Evidence of Grace

The silver-grey minivan sped north on Sparrow Street. Charlie Jericho turned his head toward its roaring engine and jumped to his feet from his perch on his front steps, shaking and twisting his strong hands. His eyes darted to the railroad crossing beyond the scrubby field across the street and a few careless blocks from his house. The Norfolk Southern careened around the curve and accelerated only one hundred yards from the crossing. A horn blasted like the tooth-rattling scream of a dying animal.

The minivan hurtled along the street so fast it swayed sideways and caught the telephone pole on its left front fender while skidding around the corner on two wheels. Like a cartoon bumper car, it flattened the post of a stop sign and bounced onto the tracks coming to rest squarely in front of the oncoming train.

Squealing metal-on-metal brakes sounded, followed by a series of staccato-like crashes from the telescoping of fuel tankers into grain cars at the front of the train. Within moments, ethanol leaked from a ruptured tank and detonated, ignited by a spark from the hot steel rails. A massive fireball leapt far into the sky. The clangor assaulted Charlie’s eardrums, and vibrations hammered with such force he thought they would shake his fillings loose. He drew back, gasping. Debris flew. A minivan hubcap rolled right over his foot.

Charlie screamed and ran inside to call 911. But there was no need. The explosion prompted a cacophony of sirens, already descending upon the scene. He swallowed hard before rushing toward the crash, until the reeking smoke rolled over him like a blanket, dropping him to his knees to crawl beneath it until intense heat pushed him back.

Firemen doused chemicals onto the strung out wreckage, and the minivan disappeared. A mean, acrid smell belched out of the heart of the wreck. Fumes spread in a thick haze over everything in the vicinity, burning Charlie’s eyes and throat.

A baby cried. The sound drew Charlie toward a stand of uncut weeds closer to the accident site. The crying grew louder and more intense. A tiny shoe lay on the eroded gravel at the edge of Sparrow Street. Charlie picked it up. Now a kind of panic struck him and he crashed through the thigh-high weeds alone among the other people thronging the fringe of the accident scene. He found the baby in a waist high clump, still strapped into a carrier on its side.

Charlie turned the carrier over and fumbled with the bindings. One cheek was skinned by the rocks, but the crying stopped. He picked up the baby, hugged it to his chest. Standing there feeling helpless, Charlie shifted his weight from foot to foot, uncertain what to do. When the crying erupted again, he squeezed the infant more tightly, scooped up the carrier, turned and ran into his house.

“Too bad Mae isn’t home,” Charlie spoke aloud. “She’d know what to do; how to take care of you.” He cleaned sooty pebbles from the baby’s face as tenderly as he could with shaking hands, and he talked as he took off the singed, smoky sleeper. A girl.

“What do you eat, little one?” he whispered, swabbing her gently with a warm washcloth

and wrapping her in a soft blanket. He found a small bottle saved from feeding a kid goat Mae had once rescued, filled it with milk and screwed on the nipple and collar. But she wouldn’t take

it. Charlie scratched his beard. Of course. It’s cold.

Holding her while the bottle warmed, he closed blinds to shut out flashing lights and nearby carnage, but nothing could muffle the shouting, crying and incessant sirens. Why don’t they stop the damn sirens?

Settling on the couch, he fed her warmed milk. She took it eagerly, and Charlie cooed to her big gray eyes, open and inquiring. After an awkward burp, she grew drowsy against his shoulder. “Should I take you to the police now?” he whispered. “They might not believe me.”

When Mae got home well after three a.m., they were both asleep on the couch.

Mae Jericho swatted back a few strands of her sweat-loosened hair toward her ponytail and pushed up the sleeves of her sweltering nurse’s uniform. She worried about a young woman, pregnant, brought in from the grisly carnage with premature labor. The woman was barely younger than Mae and had the same caramel skin as Charlie. Threading her petite but forceful body through the injured throng clogging the hospital entryway, Mae pulled her out of line toward a makeshift exam room. A man holding a cloth to his bloody head cursed her.

The gratitude in the woman’s eyes was unmistakable, but she stared at Mae in a strange way. Mae managed to take and record both her blood pressure and pulse rate before a contraction wracked her thin frame. Wrapping her in a blanket, Mae scanned the crowded scene of moaning and crying humanity with little hope of finding a doctor to attend this patient. “I must find help,” she said. Before she hurried off, the woman whispered something Mae didn’t understand. “Ce soir, vous vas trouvez ton mieus be′ne′diction.” She shrugged and the woman grasped her wrist and whispered with a heavy accent. “Today you will find your greatest blessing.” Mae broke away as the woman’s eyes bored into her retreating back.

