The person knocking was April’s ex-husband.
I knew it immediately because I’d seen him a few times picking up their daughter from daycare. Tall man, shaved head, smelled like cigarettes even standing outside the screen door. He kept asking if April came by earlier and trying to look past me into the apartment.
I lied and said no.
He stood there another few seconds before saying the police were “looking for something she stole from the hospital” and if she contacted me I needed to call him immediately. That part felt strange. Not the police. Him.
After he left, I locked the deadbolt and finally unwrapped the towels the rest of the way.
It was a baby.
Not alive. Tiny enough to fit across both my forearms. Wrapped carefully in one of those pink-and-blue hospital blankets. There was a plastic ankle band still attached.
I sat at my kitchen table until almost four in the morning staring at that container because my brain honestly could not catch up to what I was looking at.
The next morning I called the police myself.
Two detectives came over within twenty minutes. One of them recognized the hospital bracelet immediately and asked where I got it. By that afternoon they had blocked off April’s old duplex with crime scene tape again.
Turns out April had delivered a stillborn baby alone at home three nights earlier. She worked at the hospital and panicked because she’d hidden the pregnancy from almost everybody, including her ex. According to the detectives, she was terrified Child Protective Services would take her daughter if anybody thought she’d done drugs during the pregnancy.
She never came back for the container.
About a week later one of the detectives stopped by to return my Tupperware. He said April had checked herself into a psychiatric unit in Ames voluntarily after being found sleeping in her car outside MercyOne with her daughter still buckled into the back seat at 2:13 AM.