DOROTHY

Are you in there?

Good. I thought that you were.

As I was saying: That rain! It had turned from prickly sleet into a pitiless deluge. I can still feel it beating my hair from its pins and rapping my neck with cold knuckles before it snaked an icy rivulet down my back. Teeth chattering, I drummed down the steps and to the dead lawn, where I splashed past the bandstand, over a muddy flower bed, and through some little trees. I stopped short. Ten-foot iron spears loomed in the dark before me: the fence that kept in the residents. I grabbed onto one of the rusty palings to catch my breath, then hoisted up the baby. She looked up from inside my coat. Even with fat raindrops plunking on her eleven-month-old’s fluff, her face was blank.

Ice shot through my veins.

I closed my collar over her head and plunged on toward the gatehouse. There was nothing wrong with her, no matter what Mrs. Lamb said. And if there was, I didn’t care.

The excuses I had cooked up for the guard were a waste. He wasn’t in his little hut. I slipped out the gate and onto State Street, its bricks shining under a streetlamp.

I hadn’t gotten far when I heard the sucking of shoe rubbers against brick. I turned away to let their owner pass.

The sucking stopped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw soggy trouser legs about a body’s length away. I tightened my grip on the baby. Caught!

“Are you all right?”

My sights crept up a long black coat to a dripping umbrella. The umbrella tipped to reveal a young man in a bowler and rain-fogged wire-rim glasses. He had a chin the size of a hand trowel.

“Ma’am?” he asked. “You need help?”

My teeth hurt from chattering. A horse pulling a buggy clopped by, leaving a weighty splat. I could smell the manure as the buggy juddered away.

The chinny fellow wouldn’t leave. “Ma’am?” He cleared his throat. “You don’t even have a hat.”

I didn’t. It had fallen off when I’d snatched the baby out of the crib. Go away, I wanted to tell him, but couldn’t move my mouth. People get lockjaw from stepping on rusty nails. This was what it must feel like.

“My sister Edna lives around the corner. On Parnell. I was just heading there from a wireless telegraphy meet-up.” He stepped closer with a rubbery squish.

He had sensitive lips, sweet as a child’s in that tremendous chin. I laughed. I wasn’t quite right.

He pulled back his head. “Ma’am?”

From somewhere on the other side of the fence, a muffled groan escalated into a shriek, then dissolved in the spattering rain.

He sighed. “I don’t know how Edna stands living by this place. I couldn’t bear hearing this suffering all night and day.”

The top of my coat gapped open as I turned away.

He leaned to look in. “Say, is that a baby in there?”

I shrank back.

My knees buckled. He reached out to steady me but stopped short of making contact. He seemed to know that if he touched me, I would run.

He spoke gently, as if to a skittish animal. “My name is William but I go by Bud. Bud Dowdy. Everyone calls me Rowdy Dowdy.”

I rolled my gaze up at him. He looked as rowdy as a baby bunny.

He edged in the direction in which he wanted to coax me. “I’m going to my sister’s now. Around the corner. See?” He pointed. “We can fetch a cab from there to take you wherever you need to go. But come get warm first.” He saw my hesitation. “If you want.”

He took a few steps away, then stopped, as if encouraging a stray cat.

The few times in my life that I’d trusted people had not worked out well. But there was something gentle about him, something good. And I had to get my baby out of the rain.

In his sister’s home, a tidy frame cottage with a neat gingerbread-trimmed porch, I sat on the edge of a wooden chair, not wanting to get it wet, while I kept my grip on the baby on my lap and a cup of tea. Small as it was, it was a nice house, homey, smelling of furniture wax and fried potatoes. Clocks ticked on nearly every surface, brass clocks, wooden clocks, porcelain clocks, clocks with danglies dripping from them, each clock clicking to its own particular beat. On a pink-flowered chair, his sister Edna, no-necked, graying, as stout as a fireplug and blessed with the family chin, stared at me, stirring her own tea. She offered the baby her spoon. She glanced at me when the baby didn’t reach for it. The baby couldn’t even sit up right.

She laid her spoon on her saucer with a clink. “Who are you? What were you doing by the State School with a baby on such an awful night?” When I didn’t answer quickly enough, she asked her brother, “Who is she?”

What could I tell them?

“Can’t you see that she’s in trouble?” William exclaimed.

The clocks chittered away.

“How old is the child?” she asked.

I told her eleven months.

Her chin rubbed her chest as she shook her head. “Bud has always brought home baby birds and rabbits and such. I have fed more little creatures with eyedroppers because of this man.” She bounced her elbow on the arm of her chair in emphasis as she pointed at him. “But this is the first time that he’s brought home an actual human baby and her mother.”

He blushed so violently that it seemed to light up the fine black hair combed back from his forehead.

“ ‘Bud, Bud, Stick in the Mud.’ He’s always been shy. Knows more about wireless transmitters than he does about women. If you ever need to learn the Morse code, you’re in luck.” The clocks tapped as Edna twirled a curl at the base of her sagging yellow pompadour. “But you look like a good enough little girl.”

I didn’t know what to say about that.

She put down her cup and got up. “I’m not going to send you back out into the rain with a child. Come on. You can’t stay in those wet clothes. You must be frozen.”

When I didn’t move, she snapped her fingers. “Let’s go. Hop to.”

William spread his hands as if there was nothing he could do about his sister. He beamed when I put down my cup and followed her.