“Here, let’s try this.” She dipped her finger into the water and held it against the baby’s mouth. He sucked at it eagerly and made a little protest when she pulled her finger away to dip it into the water again.
He latched on to her finger a second time—which had the side benefit of cutting off the crying. Liberty took a deep breath and tried to think. There’d been a baby at her second foster home. How had the foster mother calmed that baby down?
Oh, yes. She remembered now. She began to rock back and forth, the gravel cutting into her legs. “That’s a good boy,” she said, her ears straining for the sounds of sirens. “You’re loved. You can do it.”
Agonizingly long minutes passed. She couldn’t get the baby to take much more water, but he sucked on the tip of her finger fiercely. As she rocked and soothed him, his body relaxed and he curled up against her side. Liberty held him even tighter.
“Is he okay?” Marcus demanded.
She looked up at him, trying not to stare at his body. Never in the three years she’d worked for Marcus had she seen him even half this panicked. “I think he fell asleep. The poor thing. He can’t be more than a few days old.”
“How could anyone just leave him?” Now, that was more like the Marcus she knew—frustrated when the world did not conform to his standards.
“You’d be surprised,” she mumbled, dropping her gaze back to the baby, who was still ferociously tugging on her finger in his sleep. Aside from being hot and filthy, he looked healthy. Of course, she’d never seen William before he died in foster care, so she didn’t know what a drug-addicted newborn looked like. This child’s head was round and his eyes were still swollen; she’d seen pictures of newborns who looked like him. She just couldn’t tell.
“You’re just about perfect, you know?” she told the infant. Then she said to Marcus, “Here, wet your shirt again. I think he’s cooling down.”
Marcus did as he was told. “You’re doing an amazing job,” he said as she wrapped the wet cloth around the baby’s body. The baby started at the temperature change, but didn’t let go of her finger. Marcus went on, “I didn’t know you knew so much about babies,” and she didn’t miss the awe in his voice.
There’s a lot you don’t know about me. But she didn’t say it because it’d been less than—what, twenty minutes? If that. It’d been less than twenty minutes since Marcus Warren had said he trusted her because she was the one person who was honest with him.
She wasn’t—honest with him, that was. But that didn’t mean she wanted to lie outright to him. She hated lying at all but she did what she had to do to survive.
So, instead, she said, “Must be the mothering instinct.” What else could it be? Here was a baby who needed her in a truly primal way and Liberty had responded.
The baby sighed in what she hoped was contentment and she felt her heart clinch. “Such a good boy,” she said, leaning down to kiss his little forehead.
Sirens came screaming toward them. Then the paramedics were upon them and everything happened fast. The baby was plucked from her arms and carried into the ambulance, where he wailed even louder. It tore her up to hear him cry like that.
At the same time, a police officer arrived and took statements from her and Marcus. Liberty found herself half listening to the questions as she stood at the back of the open ambulance while the medics dug out a pacifier and wrapped the baby in a clean blanket.
“Is he going to be okay?” she asked when one of the paramedics hopped out of the back and started to close the door.
“Hard to say,” the man said.
“Where are you taking him?”
“Northwestern is closest.”
Marcus broke off talking with the cop to say, “Take him to Children’s.” At some point, he’d put his shirt back on. It looked far worse for wear.
The paramedic shrugged and closed the doors, cutting Liberty off from the baby. The ambulance drove off—lights flashing but no sirens blaring.
The cop finished taking their statements. Liberty asked, “Will you be able to find the mother?”
Much like the paramedic, the cop shrugged. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, she’d barely survived childhood because, aside from Grandma Devlin, people couldn’t be bothered to check on little Liberty Reese. “It’s a crime to abandon a baby,” he said. “If the mother had left the baby at a police station, that’s one thing. But...” He shrugged again. “Don’t know if we’ll find her, though. Usually babies are dumped close to where they’re born, and someone in the neighborhood knows something. But the middle of the park?” He turned, as if the conversation was over.
“What’ll happen to the baby?” Marcus asked, but Liberty could have told him.
If they couldn’t find the mother or the father, the baby would go into the foster system. He’d be put up for adoption, eventually, but that might take a while until his case was closed. And by then, he might not be the tiny little baby he was right now. He might be bigger. And he was African American. That made it that much harder to get adopted.
She looked in the direction the ambulance had gone.
The cop gave Marcus a sad smile. “DCFS will take care of it,” he said.
Liberty cringed. She did not have warm and fuzzy memories of the Department of Child and Family Services. All she had were grainy memories of frazzled caseworkers who couldn’t be bothered. Grown-up Liberty knew that was because the caseworkers were overwhelmed by the sheer number of kids in the system. But little-kid Liberty only remembered trying to ask questions about why her mom or even Grandma Devlin wasn’t going to come get her and being told, “Don’t worry about it,” as if that would make up for her mother’s sudden disappearances.
What would happen to the baby? She looked at her arms, wondering at how empty they felt. “Marcus,” she said in a hoarse voice as the cop climbed into his cruiser. “We can’t lose that baby.”
“What?” He stared at her in shock.
She grabbed on to his arm as if she was drowning and he was the only thing that could keep her afloat. “The baby. He’ll get locked into the system and by the time the police close his case, it might be too late.”
Marcus stared down at her as if she’d started spouting Latin. “Too...late? For what?”
Liberty’s mouth opened and the words I was a foster kid—trust me on this almost rolled off her tongue. But at the last second, she snapped her mouth shut. She’d created this person Marcus saw, this Liberty Reese—a white college graduate, an excellent manager of time and money who always did her research and knew the answers. Liberty Reese was invaluable to Marcus because she had made herself valuable.
That woman had had nothing in common with Liberty Reese—the grubby daughter of an African American drug addict who’d sold herself on Death Corner in Cabrini-Green to afford more drugs, who’d done multiple stints in prison, who hadn’t been able to get clean when her daughter was shipped back to foster care for the third time, who couldn’t tell Liberty who her father was or even if he was white, who’d given birth to a baby boy addicted to heroin and crack and God
