'I wish he was-' The voice lost its words and became a smothered, exhausted cry of pain. I closed my eyes-and lost the sound along with the sight. I opened my eyes hastily. The room was still there, but the dampness by the door was a puddle now, swelling slowly in the lamplight. The leak in the corner was a steady trickle that had overrun its crater and become a little dust covered snake that wandered around, seeking the lowest spot on the floor. The person on the bed cried out again, and, tangled in the cry, came the unmistakable thin wail of the new-born. A baby! I hitched myself higher on my folded arms. My involuntary blinking as I did so moved time again in the small room. I peered into the pale light. A woman was busy with the baby on the table. As she worked, she glanced anxiously and frequently over at the bed corner. She had reached for some baby clothes when a sound and movement from the corner snatched her away from the table so hastily that the corner of the blanket around the baby was flipped back, leaving the tiny chest uncovered. The baby's face turned blindly, and its mouth opened in a soundless cry. The soft lamplight ran across its wet, dark hair as the head turned. 'It won't stop!' I don't know whether I caught the panting words or the thought. 'I can't stop the blood! Jim! Get here! God help me!' I tried to see past the flare of light but could only sense movement. If only I could-but what could I do? I snatched my attention back to the baby. Its mouth was opening and closing in little gasping motions. Its little chest was laboring but it wasn't breathing! 'Come back!' I cried-silently?-aloud? 'Come back! Quick! The baby's dying!' The vague figure moving beyond the light paid no attention. I heard her again, desperately, 'Vesta! What am I supposed to do? I can't-' The baby was gasping still, its face shadowing over with a slatey blue. I reached. The table was beyond my finger tips. I pulled myself forward over the sill until the warped board of the wide framing cut across my stomach. My hand hovered over the baby. Somewhere, far, far behind me, I heard Peter cry out sleepily and felt a handful of my flannel gown gathered up and pulled. But I pulled too, and, surging forward, wide-eyed, afraid to blink and thus change time again, I finally touched the thin little subsiding chest. My reach was awkward. The fingers of my one hand were reaching beyond their ability, the other was trying to keep me balanced on the window sill as I reached. But I felt the soft, cold skin, the thin hush of the turned back blanket, the fragile baby body under my palm. I began a sort of one-handed respiration attempt. Two hands would probably have crushed the tiny rib cage. Compress-release-compress-release. I felt sweat break out along my hairline and upper lip. It wasn't working. Peter's tug on me was more insistent. My breath cut off as the collar of my gown was pulled tightly backward. 'Peter!' I choked voicelessly. 'Let me go!' I scrambled through the window, fighting every inch of the way against the backward tug, and reached for the child. There was a sudden release that staggered me across the table. Or over the table? My physical orientation was lost. I bent over the child, tilting its small quiet face up and back. In a split second I reviewed everything I had heard or read about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then sent my fervent petitionary prayer into the lungs of the child with the first breath. I had never tried this before, but I breathed-not too hard! It's a baby-and paused and breathed and paused and breathed, losing myself in the rhythm, losing my sight in a too-close blur, afraid to close my eyes. Then there was movement! Breathe. And a gasp! Breathe. And a turning! Breathe. And a thin wail that strengthened and lifted and filled the room. My eyes ached with keeping them wide and I was gasping. Blessedly the room swam grayly. I thought, Peter! Oh, Peter! And felt a small twitch at the hem of my gown. And felt the flannel tug me back to awareness. There was a movement beyond the lamp. 'My baby.' The voice was hardly audible. 'Hattie, let me see my baby before I die.' 'Vesta!' Hattie's voice was sharp with anxiety. 'Don't talk about dying!. And I can't leave you now. Not even to 'I want to see my baby,' the faint voice persisted. 'Hattie, please-' I looked down at the still wailing child, its face, reddening with life, its clenched fists blindly beating the air. Then I was with the baby near the bed. The young face in the shadows below was a vague white blur. The baby fit into the thin curve of the young shoulder. 