The Child of 551 and Tipper

551 and Tipper.
That's where it happened.

I think I visited the past or a memory. At some point, I remember seeing a father with his baby, who was considered to be a special needs child, alone without the mother. Somehow, I knew she had passed away. It was sad to see a broken family but I was glad the father had stayed with his child despite the additional hardships that his condition surely brought about.

Then I was back in the past. We were in a car. The father was driving, I was lying in the seat behind his. I'm not sure how I had room to lie down but somehow I did. The mother was in the passenger seat and had the back of the seat fully reclined into a makeshift bed. She was still in a hospital gown and had a thick sheet over her lower half, much the same as the kind they have in hospitals. The baby was bundled up and lying on top of the center console, which was a large flat rectangle. It clearly wasn't safe to be driving that way, but no one thought anything of it.

I looked at the baby and he looked back at me. He was barely a few days old. One of his eyes was a bit larger than the other; not enough to cause any mental issues but enough to be considered a deformation. He was a cute baby though.

The mom was exhausted. She was lying in  her chair, staring at her baby, with lightly-curled strands of her black hair fallen in front of her face. Without thinking about it, I reached forward and brushed her hair to the side so she could see more clearly.

I looked back to the baby, and the mother finally spoke. She was teasing me, asking if I wanted to feed the baby. She sounded as if the two of us had been the best of friends. I laughed, and I told her I was probably dried up with as old as my own kids were. My daughter was almost two, so she had stopped feeding months ago.

The mom smiled and eased herself up a bit to take her baby. Time seemed to pass quickly here, and the next thing I knew she was putting the baby back on the center console. I think she fed him, but I didn't get to see that part.

But as she set him back, her grasp of his blankets slipped a bit. The baby missed the console and hit the front edge of the passenger seat, by her feet, before falling to the passenger floorboard.

I jumped up and grabbed the baby to make sure he was okay. He seemed fine; his blankets must have kept him protected from the fall. I looked to the parents to see if either of them had freaked out too. The mother was trying to lay back down. I don't think she was even aware of the fact that her baby had fallen. But when I looked to the father...he didn't react the way I expected him to, the way the man I had seen before, holding his child, would have reacted. I knew he was driving, so he couldn't just jump over to grab his son, but he looked so casual. Like he was watching me collect his child as if it had been my purse that had fallen. As if I were just picking up the spilled contents of a sack of leather. He had no attachment, no worry, no care. That bothered me.

I laid the child back in his place on the center console, making sure he was okay and that he was safe. I was about to turn to the father to scold him about his lack of caring when the mother made a sound. It was something like a cross between a moan and a gasp, and it didn't sound good.

I turned to look at her. She was sitting up slightly, leaning back. Her gaze was out of focus and her shoulders weaved back and forth slightly, like she didn't have balance or control. She whispered, "Please call nine-one-one...and tell them...I'm bleeding." Then she pulled her right hand out from beneath the sheet. It was soaked—coated entirely—in dark blood. The color is what really stuck with me. It wasn't bright red, like fresh blood, nor was it thin or aqueous. It was thick and congealed, with a mucus-like texture that spread between her fingers. It was a dark, mauve-like purple with brown, like old blood, bad blood, but it shone black. It ran down her fingers, over her wrist, and began oozing down her arm. There was so much of it. So much blood. Bad blood.

I screeched at the husband to stop the car, and I could feel his panic. At least he had emotions, that was something. I pulled out my cell phone at stared at the screen, but for a moment I was frozen. I knew I needed to dial a number but for the life of me I couldn't remember how to access the phone itself. I knew this was it. This was how she died. What could I do to save her? Could I save her? I only paused for a moment before it clicked into place and I brought up the keypad, carefully dialing the right numbers and hitting the button to call. The car stopped and I leapt across the mother and out the passenger door, away from traffic.

As I waited for the operator to answer my call, I saw myself standing there. The whole world was a stage, and the spotlight was on us. Only the car, the intersection, and myself were visible beneath the glow of a nearby street light. Like an old-fashioned movie, everything seemed to be black/brown, with the night closing in around us. The hazy light was a brownish yellow and I could see mist or fog in the air. No other cars were moving, nor could I see them anyway, but I felt their presence. But it didn't matter, because in that moment, all that existed was a dying mother who wouldn't be able to care for the child she loved, the child who needed her, and the father couldn't care less. He seemed worried for his wife, but I don't even know if he acknowledged that he even had a child.

