Chapter 5 Mason - A Valiant Effort
MASON A Valiant Effort
Is she…” I gulped as the woman in the emergency room led me into the elevator.
My breath was getting short. Was I panicking?
I must have been because the woman was rubbing my back, saying, “Don’t worry.
Everything is going to be just fine. I’m Daisy, and I’m going to help you, okay?
” I couldn’t respond. “What’s your name? ” she asked.
“Mason,” I managed.
“You did the right thing,” she said, soothingly. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Tell her about it… I wasn’t sure I could find the words to explain the past twenty minutes. It had all seemed so ordinary. Until it wasn’t. But I guessed that was life in a nutshell.
The only newborn babies I had ever held were Greer and George, my plump, full-sized niece and nephew. And that was in the regular way, in this very hospital I found myself in now, when they were clean and swaddled in blankets wearing hats knitted by the Junior League.
Now, I said to Daisy, “When I saw her in the dumpster, she was so covered with white gunk and blood that it took me a minute to realize she was a baby.”
Daisy nodded. “Yeah. They look different before they’re cleaned up.”
“When I saw her, Drew held my feet, and I dove in and grabbed her.” I shook my head. “I don’t know why I put her in my shirt.”
Daisy nodded and patted my arm. “Your body heat might have kept her alive.”
I had considered calling 911, but, since we were only two miles from the hospital, it would take them way longer to get to us than it would to just drive. So I tossed my keys to Drew and said, “You’re going to drive to the hospital.”
He nodded, looking a little like a deer in headlights.
As we ran beside each other, me still holding tight to the baby, I realized that we had practiced for this.
“Drew,” I said, still running. “You’re my man.
This is the bottom of the ninth, the bases are loaded, and I need you to strike out the other team’s best batter. You hear me?”
He nodded again and threw open my car door, then his, and started the car. The mewling had stopped. Was she dead? Had we been too late?
As Drew drove in the direction of the hospital, I realized that I was too freaked out to look.
“We probably shouldn’t have driven her without a car seat,” Drew said now, reminding me he was here too. “But I guess we weren’t the ones who left a baby in a dumpster.”
Daisy nodded. “Hey, you guys were just going on instinct.”
Going on instinct. That was something Drew and I had in common. With the other guys, I coached them within an inch of my life. But not Drew. Drew was like me in that, on that field, he could read the energy, the batter, the crowd. He felt it in his bones—just like I had. “Instinct,” I repeated now.
The elevator doors opened, and Daisy said, “Sandy, we have a baby found in a dumpster here! I’m going to take her to Room 307 to examine her and get her cleaned up.”
Sandy, apparently, a bespectacled middle-aged woman in scrubs, walked toward me and peeked behind my hand. “Oh, my good Lord. I thought I’d seen everything.” Then, to Daisy, she said, “I’m going to get the formula.”
I followed Daisy into a room with a hospital bed, a chair in the corner, and a plastic crib-looking thing beside the bed. Finally, she took the baby from me. She was so small and very still, but her eyes were open wide, taking in the room.
“Hey there, little girl,” Daisy crooned to the baby, putting her down gently. “Miss Daisy’s going to get you all cleaned up, and then we’re going to get you a good bottle.” She shook her head. “Kind of weird to clean up a baby in a delivery room when she wasn’t here for the delivery.”
A man in a white lab coat that I took to be the doctor skittered in, and Daisy handed me a handful of wipes, which I realized were for my chest. Looking at the residue clinging to my skin, I suddenly felt sick.
Drew looked pale, so he must have been feeling the same.
I got up and put my arm around him, leading him out of the room.
Our work here was done. We had done something good.
Whether it worked or not, we had at least tried to save this baby.
“You good?” I asked Drew in the hall.
“Do you think the baby is going to live?” he whispered.
“I don’t know, bud.”
Then he asked the question that, until this very moment, had not even occurred to me. “Whose baby do you think it is?”
Duh. It was someone’s baby. “It would have to be a student, right?” I asked. “Someone too scared to take the baby to the authorities or a place that could take care of it?”
Drew nodded. “I don’t know. I guess. But damn. Don’t you leave it at, like, the fire station or something?”
These were things that, as a high school teacher if not as a human on the earth, I should know the answers to.
So I answered, honestly, “You know, Drew, this has never really come up. I can’t one hundred percent say.
” I paused, then asked the obvious question: “Do you know of anyone at school who was pregnant?”
Cape Carolina High was a midsized high school. It bordered between 3A and 4A, flipping back and forth every few years. It was big enough that I didn’t know every student, and I was sure Drew didn’t either.
“I mean, not that I know of,” he said. He looked ashamed, and I could read that shame.
It was the same shame that, had this been me in high school, I would have felt too.
Kids like Drew and me—athletic, popular—we didn’t really concern ourselves with the dramas and traumas of kids outside our specific sphere of influence.
It had been one of the most eye-opening parts of being in a school again as an adult, realizing that there were so many kids who had so much to offer who didn’t fit the mold of what mattered to me when I was a student.
I was a better man now; I saw the world—and the people in it—in such a different way.
I knew that this was changing Drew. It would be a formative life experience that would attune him to the real world in a way I’d been sheltered from.
“Are you scarred for life?” I asked.
