THEN
If you look back at your life, you’ll see the moments when everything changed. It might be the instant when the technician’s voice shifted from breezy to matter-of-fact as she did your mammogram. Or maybe it was when your phone rang as you were driving and you looked down for just a second to see who was calling instead of keeping your eyes on the road. They’re the tiny shifts that send us careening onto another path or nudge us in a different direction. For me, it happened on an overly hot Tuesday morning last October. The day the baby fell from the sky.
I was on my way to Xander’s occupational therapy appointment and I remember the feel of the heat rising off the sidewalk and Xander’s sweaty little hand in mine. We were already late.
“Come on, Xan, let’s race,” I said. “See if you can beat me to the door.” I tugged on his hand. “One, two, three, go.”
Instead of running, however, Xander dug his heels to a stop and pointed.
“Look, Mama, a pirate,” he cried.
I looked up to see, walking our way, a bearded man with an eye patch, and that was when I saw the flash of pink above my head. For the briefest of moments, a nanosecond of time, I thought it was a bag of laundry.
Then some part of me realized it was a child.
I didn’t even think before I dropped Xander’s hand, leaped forward and curled my arms outward.
The weight of that tiny falling girl drove me to the ground.
My knees skidded across the sidewalk and my left elbow smashed into the concrete. I felt myself start to roll and I hugged that little girl tight against my chest. There was a dull thud as the side of my skull hit the hard pavement and I heard a scream. For a moment, I saw stars.
Then I was flat on my back, the toddler’s big brown eyes staring into mine, so close I could see the little flecks of gold in them.
“Oh my God,” someone cried.
The girl’s mouth opened and she let out a wail.
Above me, a white curtain fluttered out from an open second-story window.
“Call an ambulance,” a man shouted.
My ears rang like a fire alarm and faces appeared above me. The world took a single jerky turn. I squeezed my eyes closed.
Then a gentle voice: “You can let go, honey. I’ve got her. I’m a nurse.”
I didn’t want to let go. Yet I felt the little girl being pried from my arms. A mumble of voices rushed in and then receded like waves on the shore.
“She saved that baby’s life,” a woman said.
“She’s a hero,” a man agreed.
Which was the same thing the cop called me later as I sat in the back of an ambulance after “the Catch,” as it would come to be known.
“That was something how you caught that kid,” the officer said. His voice was full of admiration.
He had reddish blond hair, a gap between his front teeth and a rash of freckles that covered his face and arms. He looked like a boy in my sixth-grade class, a kid named Wilson, whom everybody had teased.
“If you don’t mind me saying, you would have made a helluva wide receiver,” the officer said.
I was staring through the ambulance’s back windows, watching a clump of television cameras aim their lenses at the second-floor window of the apartment from which the girl had fallen. Officer Freckles, as I thought of him, told me the baby’s mother claimed she’d opened a window in their new home to catch a breeze and hadn’t noticed the screen was missing. While she was on the phone, her daughter, an active twenty-month-old, had somehow scrambled up onto the back of the couch under the opening and tumbled out. The baby’s name was Molly. I hoped she was OK.
“What?” I said.
“You know, like catching a football?” Officer Freckles said.
“Oh,” I said, turning back to look at him. “I clean houses.”
The officer’s forehead crinkled into a frown. “I’m not sure I’m following you there, ma’am.”
“I mean I’ve got strong arms. That’s how I caught her.”
“Oh, gotcha,” he said.
Xander lay on his back on the ambulance floor, listening to his playlist on my phone. “George Strait. ‘I Cross My Heart,’ ” he said, and thumped his heel once on the ground as if to punctuate the point.
“Lucky for her you came along when you did,” the officer said. “Otherwise…” He let his voice trail off.
An image formed of the little girl Molly lying on the ground with blood pooling beneath her small head, her limbs splayed in unnatural positions, a bit of brain matter leaking out.
“I think I might throw up,” I said.
The officer grabbed a tube-shaped plastic bag and handed it to me. I held the bag over my mouth and breathed deeply until the nausea passed. Finally, I lowered it to my lap.
“All good?” Officer Freckles asked.
I wasn’t “all good” but I nodded anyway.
“Can I go now?” I asked the officer. “I’ve got to get home.”
“You should go to the hospital. Get checked out.”
“I don’t have insurance,” I said, which was true, but mostly I wanted to get away from the cop, from the commotion outside.
“How about I take you home?” the officer said. “You might black out or something. You hit your head pretty hard.”
“I’m OK. I need to get out of here.” I handed the tube back to the cop. “Come on, Xander.”
“Really, you ought to get checked out.” Officer Freckles looked at his notes. “Mrs. Russo,” he added.
Outside, another TV truck pulled up. I turned to the cop. “Do you have to put my name in your report?”
“Sorry,” he said, although he didn’t look like he was. “SOP. Standard operating procedure.”