They finally answered the phone, and I rambled on for help. I told them about the mother, I begged them to send an ambulance. They asked me where we were. The sign in front of me by the side of the road wasn't helpful. It listed all the upcoming stops and roads we were nearing for future exits, but they didn't tell me where we were. I shouted into the car, asking the husband, "Is this the interstate? Are we on the interstate? Where are we? Tell me, damnit! Where are we?!" He seemed shaken at my outburst. He looks up at the traffic light and says, "551."

I glance up at the traffic light. Suspended in the air in the center of the intersection were the street signs—why didn't I see those before? The road we were on was 551, and the cross street was Tipper. 551 and Tipper. For a moment, I could see the other cars at the intersection. They were older cars, 80s or older. They were all stopped at the intersection as if every single lane was at a red light. The driver closest to our car was the only one clearly visible, but he looked at me like I was crazy for asking which street we were on when it was clearly labeled in the center of the road. I was embarrassed, but I didn't say a word or acknowledge them. I was distressed, surely they could forgive my oversight.

The woman on the other end of the line assured me the ambulance was on its way, and time leapt forward. I didn't have time to worry, because before I could blink, the ambulance was there.

Reality blurs here, as the medics prep her and remove her from the car, transferring her to the ambulance. That was the last time I saw her. I was holding the baby now, though his blankets were messed up. The world spun and shook, and the gray-brown of the intersection became white. We were in a room. It looked kind of like a hospital room, like a small room at a doctor's office. I stood to one side, leaning against a counter. A female police officer or detective—not sure why she was there—was helping me get some last-minute things together and closing out the room. She seemed sympathetic, though I wasn't sure if she felt bad for the baby for losing his mother or if she felt bad for me, the stranger who now had the baby.

I tried to talk to the officer, to get her to understand that although I wanted to see the baby safe and sound and with his family, I wasn't related and I'm not even sure how I knew the parents. The phone on the wall rang, and the officer held up a finger to silence me as she conversed with whoever had called.

After a few minutes, discussions of work must have trailed off because the officer was talking about going for drinks and hanging out later in the night. She was talking about how she was just getting off work now and she'd be there soon, wherever 'there' was. When she hung up, she glanced around the room and said that it looked like I had everything under control.

I immediately voiced that I didn't. I didn't have anything under control. I looked around the room and noted umbrellas, shoes, blankets, and my own daughter curled up on the floor by the door, asleep. I told the officer that the baby was cold and his blankets were messed up, and on top of all that I had to get the baby and all the things in the room out to my truck, and I had three kids of my own to handle, I couldn't do it all by myself. Reluctantly, the officer began helping me to fold up some of the baby's blankets so we could wrap him. The blanket was huge though, and it took both of  us to fold it. The officer was only half-attentive to what she was doing; I could tell her mind was counting the seconds that ticked past her final hour of the work day. I almost felt bad for making her work overtime, but I was really only asking for a few minutes, for a little help. Where was her sense of compassion?

We finally folded the blanket, and I set the baby down to arrange the blanket in my arms so we could wrap him—an odd method, I know. The officer set the baby down in my arms but wasn't even paying attention to exactly where my arms were. He nearly slipped, but I caught him and adjusted my grasp to keep him secure. I threw a frustrated glance at the officer, but she had already turned to pick up some of the shoes and umbrellas. Bit by bit, everything got moved to the truck. My boys were already out there, and I had set the baby down in the truck, so I just had to get my daughter and make sure the room was clear. As we walked down the hall way just outside the room, I realized the walls were lined with rows of baby clothes.

The officer was holding up some of the outfits and showing me how cute they were. They were so small. When I noted that, she told me that everything here was for the preemies. The tiny babies who were too small to wear anything aside from doll's clothes. It made me immeasurably sad. I couldn't even look at the clothes, because I could only think of the parents whose babies didn't make it, which then reminded me of the babies whose parents didn't make it, like the little infant boy I now had to care for.

Everything finally made it into my truck, and the officer vanished. It was just me, my three children, and the baby whose only loving parent had been lost. The father had disappeared.

I wondered why things had worked out so differently than the way they had been before. Before, the father had held his son. I thought he had loved him. Did he, really? Or had he wished for a way out? When we relived the past and I had been present for it, was that all the reason he had needed to leave the child behind? Would he ever come back for his son? I had so many questions.

All I knew for sure, looking down at that child, was that I'd raise him as my own. I'd love him, because he'd need me. Because he deserved it. Because she'd want me to.