A sound. Faint, muffled. Coming from inside the suitcase.
My blood ran cold.
No. It couldn’t be. Please, God, don’t let it be what I’m thinking.
I pulled faster, more desperately. I dragged the suitcase onto the wet sand of the shore. I fell to my knees beside it. My hands fumbled for the zipper. It was stuck, wet, rusted. My fingers kept slipping.
“Come on. Come on. Come on,” I repeated through clenched teeth.
Tears started to blur my vision. I forced the zipper once. Twice. It burst open.
I lifted the lid, and what I saw inside made the entire world stop.
My heart stopped beating. The air caught in my throat. My hands flew to my mouth to stifle a scream.
There, wrapped in a soaked light blue blanket, was a baby. A newborn. So small, so fragile, so still.
His lips were purple. His skin was pale as wax. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. No.”
My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold him. I lifted him out of the suitcase with a gentleness I didn’t know I still had. He was cold. So cold. He weighed less than a bag of sand. His little head fit in the palm of my hand.
His umbilical cord was still tied with a piece of string. String, not a medical clamp. Plain string. As if someone had done this at home, in secret, without any help.
“No, no, no,” I whispered over and over.
I pressed my ear to his chest. Silence. Nothing.
I pressed my cheek against his nose.
And then I felt it.
A puff of air so faint I thought I’d imagined it. But it was there.
He was breathing. Barely. But he was breathing.
I stood up, clutching the baby to my chest. My legs nearly gave out. I ran toward the house faster than I had ever run in my life. Water dripped from my clothes. My bare feet bled from the stones on the path, but I felt no pain—only terror, only urgency, only the desperate need to save this tiny life trembling against me.
I burst into the house, screaming. I don’t know what I was screaming—maybe “help,” maybe “God,” maybe nothing coherent.
I grabbed the kitchen phone with one hand while holding the baby with the other. I dialed 911. My fingers slipped on the buttons. The phone almost fell twice.
“911, what’s your emergency?” a female voice said.
“A baby,” I sobbed. “I found a baby in the lake. He’s not responding. He’s cold. He’s purple. Please, please send help.”
“Ma’am, I need you to calm down. Tell me your address.”
I gave her my address. The words tumbled out.
The operator told me to put the baby on a flat surface. I swept everything off the kitchen table with one arm. Everything crashed to the floor—plates, papers, nothing mattered. I laid the baby on the table. So small, so fragile, so still.
“Is he breathing?” I asked the operator. My voice was a high-pitched shriek I didn’t recognize.
“You tell me. Look at his chest. Is it moving?”
I looked. Barely. Very barely. A movement so subtle I had to lean in to see it.
“Yes, I think so. Very little.”
“Okay, listen to me carefully. I’m going to guide you. I need you to get a clean towel and dry the baby very carefully. Then wrap him up to keep him warm. The ambulance is on its way.”
I did what she said. I grabbed towels from the bathroom. I dried his tiny body with clumsy, desperate movements. Every second felt like an eternity. I wrapped the baby in clean towels. I picked him up again, cradled him against my chest. I started rocking him without realizing it. An ancient instinct I thought I’d forgotten.
“Hang on,” I whispered to him. “Please hang on. They’re coming. They’re coming to help you.”
The minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive were the longest of my life. I sat on the kitchen floor with the baby against my chest. I sang. I don’t know what I sang—maybe the same song I used to sing to Lewis when he was little, maybe just meaningless sounds.
I just needed him to know he wasn’t alone, that someone was holding him, that someone wanted him to live.
The sirens broke the silence. Red and white lights flashed through the windows. I ran to the door. Two paramedics rushed out of the ambulance—an older man with a gray beard and a young woman with dark hair tied back in a ponytail.
She took the baby from my arms with an efficiency that broke my heart. She checked him quickly, pulled out a stethoscope, listened. Her face showed no emotion, but I saw her shoulders tense.
“Severe hypothermia, possible water aspiration,” she said to her partner. “We need to move now.”
They placed him on a tiny gurney, put an oxygen mask on him. Their hands worked fast, connecting wires, monitors, things I didn’t understand.
The man looked at me.
“You’re coming with us.”
It wasn’t a question.
I got into the ambulance and sat on the small side seat. I couldn’t stop staring at the baby, so small among all that equipment. The ambulance took off. The sirens wailed. The world blurred past the windows.
“How did you find him?” the paramedic asked as she continued to work.
“In a suitcase. In the lake. I saw someone throw it in.”
She looked up. She stared at me. Then she looked at her partner. I saw something in her eyes—worry, maybe suspicion, maybe pity.
“Did you see who it was?”
I opened my mouth. I closed it.
Cynthia. My daughter-in-law. My son’s widow. The woman who cried at Lewis’s funeral as if her world had ended. The same woman who had just tried to drown a baby.
How could I say that? How could I even believe it myself?
“Yes,” I finally said. “I saw who it was.”
We got to the general hospital in less than fifteen minutes. The emergency room doors flew open. A dozen people in white and green scrubs surrounded the gurney. They were shouting numbers, medical terms, orders. They rushed the baby through a set of double doors.
I tried to follow, but a nurse stopped me.
“Ma’am, you need to stay here. The doctors are working. We need some information.”
She led me to a waiting room. Cream-colored walls. Plastic chairs. The smell of disinfectant.
I sat down. I was shivering from head to toe. I didn’t know if it was from the cold of my wet clothes or from shock. Probably both.
The nurse sat across from me. She was older than the paramedic. Maybe my age. She had kind wrinkles around her eyes. Her name tag said ELOISE.
“I’m going to need you to tell me everything that happened,” she said in a soft voice.
And I told her every detail. From the moment I saw Cynthia’s car until I opened the suitcase. Eloise took notes on a tablet. She nodded. She didn’t interrupt.
When I finished, she sighed deeply.
“The police will want to talk to you,” she said. “This is attempted murder. Maybe worse.”
Attempted murder.
The words hung in the air like black birds.
