he heard his mother screaming so loudly that he was sure the sound carried back to the mess hall, he ran into her private room. As short-staffed as the hospital was, there was no one to stop him.
He didn’t knock on the door, but flung it open, only to see the doctor holding a tiny, blood-covered baby in his arms, still attached to his mother by the thick spiral of umbilical cord. It was a girl, as his mother had prayed for, and she was dead.
“Christian, get out of the room right now,” said his father, seeing him first, but Christian didn’t move. He just stood there staring.
The baby girl was going to end up nothing but a bloodstain on an internment camp hospital floor. A dead baby, just twenty-four weeks old.
“The American killed my child!” his mother was screaming at his father in German. “He’s a murderer!”
The doctor didn’t quiet her, but continued the delivery, cutting the cord and handing the baby to the nurse.
“Don’t look, Christian!” his father shouted again, but his son couldn’t divert his gaze. The baby was pale blue, with tiny bulging eyes and translucent hands. She looked amphibian. Christian kept staring as the nurse wrapped her in a thin white blanket and tucked it over her face while the doctor delivered his mother’s placenta.
The nurse turned away from Helene to take the baby out of the room, but Helene reached out for her, almost falling off the metal delivery table.
“I want to hold her!” she screamed. “Take that blanket off her and give her to me!” She was kicking her legs hard and one of the Japanese-American women had to press her forearms against them to keep her from thrashing herself off the table.
The doctor and the nurse looked at each other and finally placed the dead blue baby on Helene’s almost bare chest, still wrapped in the blanket. Helene unwrapped it and held the little girl tight against her, but the baby’s head flopped to the side, her limbs hanging unnaturally, covered in thick vernix.
Helene started to sob loudly and lose her grip on the baby. But she fought off the nurse’s attempt to take her.
“I want to hold her, and I want to name her!” she shouted. “And I don’t want her buried in this desert hell!”
Christian closed his eyes, stunned, and saw the baby’s dead eyes, gray as stones, following him around the room. He imagined her pale face that would never smile, her cold cheeks that would never be kissed.
“Christian. I mean it,” said his father, moving to his mother’s side. “Get out of this room. Let me be alone with your mother. Right now.”
Christian turned and walked out. He didn’t head to the chair at the front of the office as he should have. Instead, he just stood in front of the closed door picturing the baby’s tiny dead face.
He could still hear his mother sobbing, and he instinctively moved to go back inside.
“Why don’t you wait a bit?” he heard a voice say quietly from behind him. Surprised by the British accent, he spun around to see a young Japanese woman in a white uniform. She was holding a pile of folded bedsheets. “It’s your mother in there?” she asked.