“It’s just that I’m a pretty private person.” I looked out the ambulance windows again.
Officer Freckles followed my gaze. “I hear you. Those reporters are scum.”
“Vultures,” I said.
I didn’t explain more.
“Listen, I’m not supposed to do this,” the cop said, and looked out the window again, “but I know the EMT. I’ll get him to drive us around the corner so those clowns don’t see you, and I’ll walk you to your car, make sure you’re OK.”
“All right,” I said.
The officer winked. “It’s the least I can do for a hero like you.”
Which is exactly what I wasn’t.
I didn’t tell the cop that, however. Maybe I should have. Instead, I let him walk me to my Subaru and wait on the sidewalk until I drove off. The scrapes on my knees and elbow burned, and I wished, for a second, I could rewind time so the mother would have noticed the missing window screen and the baby wouldn’t have climbed up onto the couch and I wouldn’t have been the one walking by at the moment she fell and somebody else had caught her—an ex–baseball player, for instance. But then maybe I should have rewound even further. To what had happened before I went to prison. To that winter’s evening when I was seventeen.
Xander was in his booster seat behind me and Carrie Underwood was on the radio. I debated canceling my regular Tuesday afternoon cleaning clients, the Kiplingers, but what would that change other than creating an even bigger hole in our bank account?
The Kiplingers were a pair of fussy real estate agents who lived in a seven-thousand-square-foot house that looked as if it should have been located on a vineyard in the South of France but had accidentally been dropped into a gated community on the outskirts of Sacramento, California, instead. They insisted that their house should resemble a model home rather than a place where people actually lived. The granite countertops had to be shiny enough to see your face in them, the towels were required to be hung just so and the throw pillows needed to be fluffed and then chopped, so the corners stood up like Doberman pinscher ears.
Six months earlier, they’d also installed one of those camera-based alarm systems that not only recorded the comings and goings in the house but allowed them to watch whoever was inside. Once, Mrs. Kiplinger had sent me a text saying she had noticed that I was putting the burgundy-striped sheets on their bed when she’d specifically left me a note to use the sage green set.
Their finicky little hearts would have stopped if they had seen Xander wandering around their house, and yet there hadn’t been enough time to drop him off at home so Mark could watch him and also get to their house on time. We had only one car. Besides, what if Mark had asked why I was all skinned up and saw the worry in my eyes when I told him?
“Xan, baby,” I said, and looked into the rearview mirror, “Mama has to go to work and I need you to help me.”
He wrinkled his nose.
“If you can watch cartoons and be quiet as a mouse, I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone when I’m done. How’s that?”
“I can do it,” he said solemnly. “I like mouses.”
At the Kiplinger house, I parked my car in the shade of a giant oak, grabbed my cleaning caddy and step stool and told Xander to wait in the car. I let myself into the house, went into the kitchen–family room area with its expansive hardwood floor, overstuffed furniture and giant TV and got out my feather duster. I tied a bandanna over my hair and began to swipe the duster over the Kiplingers’ walnut bookcase, atop which the telltale camera blinked its red light. I tried to act nonchalant as I climbed the step stool to dust. Instead, I gave the camera a little shake and tossed a white cleaning rag over the lens.
Let the Kiplingers think that their fancy camera system had malfunctioned or that I’d accidentally jostled it and turned it off while I cleaned. I knew I couldn’t get away with the stunt twice but I hoped it would work for now.
I hustled back outside, moved the car in front of the garage, where I knew there was a blind spot with no cameras, and snuck Xander into the house. I gave him a Fruit Roll-Up, turned the TV to the Nickelodeon channel and went to work.
I stripped the Kiplingers’ bed (they’d had sex this week, which wasn’t always the case), started the laundry and cleaned the four bathrooms, the two guest bedrooms, the office and the formal living room before I headed for the kitchen–family room area.
Xander said he had to go to the bathroom, so I took him into the garage and had him pee in one of my cleaning buckets.
“Let’s always pee in buckets,” he said as his stream drummed against the plastic.
“Let’s not,” I said.
My head thumped as I scrubbed the kitchen sink and wiped down the granite countertops. Outside the Kiplingers’ big French doors, their pool shimmered cool and blue in the heat.
If I could, I would have stripped off my clothes and waded into the water, letting myself sink below the surface and opening my mouth so the water rushed in and I wouldn’t have to think about the trouble that might be coming. Instead, I shook off the thoughts, grabbed my mop and went to work on the kitchen floor. The scrapes on my knees and elbow flamed every time I moved.
When the house was done, I snuck Xander back to the car, returned inside and changed the TV channel back to PBS. Then I climbed the step stool and used the handle of my duster to flip the cloth from the camera.
On the way home, I stopped at the drugstore and bought Xander a vanilla ice-cream cone for a dollar fifty-five.
“You’re such a good boy,” I told him.