PART 2
I unbuttoned my shirt and pressed that baby against my bare chest. Skin to skin. Then I wrapped my jacket around both of us.
My grandmother was a midwife in Chihuahua. When I was a boy, she told me the warmest place in the world for a newborn is a heartbeat.
With my other hand, I called 911.
“There’s a newborn baby in a dumpster behind the car wash on Amarillo Boulevard. He’s alive. He’s very cold. Please hurry.”
The dispatcher stayed on the line. She told me to keep him against my skin. Keep rubbing his back. Keep him breathing.
He was so small. He fit in one of my hands.
Pirate sat on the ground at my feet, staring up at us.
The ambulance came in seven minutes. A paramedic took the baby from my chest and put him in a warming blanket. His temperature was dangerously low. They said he was maybe six hours old.
“If he’d been in there another hour,” the paramedic said, “in this cold, he wouldn’t have made it. How did you even find him?”
I looked down at Pirate.
“I didn’t,” I said. “She did.”
The baby spent eleven days in the neonatal unit. He made it.
The police found his mother two days later. She was sixteen. Her name was Destiny. She’d hidden her pregnancy from everyone. She gave birth alone in her bathroom, panicked, and walked to the first place she could think of.
She was terrified. She cried for hours when they told her he was alive.
She didn’t know that Texas has a Safe Haven law. A parent can leave a newborn at any hospital or fire station, no questions asked. Nobody had ever told her.
Mr. Pryor called me the next week.
“You called the police on my property without telling me. There were news trucks at my business. You’re fired.”
So I was fired.
Then the news ran the story. A man and a one-eyed cat who saved a baby from a dumpster. The video of the paramedics was everywhere.
Three days later, Mr. Pryor called back and offered me a raise.
I said no.
Because by then, the fire chief of Amarillo had called too. They needed a night custodian at the central fire station. Full benefits. And a special request.
“Bring the cat,” he said.
Pirate lives at Station 1 now. She has her own bed by the heater. The firefighters spoil her rotten.
And there’s a new sign on the front door of the station, in big letters.
“SAFE HAVEN. Leave your baby here. No questions. No shame.”
Destiny made her choice in the spring. She asked to meet the family who’d adopt her son.
She chose a young couple from our church. Teachers. Kind people.
At the adoption hearing, they asked me to stand up front.
The baby’s name is Felix now. It means “lucky.”
His middle name is Reuben.
THE END.
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Kindness to the smallest creature can save the smallest life. If you or someone you know is ever in Destiny’s place, find out about your state’s Safe Haven law. There is always another way.
Have you ever had an animal lead you to something important? Tell us in the replies.