Mae slipped off her shoes in silence and dropped her purse on the upholstered chair with a soft thud. She bent over her sleeping husband, Charlie, to kiss his cheek and tell him she was finally home. An infant was nestled against his chest, and her hand fluttered to her mouth to stifle her sharp inhale. Oh my. Why does he have a baby? Where did it come from?

The street lamp cast a milky pallor into the darkened room. Mae was able to make out their forms but not their features until she leaned closer. Charlie’s chin rested crookedly on his chest with his beard barely brushing the top of a small round head, hairless in that light. The gold in his wedding band glinted in opaque darkness against the baby’s back.

Overwork weary, Mae sunk to her knees and trembled. She touched the sleepers. Her husband’s eyelids wavered, and the baby sighed. She stroked the baby’s back with one finger; Charlie opened his eyes then smiled.

Mae held out her hands, opened, to take the baby. “Charlie?” she whispered, but he held his finger to his lips. Together they tiptoed into the kitchen.

By now, nearly four a.m., all but a few guards posted by the railroad to keep looters and curiosity seekers away were gone from the accident site. The quiet was expectant with questions.

Charlie kissed Mae on the cheek and held her with the still sleeping baby between them.

“Charlie?”

“I rescued her, Mae. Be proud of me.”

“A little girl?”

Charlie nodded. A warm, wet substance seeped onto the front of Mae’s uniform. “We could use a few diapers,” he said.

Mae’s eyes were shining. “And formula and bottles and baby powder and a crib and some clothes…”

“Now hold on, Mae.” Charlie’s voice was a soft alarm. “This is not our baby.”

“Whose is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, where did you get her then?” Her voice rose.

“Shh.” Charlie took a deep breath and let it taper out. He reached across the table to close his still sleep-warmed hand over hers. “I told you I found her. When she was crying,

all I could think of was helping.”

“You what?”

“Guess you know about the train wreck?”

“Sure. Had to work four extra hours at the hospital and thread my way home through the back streets. Sparrow Street is closed. But Charlie, what about…” Realization washed over her features as early daybreak spread through cracks in the kitchen blinds, giving the room a pale glow. “She’s from the train wreck?” Mae put one hand over her mouth as if to stop her sudden awareness.

“It was unbelievable here, Mae. Those jolts from the crash and then the explosion made everything vibrate, probably for miles. Chaos, screaming, sirens. I ran right over there to help, but the heat kept me back, and then the police drove everybody away. I sat on the porch wringing my hands like an old lady, wishing there was something I could do.” He hung his head.

“It was a nightmare at the hospital too, but Charlie−”

“I followed the cries over to that old weed patch across from Phillips’ driveway. And there she was. One shoe off but strapped into a baby carrier. I brought her into the house to clean and comfort her before I took her to the police. You’d have to see her to believe me. But there was so much commotion, I waited until things calmed down a bit, and, I guess you saw, we both fell asleep.”

“She’s a miracle,” Mae said.

“Yes, I’d say so.” Charlie smiled down at the baby still sleeping in Mae’s arms. “But she’s not ours. We have to take her back. Someone will be searching for her.”

“Maybe not. How do you know they won’t think she got ground to pieces under those tons of mangled, twisted metal out there?”

“I don’t. But Mae, she’s not ours.” Charlie closed his eyes. Why didn’t I think about what Mae would say? “Wouldn’t you have wanted me to take care of her?”

“Of course, you couldn’t leave her there, but Charlie, she’s our miracle, don’t you see?” Mae grasped Charlie’s hand and squeezed it. “This is the answer to our prayers. Our little girl. Because you found her, it has to be so.”

“Mae, we’re talking about somebody’s child here, not manna from heaven,” he said. “We have to find her family.”

Mae’s eyes glistened. She lifted her chin. “She’s already found her family.”

Charlie made coffee in near silence, and Mae sat at the scratched Formica kitchen table, succumbing to a wakeful dream. Her mind recited a litany of items to care for a baby. The only sound was the baby’s light sleep-breath until dawn crept upon the house, and the shouts of railroad investigators were heard. How would they answer a knock at the door?

Inhaling the aroma of the coffee for a moment, Charlie poured two cups and sat down.

“Mae, whatever life she has, or had before the collision, she has people, somewhere.” His shoulders slumped with defeat before his wife even spoke. There was no mistaking the spark of eagerness in Mae’s bright eyes when the baby stirred and cried into the half-light of the morning.