He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, I’m never having sex again. I can tell you that much.”
I raised my eyebrow. “That will be a valiant effort.”
“Should we, like, go now?” Drew asked.
I chewed the inside of my lip. “You know what? You go. Take my car back to school. Go home and get some rest. We have a really early morning.”
“We’re still going fishing?”
I shrugged. “I mean, yeah. Not much else for us to do.”
He nodded. “How will you get home?”
“I’ll Uber.” I paused. “I think I need to see how this turns out or something.”
“Text me?”
I nodded.
A policeman I knew well stepped off the elevator, and I mouthed, Go.
Now. Another thing I hadn’t thought of… We’d found an abandoned baby in a dumpster.
The police were going to get involved. As the officer walked to the nurses’ station, and Drew beelined for the opposite hallway, I went back to check on the baby.
Daisy was holding her, in a rocking chair, feeding her a bottle.
She was wrapped in the blanket with the multicolored feet I remembered from my niece and nephew, with a striped hat on her head, eyes still wide open.
Daisy didn’t notice me, just stared down at the baby, rubbing her cheek with her thumb and whispering to her.
I love women. I always have. But the sight of one had never overwhelmed me quite like this. I just wanted to be near her.
“Is she okay?” I whispered.
“The doctor has thoroughly checked her out. She’s almost seven pounds.”
“Is that…” I didn’t know the right word. “Good?”
She laughed. “It’s good. She’s a perfect size, not premature. And she doesn’t show any signs of drugs. Our girl has a touch of jaundice, so she’ll be here with us for a bit. But, otherwise, she’s perfect.”
She looked perfect to me.
She grinned up at me. “You saved her life, Mason. You’re a hero.”
“What’s jaundice?”
“An excess of bilirubin. Gives our girl this savage tan she’s got going. But with plenty of milk and some special light that we have in our intermediate nursery, she’ll be living her best life in no time.”
Daisy looked up at me. Our eyes locked, and I think we must have had the same thought: What was the best life for an abandoned baby?
I had no idea what came next. I had the craziest thought: Would they give her to me since I found her?
But that was nuts. I didn’t want a baby, nor did I have any idea how to raise one.
But she looked so sweet and innocent and so quiet in Daisy’s arms that I wondered how hard it could be.
But then I remembered that night I’d stayed over at my brother Parker and his wife Amelia’s because George and Greer were both projectile vomiting and… parenthood wasn’t that easy.
“Do you have kids?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. But I spend a lot of time taking care of other people’s.”
“Same,” I said. “But mine are bigger. I’m a high school coach.”
“I’ll have to come to a game. I just moved here, so I literally don’t know anyone.”
My eyes widened. “Wow. Well, you know me now. I can introduce you to some people if you want.”
She smiled. “I’d love that.”
I was about to respond as the officer entered the room. I slapped him on the back. “What’s up, Gar?” Then I said, “Gary Mendoza, this is Daisy…”
“Stevens,” she filled in for me.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. Then he turned to me. “This isn’t yours, is it?”
There was a twinkle in his eye, but still. That’s what I was talking about. A preconceived notion from a person who would never let the high school version of me go. But I laughed it off. “You know, Gary, I couldn’t always say this. But I am one hundred percent positive this is not my baby.”
“Can you walk me through this really quickly?”
I told him what I knew, which, frankly, wasn’t much.
“Well, look, this is more a DSS matter,” Gary said. “I was just in the neighborhood, so I wanted to make sure we didn’t have a criminal situation on our hands.”
Daisy shook her head. “No signs of trauma or abuse, thank goodness.”
Gary looked at me. “We’re presuming this is a high school student?”
I shrugged. “I would assume so, but I really have no idea.”
Daisy nodded. “Poor kid. High school can be really hard…”
There was more to that. I could tell. Gary said, “Mason, why don’t you come out into the hall with me.”
“Look,” Gary said, walking out of the room, “if you hear anything, let me know. DSS will be all over this, and, if the parents aren’t willing to step up, we really like to find next of kin when we can. So if any kids mention any leads, it could help us get this baby placed faster.”
I nodded. “I’ll do some digging.”
Gary shook his head. “Some kid is really, really lucky you were at the right place at the right time. A couple more hours, and we could have had a homicide on our hands.”
The thought made my blood run cold. I shook my head, suddenly wanting to get home. I thought about getting an Uber. I knew Gary would take me home, but I didn’t need any rumors brewing about how people saw Mason Thaysden in a cop car. This story would be enough for one day.
I was tired, but I couldn’t resist seeing the baby one last time. Or, I realized, as I walked back into the room, maybe who I really wanted to see one more time was Daisy.
“Hey, um, since you don’t know anyone, why don’t you give me your number? I can introduce you to some women I think you’d like.”
She raised one eyebrow at me. “So, is that a sneaky way of asking if you can call me?”
I smiled. I liked her. “Maybe it is. If it was, could I?”
She made a face like she was considering. “I mean, you did save a baby today.”
She gave me her number, and I wondered if I’d use it. Probably. I’d been a baseball hero for a lot of my life. Then, for a time, the exact opposite. But the way Daisy smiled at me made me think that maybe all that wasn’t over for me. Maybe I could be a hero of a different kind.