PART 2 — THE STAIRWELL
Nurse Kayla set down her plate, pulled out her phone, and turned it around to show a photo of a healthy newborn asleep in a hospital crib.
This past March, she said, a baby was born that none of us at the hospital knew about. Someone left a newborn wrapped in a towel in a cold stairwell in the middle of the night. If no one had found her in time, she would not have survived until morning.
At four in the morning, a man restocking a vending machine heard crying that nobody else was there to hear. He followed it up the stairs, found the baby, wrapped her in his own jacket, and ran her to the nurses station. I was the nurse who took her from his arms.
The man Tyler mocked for restocking Snickers bars had followed a cry up a dark stairwell at four in the morning and saved a newborn nobody else even knew was there.
She was adopted by a wonderful family, Kayla said, and she is healthy and loved. I kept this photo to show the man who found her, if I ever got the chance. Then she looked at Gary. A friend brought me by today, and I saw his face, and I knew.
The pavilion went quiet. Tyler, who had brought his own kombucha, set down his craft beer.
Gary just passed the potato salad and said he only followed the sound. But Kayla held up that photo and said that sound was a life, and he was the one who went looking.
My son jiggles the machine when the chips get stuck, his nephew had joked. One March he followed a cry up a stairwell and carried a newborn to safety. That is the man on the vending route.