'I can't see!' The pale suffering face fretted in the shadows of the bed corner. 'It's too dark.' Hattie whirled from the empty table, the lamp she had just lifted tilting heavy black smoke against one side of the chimney, slanting heavily in her hands. She righted it, her eyes terrified, and looked quickly back over her shoulder. Her face, steadied by the determined set of her mouth, was white as she brought the lamp to the bed, her free hand curving around the top of the chimney to cut the draft. She held the lamp high above Vesta. Vesta weakly brought herself up to one elbow above the baby and peered down at the crumpled face and the smudge of dark hair. 'A girl,' she smiled softly. 'Name her Gayla, Hattie. It's a happy name. Maybe she will be-' Her face whitened and she slid slowly down from her elbow. 'Oh, I wish,' she whispered. 'I wish I could see her grown up!' The sound of the rain filled the silence that followed, and the tug on my own gown was no longer a tug, it was an insistence, an imperative. My gown was straining back so that I felt as if I were a figurehead on a ship. I moved involuntarily backward. 'Who came?' Vesta's fading voice was drowsy. 'There's nobody here but me.' Hattie's voice jerked. 'I thought someone came.' Now she was fading and the whole room was stirring like a bowl full of smoke and I was being drawn back through it, hearing Hattie's, 'There's nobody here but me-' The sound of the baby's cry cut through the rain-sound, the swirling smoke and Hattie's voice. I heard Vesta's tender crooning, 'There, there, Gayla, there, there:' Then I faded-and could finally close my eyes. I faded into an intolerable stretching from adobe window sill to car window, a stretching from Then to Now, a stretching across impossibility. I felt pulled out so thin and tight that it seemed to me the sudden rush of raindrops thrummed on me as on the tightened strings of some instrument. I think I cried out. Then there was a terrific tug and a feeling of coming unstuck and then I was face down, halfway out of the car window, rain parting my hair with wet insistent hands, hearing Peter's angry, frightened voice, 'Not even sense enough to come in out of the rain!' It took quite a while to convince Peter that I was all there. And quite a time to get my wet hair dried. And to believe that there were no mud stains on the sleeves of my gown. And an even longer, disjointed time to fill Peter in on what had happened. He didn't have much to say about what happened from his point of view. 'Bless the honest flannel!' He muttered as he wrapped me in a scratchy blanket and the warmth of his arms. 'I was sure it was going to tear before I could get you back. I held on like grim death with that flannel stretching like a rubber band out the window and into the dark-into nothing! There I was, like hanging onto a kite string! A flannel one! Or a fishing line! A flannel one! Wondering what would happen if I had let go? If I'd had to let go! We comforted each other for the unanswerable terror of the question. And I told him all of it again and together we looked once more at the memory of the white, young face floating in the darkness. And the reddening small face, topped by its smudge of black, floating in the yellow flood of lamp light. Then I started up, crying, 'Oh Peter, what did I save her for?' 'Because you couldn't let her die,' he said, pulling me back. 'I don't mean why did I save her. I mean for what did I save her? For making her own way? For that's enough for her kind? For what did I save her' I felt sorrow flood over me. Peter took my shoulders and shook me. 'Now, look here,' he said sternly. 'What makes you think you had anything to do with whether she lived or died? You may have been an instrument. On the other hand, you may have just wanted so badly to help that you thought you did. Don't go appointing yourself judge and jury over the worth of anyone's life. You only know the little bit that touched you. And for all you know, that little bit is all hallucination.' I caught my breath in a hiccoughy sob and blinked in the dark. 'Do you think it's all hallucination?' I asked quietly. Peter tucked me back into the curve of his shoulder. 'I don't know what I think,' he said. 'I'm just the observer. And most likely that's all you are. Let's wait until morning before we decide. 'Go to sleep. We have hunting to do, in the morning, too.'
