Tom had taken the day off so I was just working BLS with a new employee. We got called for a person screaming in Stowe Village, which was one of the public housing projects, and was probably the worst of them.
We happened to be close by, heading south on Main Street, just having crossed the Hartford line from Windsor, where we’d returned a gorked-out old man to a nursing home. We banged a quick right up Kensington Street and we were out. We could hear the howling from the parking lot. We ran up the stairs, and there was a crowd of neighbors around an open door, and what was spooky was they were quiet, not yelling and causing a commotion like you normally saw in the projects. We pushed through the door, and in the dim light of the apartment, a room that smelled like rotten hamburger and marijuana, a crying woman lay on her knees holding something tight to her. I saw two men sleeping on the sofa. A TV was on soundless. I stepped closer and saw it was an infant. “What’s going on?” I asked.
The woman didn’t even look at me; she just continued wailing.
I stepped nearer. The child did not appear to be moving. I put a hand on her shoulder, which was rocking. “May I see the child?”
She looked up at me then. She was thin, emaciated—with the wild eyes of a crack addict. She handed me the baby. It was cold and stiff—lifeless as a doll.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” I must have said. I looked at my partner and he looked scared shitless. The people in the door were looking at me. They saw what I held.
“Is she alive?”
“That baby dead.”
“Do something! Do something!”
I raised the baby to my mouth and kissed its cold lips, blowing in air, but the baby was as stiff as a plastic doll. I started toward the door, relieved to see two police officers cutting through the crowd. They saw my terror.
“I’m going to Saint Francis,” I said. I moved my fingers up and down on the baby’s chest.
“That baby dead. She dead! Run, boy! Run. Help that baby! Help that baby! Crackhead mother should be in jail!”
I went through the crowd and out to the ambulance. My partner, shaking, got in the back to help me, but I just said, “Dude, just drive! Drive fast!”
I didn’t even know what I was doing. The baby was dead, beyond dead, but there I was breathing air, doing mouth to mouth. I never even grabbed the ambu-bag we had, never put the baby on a half board, I was just breathing into a doll, the dead baby’s eyes open and lifeless.
We were lucky we even made it to the hospital. My partner was so nervous; he never even turned on the lights, so we were barreling through intersections with just a siren. I came into the ER, holding the baby cradled in my arm, doing CPR and still breathing in its mouth.
The nurse took the baby from me and laid it on the bed. I kept doing CPR until she gently eased me away. The doctor felt the baby’s cold skin, and looked at me, the tears rolling now down my face. A grey-haired nurse hugged me. I sobbed uncontrollably.
***
Ten minutes later one of our crews brought in a twenty-one-year-old man in cardiac arrest from a heroin overdose—one of the men on the couch. The other was roused with Narcan. A third ambulance brought in the mother. Half the police department must have been at Saint Francis. They interviewed me a couple times to ask what I had seen when I got there, but all I could say was the mother was holding the baby and wailing.
The story that came out was most disturbing. The mother had come back from a night out—a night spent looking for crack, and doing what it took to get it. She’d left her baby with a friend, who’d shot up when his buddy came over. While they nodded off, at some point the baby had been sodomized. They apparently hadn’t realized why the baby was now quiet.
That day I kept thinking what kind of world did we live in where you could look out at an apartment window and see beautiful office buildings, where people made hundreds of thousands of dollars and drove fancy cars back to their homes in the suburbs, and yet at the same time look around and see poverty, neglect and the results of illiteracy and a broken-down human system. I mean, what kind of chance did that little girl have? How come we couldn’t protect her? I found out Tom and I had revived each of those addicts before. Maybe we should have just let them die. Maybe if we hadn’t done our jobs, that baby would still be alive. Maybe instead of letting crack whores ply their trade in the back of my cab, I should have driven them out to the country, and put a bullet in their heads, and thrown them in a shallow grave. The city would be terrorized by the prostitute killer, but that baby wouldn’t have had to have gone through what it did. Maybe the fear of the prostitutes I didn’t kill would send those prostitutes running for a convent. Hardly likely. The rock was too strong. And people without hope had no chance against it. But how could we give them hope? If a baby in a mother’s arms couldn’t do it, what could a country do? These questions tormented me.
***
Carrie’s dress was gorgeous—long and sleeveless, a chiffon blue that matched her eyes. The dress hid her rounding figure and yet showed off her ample cleavage.
The event was held at the Sky View Ballroom out near the airport due to security for the Vice President. He was running late so they held us out in the hallway for two hours. It was baking hot, the air conditioning wasn’t working, but at least they had an open bar. Carrie made the most of that. I think she felt nervous on account of how good-looking Tom’s girlfriend was. She started in with her talking and her voice got really loud, and I had to shush her a few times. After that, I gave up. I figured what the hell after a while. I didn’t want to put her down in public.
I was doing my best to keep smiling and show her a good time, but I was distracted and feeling out of sorts due to the baby call I had done. In the back of my mind I was forming a plan to talk to the Vice President about my day. I was going to ask him about a world that no longer saw the fallen sparrow. I was going to be the voice of that little girl. All the free drinks, and the fancy dinner they were going to serve, and at the same time there were more little girls out there right now in that city and in cities all over the country. Someone needed to help them. I mean, what was the point of patting ourselves on the backs as supposed heroes when we couldn’t even protect a baby girl?
They finally let us in after making us go through metal detectors and then getting pat downs. We sat at a table near the back. The Vice President gave a short speech, reading from a teleprompter, while cameras from all the networks filmed. They had the twenty of us who were getting awards get in a line, and we came up as our names were called one after the other. It didn’t look like I would have a chance to say anything. The Governor shook my hand, and then the Vice President shook my hand, and then another guy—I think he was a Congressman—put a medal around my neck as I smiled and nodded.
Carrie gave me a kiss when we got back to the table. Ned and the boss shook my hand. The Vice President left as soon as he’d hung the last medal, walking out with fingers flashing the peace sign, and then the Congressman made a long windy speech that I don’t remember anything from, I was so caught up in my thoughts. I just sat there quietly while Carrie sucked down the wine like it was water. I just kept thinking I had let that little baby girl down. I should have walked up to the podium, grabbed the mike, and said, “Listen people, listen people, there’s something bad going on out in our streets, something real bad.” I imagined them all listening, and then behind me a video playing sights from the Hartford streets, while Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” came over the sound system. And maybe I sang karaoke along with it, or maybe I sang just like Marvin, deep and soulful. And the whole world would change, at least until investigative reporters dug into the life of the man who dared stand up for children in front of the government muckety-mucks. They would discover that I was a common thief. Instead of being praised, I would be shamed, hounded by the press and even common people. Dogs would bark at me. Children would point their fingers at me and taunt. And I would leave the city, forever a pariah.
I was expecting a conquering hero’s night of passion, but after stopping in the bathroom to pee, when I came out, I found Carrie passed out on the couch with my medal still around her neck. I put a blanket on her, turned the TV to mute and sat next to her for a while. I had another one of my bad headaches that night and I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the porch and stayed there till the sun came up.