Charlie yanked open the screen door while he struggled to hold two bags of groceries. The hinge popped out, and the door fell away from its frame. With great care, he set the grocery bags on the cement stoop and turned to push the door into place. Shouldn’t be too hard to fix this. When he picked up the bags, he smiled at a dozen bleached cotton diapers fluttering in the breezy sunshine on the clothesline.

Inside, he pulled a newspaper from one of the bags and carried it to Mae, who was sitting

in his grandmother’s old rocker holding the baby. Her skin glowed and soft contentment filled her face.

Charlie kissed the top of Mae’s head, and pointed to the newspaper, mouthing “Read?”

Mae nodded before carrying the tender bundle to the small crib they’d kept after Charlie had crafted it a few years earlier. The baby sighed and settled into the softness. Holding hands, Mae and Charlie crept into the kitchen.

Charlie poured two cups of coffee; Mae smoothed the newspaper over the top of the table. Her brow furrowed when she skimmed the front page. “Nothing here,” she said.

With systematic concentration, Mae read at each article on each page. Tucked into the lower left corner of page five she found it.

Ex-Mayor’s Infant Granddaughter Missing after Vehicle-Train Crash

As a follow-up to our previous report of Monday’s fatal vehicle crash with a

Norfolk Southern on the Indiana line (see page A2, Tuesday’s edition), the

infant child of one of the victims is missing. Tillman Police Sgt. Lloyd Andrews

stated today the body of Grace Gilliver Richards, the granddaughter of former

Mayor, the late John Gilliver, has not been identified. She was believed to be a

passenger in the vehicle at the time of the accident that killed her mother, Lisa

Gilliver Richards, and a sibling, Benjamin Jack Richards, Jr. Anyone with information

on Grace’s whereabouts should contact the Tillman Police.

The explosion critically injured five, including two firefighters. One of the two firefighters, James Noble Jr., has been upgraded from critical to serious condition at Mercy Hospital. The other firefighter, Mike Sanders, remains in critical condition. Property damage estimates have not been released. The cause of the crash is still under investigation.

Charlie’s eyes met Mae’s over the steam from their rising coffee cups before they each looked away.

Charlie stared into the Formica. His thoughts tumbled in confusion, fighting to become the words he didn’t have the courage to say. When their silence made want to him scream, he said, “Well, it sounds like Jimmy Noble is going to be all right.”

A tear dripped onto the newsprint from Mae’s lowered face. Charlie was gripped with fierce love and tender compassion for his childless wife. He reached for her hand then moved to

hold her shoulders shaking with silent sobs.

When she quieted, Mae went to the counter for some tissue and busied herself with unloading grocery bags. She kept her back to Charlie as she spoke. “I told Crystal and the other nurses and aides on my shift I’m taking care of my sister’s baby−probably for a long time. They were all so happy for me, but Crystal asked why I’d never mentioned my sister. I said it hadn’t come up, and now she needed me to take care of her little girl, Amy, until she gets better.”

Charlie had been pretending to himself to read the newspaper, but his head shot up at her words. “Amy?”

“Yes,” Mae said, still not looking at him. “I’m calling her Amy. I’ve always liked that name, and it seems to suit her.” She smiled as she unpacked the formula. “What did you tell them down at Mercer’s when they saw you buying formula and diapers?”

Now Charlie paled. “Well, we told the same lie. I told Mercer we’d be taking care of your sister’s child for a while. He doesn’t know you don’t have a sister.”

Mae turned her shining face to him.

“See, Charlie, it’s meant to be. God wouldn’t have let that little angel survive that horrible wreck to be found by somebody as kind as you for no reason.”

Charlie shook his head. “I’m nobody. That child is from money, Mae. Besides, if you lost your child wouldn’t you want her back?” Instantly he regretted his words.

Mae spun around to stare out the kitchen window, twisting a strand of toast-brown hair with her index finger. “Yes,” she whispered. “I do.”

Charlie went to her, hugging her. “Sorry, sorry. I’m such a dope, Mae.” He closed his eyes and spoke into space above her head. “You’re the only good, truly good person

I’ve ever known since Nana died. I’d never hurt you.” He held her close counting her heartbeats. Her smothered sobs slowed, halted.

She pushed back, avoiding his eyes. For a minute he was afraid she would leave him, his greatest fear. He urged his rising panic to stop.

“If that’s true, you’ll let me keep this baby, our baby now. It’s meant to be. She has no parents but us. Oh, Charlie, we can give her so much love!”

Charlie sighed with fatigue and defeat. He always surrendered to Mae. He reasoned she must be right because she was more educated. But he feared losing her more than death.

