I dialed 911 with shaking fingers. On the porch steps, Roy sat rocking the baby, dribbling water onto his lips from a spoon, and the little one had gone quiet in a way that frightened me more than the crying had.
When I hung up, I asked him again. “Roy. Why Joanne? Why my sister?”
“Because of the picture on their refrigerator,” he said. “Kayla, as a little girl. She is sitting on your sister Joannes lap, Maggie. At our wedding.”
The ambulance came, and then a second one, and then a fire truck. The young couple, Kayla and Dustin, were on the floor of their bedroom, barely breathing. The medics moved fast.
It was not neglect. It was not drugs, the way the whole street had been whispering for three days. It was carbon monoxide. Their furnace had cracked that first cold Sunday night and had been filling the little house with poison ever since. The gas had pulled the young parents down into a sleep they could not wake from. Only the baby, in his crib by the drafty window, had gotten enough air to keep crying. And his crying, thin as a kitten by Wednesday, was the only reason anyone knew at all.
“One more day,” the fireman told Roy, “maybe less, and nobody in that house comes out alive. You saved all three of them.”
The crying I had tried for three days to ignore was a baby doing the only thing he could to keep his family alive.
Kayla and Dustin pulled through at the hospital. And when I called my sister Joanne and told her the name of the young woman next door, the phone went silent for a long moment.
“Kayla,” Joanne finally said. “Margaret, I lost track of Kayla fifteen years ago. She is my goddaughter. Her mother was my dearest friend before she passed. I promised I would watch over that child, and then the family moved and the Christmas cards stopped, and I have wondered every single day where she ended up.”
She had ended up next door to my husband and me, in a house with a broken furnace, with no idea that the woman from the photograph on her own refrigerator lived four hours away and had been praying for her for fifteen years.
Joanne drove up the next morning. She walked into that hospital room, and Kayla, pale and weak and hooked to an oxygen line, took one look at her and said, Aunt Jo, in the voice of the little girl from the picture.
Roy fixed their furnace himself the following week, and would not take a dime. The RV and the campground reservations can wait, he told me. Some things you do not drive away from. We had moved next door to family and never known it, and it took a baby crying through the wall to bring us all home.