Vincent took the baby from my hands, checking him over quickly. He cut the umbilical cord, examined Amy, delivered the placenta. I supposed it was all done with my help, but my tears were in the way and I moved on autopilot.
“Take this baby out of the ward,” Vincent said to me. “Keep him warm and get him some oxygen and an ambulance to the nursery at the local hospital.”
I nodded, wrapping the baby in a towel, my hands shaking with adrenaline. Then I carried the tiny bundle through the ward, stopping only long enough to let Amy see her little son before heading outside. In the stone building, I sat down next to one of the oxygen tanks and told the switchboard operator to call an ambulance. We had no masks tiny enough for a baby, so I held the cannula close to his nose. He could not have been more than five pounds but he was beautiful, with pale fuzz on his head and perfect features. I held him in my arms still swaddled in the towel. I held him the way I wished I could have held my own son. Held him and whispered to him and wondered how I was going to let go of him when the ambulance finally arrived.
70
The ambulance took Amy’s baby away, and I sat down on the bench in front of the stone building. I was needed in the ward, but I needed time to myself even more. I heard the ward’s screen door slam, and in a moment, I saw Vincent walking toward me. He pulled off his mask as he walked, then sat down next to me. For a few seconds, neither of us said a word. His presence felt like such a gift.
“Do you remember,” he said finally, “when I was about sixteen and you were about twelve, and we were sitting on my stoop eating watermelon and seeing who could spit the seeds the farthest, and that little girl from down the street rode by on her rollerskates?”
I nodded. “Beatrice, her name was,” I said. I knew where he was going with this.
“Beatrice. That’s right. How old was she? Five?”
“I think so.”
“And she fell right in front of us.”
“Probably caught her skate on a watermelon seed.” I smiled.
“Probably,” he said. “I used to think about that day. Whenever you and I would talk about eventually working together in our medical office, I’d think about that little girl and how it felt to help someone side by side with you. I remember looking down at your twelve-year-old hands. You were calmly pressing my handkerchief against that bloody cut on her forehead, while I was trying to hold her broken arm in place.”
“I remember,” I said. He’d been more of a big brother to me then than someone I would eventually fall in love with.
“Those few minutes with Amy and the baby brought that all back to me.” His voice was quiet and calm. His hands rested on his thighs. “That was our dream, wasn’t it?” he asked, though it wasn’t really a question. “Working together someday?”
Among other dreams, I thought. My throat felt too tight to speak.
“You saved that baby’s life, Tess,” he said. “You performed like a nurse with twenty years’ experience.”
My eyes burned. I tried to say “thank you,” but again, the words caught in my throat. They came out in a whisper I wasn’t sure he heard.
“I just wanted to tell you that,” he said, getting to his feet.
I grabbed his hand, not wanting him to leave, then instantly let go, afraid someone might see us. I looked up at him.
“Every day, I come to work terrified you won’t be here,” I confessed.
He sat down again and took my hand, holding it between both of his. I savored the warmth of his palms. His fingers. Their shape. The smooth skin. So familiar to me. I pressed my palm against his.
“I keep thinking I should leave,” he admitted. “There are other doctors who could take my place, and it frankly hurts like hell to be this close to you and know you’re married to someone else.” He squeezed my hand. “I don’t want to leave though. Now that I’ve finally found you … and I can see you’re not happy. You got yourself in a bind. I’m angry you didn’t tell me. Didn’t trust me enough to come to me.”
“How could I?” I said. “How could I admit to you that I’d slept with a stranger? That I was carrying his baby? What would you have done? Would you still have married me?”
“I would have had to do some soul-searching,” he admitted. “But I know you, Tess. Or at least, I knew you then. I knew what a good person you were. I knew that one mistake didn’t define you. Of course I still would have married you.”
A truck drove into the clearing not far from where we sat. I pulled my hand from between his at the same moment he rose to his feet again. He looked down at me.
“Are you ready to come back in?” he asked. “Things are crazy in there today.”
He would have married me, in spite of my infidelity, in spite of the fact that I was carrying another man’s child. I threw it all away. I lost the chance to be his wife. I lost the chance at happiness. I wondered if it was possible to find it again.
“Yes,” I said, standing up. “I’m ready.”
71
When our shifts ended that evening, Grace and I walked outside to see a small crowd of people in the clearing. A car bearing the radio station logo WHKY was parked in the scrubby grass nearby.
“What’s that all about?” Grace asked, pointing.
As we walked closer, we could see that the group stood in a semicircle around a man holding a microphone. Henry was there, and he smiled when he spotted me and waved us over. When we reached the outskirts of the circle of people, I realized that the man with the microphone—a reporter?—was interviewing Vincent. Next to him stood Mayor Finley and his wife, Marjorie.
Marjorie spotted us and let out a squeal. She grabbed me, pulling me into a hug. “Thank you!” she said, then turned to Grace. “Thank you both so much!”
“These must be the nurses,” the reporter said, grinning at us, and only then did I realize WHKY was there because of what had happened that morning with Amy Pryor and her baby.
Vincent smiled. “Yes, these are the nurses,” he said. “Tess DeMello.”
“Kraft,” I corrected him.
“Tess Kraft,” he said. “And Grace Wilding. All the nurses here are excellent,” he added, “but Amy Pryor and her son are alive today because of these two women. Grace operated a handheld inflator to help Amy breathe while outside of the iron lung, and Tess delivered the baby on her own. The baby wasn’t breathing and Tess performed artificial respiration—what we call mouth-to-mouth insufflation—on him, which required a great deal of care and skill.”
“Mrs. Kraft,” the reporter said to me, “can you tell us more about what happened?”
I explained what had taken place the best I could without making the whole event sound too frightening for Amy’s parents to hear. The man next to Henry threw a question my way and I noticed he was jotting my answer down on a notepad. A newspaper reporter, I guessed, and then I realized he was not the only one. A couple of men and one woman were taking notes. Another man was snapping pictures. The story was bigger than I’d imagined.
“Did you have special training to know how to save the baby?” one of the reporters called out.