Judith Branson gave her daughter a fancy name, Corey Mae Branson, then shortened it to Mae, and that is how her daughter was always known. Judith was a stranger to Mae, but that week when she rocked Amy in Charlie’s grandmother’s old horsehair rocking chair or fingered the yellowing doilies the old woman had crocheted, she pushed down a fierce longing that surprised her.

The sleeping baby yawned and stretched but didn’t wake. Mae wanted to hug her tightly, breathing in sweet baby-powdered perspiration, and never let her go. She sat rocking and staring into a past that wouldn’t be forgotten, like a hazy phantom lingering at the edges of her mind.

She had been old enough to walk. Her mother held her hand as they made their way through the store. She had been frightened by the crowd pulsing around her and cried. Two or three times her mother stooped to her side, told her to be quiet but didn’t carry her.

They walked on and on. She could barely keep up. At last they stopped and her mother lifted her to a chair in a corner. Kneeling, she told Mae to be a good girl, wait for her there and she’d get a treat. Then Judith had hugged her and disappeared among the shoppers.

She had been glad to not be walking, but time grew; she worried. She looked up at every passing face for her mother. No one paid any attention to the quiet little girl. Soon she had to pee and was thirsty. If she wet her pants her mother would be mad when she got back, so she held it as long as she could. When she leaked onto the chair, Mae’s shame added to her fear, and

she crawled down to hide beneath a clothes rack.

Still, no one came to her; eventually she cried herself to sleep. When she awoke, the room was dark and all of the people were gone. Mae had seen her mother for the last time.

Amy stirred. I’ll never do that to you. No one will take you away from me. Mae kissed

her forehead leaving a wet spot on Amy’s soft skin.

One question haunted Charlie. Why was that Norfolk Southern barreling around the curve so fast that day?

“You know, Mae, the trains are going faster through here since they put down the new track.”

Her direct blue eyes grew pensive above the pot of onion soup she was stirring. The aroma suffused their kitchen with a pleasant hominess along with the sparkling windows and pots of thriving herbs on the windowsill. Her vision shifted outside to the scraggly field across the road and the tracks beyond. The air was still tinged with the cloying smell of burning brush and weeds and the gagging smoke. “Now that you’ve mentioned it, you’re right.”

“But there’s something about that particular train. It was a huge freight pulling cars of grain and then flammables. Why did it also have passengers on board?”

Mae bit her lip. “There was talk at the hospital about that,” she said. “It was pulling an illegal load and that’s why it was speeding—to get out of town fast.”

Mae and Charlie quarreled. A week had passed since the train wreck.

“We might be seen as heroes,” Charlie said. “It’s just an idea.”

“And not a very good one.” Mae stood and ran her fingers through her hair. “How could you, Charlie? How could you even think that?”

He glowered. “You’d be surprised what I can think.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing, Mae. We did the right thing to save her but keeping her is turning it into something wrong.”

She didn’t back down and stood with her hands on her hips. Neither spoke.

Charlie focused on cracked green plastic tile on the kitchen wall. He grimaced. Baby Amy sat propped up between pillows in the garage sale highchair they had bought. Her clear

gray eyes found him, awakening the guilt of betrayal in him. She drooled from a toothless grin and pumped her arms as if to clap.

“There sweet girl,” Mae whispered and blotted Amy’s chin with a faded dishtowel. “You have to be pretty for Daddy.”

At the word daddy, Charlie felt a gut-deep pang. Is this what it takes to make her happy? Already he was thinking of the baby as Amy, knowing from newspaper accounts read to him her name was Grace. The truth was colliding with the deception in their lives more acutely every day, just as the train had collided with the van. If he could no longer trust himself, how long until he could no longer trust Mae? How much longer until he forgets and accepts the lie as truth?

He smiled at Amy and seeing that, Mae smiled at him. She came to stand behind his chair, hugging his shoulders and kissing the top of his head. “She already loves you, Charlie,” she said. “You are her true daddy, no matter who the biological father really is. You rescued her and brought her to me. Our little angel.”

“She’s everything you, we, always wanted. But I’m afraid to love her and unable not to. What if someone comes and takes her away? You know, a man like me . . .”

He pulled back and looked up at her, his brown eyes questioning.

Mae stroked his hair. “They won’t, Charlie,” she said. “God has given her to us, and it’s up to us to figure out how to keep her. I know we can do it.”

“It’s more than that. How can I live with myself if we keep her?”

She soothed him, caressing his shoulders and arms. “It’s okay honey. We’re a family now.”

Baby Amy chose that moment to begin wailing.