When I Found You Read Online Free PDF

Not even knowing what to say next. He could hear and feel his own pulse beating in his chest and neck and temples. It felt nearly impossible to breathe and talk at the same time.
    “He’s not here any more,” the doctor said. Sounding all too calm about it. “Sorry to say this ends our correspondence, unless you find any more babies lying around in the future.”
    Nathan saw the world grow brighter and more glaring at the periphery of his vision. He worried he might pass out. He tried to speak, but no words materialized.
    “Yeah,” the doctor continued, “we handed him over to his grandma yesterday afternoon. Poor woman. She’s probably nearly fifty and she won’t get a good night’s sleep for at least a year. Babies are for the young.”
    Nathan very consciously filled his lungs with air.
    “Then he’s not … he’s all right?”
    “Yeah, he’s doing great. Told you they could be strong little beggars. It’s like God wanted ’em to get born and there’s nothing going to stop them after that. He even had good color when I saw him last.”
    “Oh. Well. Thank you, doctor. You’ve been very kind.”
    Nathan made his way slowly back into the lobby of the county jail, the muscles in his thighs feeling loose and liquid, like runny jelly.
    He took his spot again on the bench, where he waited, thinking very little, for well over twenty minutes.
    •  •  •
     
    “Detective Gross,” a small man said.
    Nathan rose and shook his hand.
    Detective Gross was a young man, or at least appeared to be so. He didn’t look like he could be much over thirty, yet the hairline of his red head was surprisingly receded, giving his forehead a strange, angular look.
    “If you’ll follow me to my office. Sorry to say it’s a pretty long walk from here.”
    Nathan followed him outdoors, then into an adjacent building. Followed him down dingy halls with high windows that seemed not to have been cleaned for years. Followed him into a small office with a baseball-sized hole in one of its dirty window panes, casting a distinct beam of light at an angle across the room. Nathan took a seat on the other side of the detective’s desk. He looked up at the window briefly, and thought of the recent bond measure to build a new jail. He had voted against it. Thinking himself far too overtaxed as it was.
    He still had not spoken a word to this new man.
    “This is always the very hardest moment in my job. Hate it, really. Nobody likes this. Not one bit. But I’m the investigator assigned to the coroner’s division, and somebody has to do this, so here goes. I am dreadfully sorry to have to inform you that your daughter died sometime in the night last night.”
    “Lenora?” Nathan asked. Confused.
    “Yes. I’m afraid so.”
    “Of … ?”
    “Sepsis.”
    “Related to her recent childbirth?”
    “Yes. Exactly. Apparently it had been a difficult birth, with a lot of bleeding. Because she was so young, I guess, at least in part. Being barely eighteen, and very small …”
    A long silence.
    Then Nathan said, “Don’t you have medical care for your inmates? Oh, I don’t mean that the way it sounds, only … Well,
don’t
you? I mean, aren’t you required by law to offer medical attention to any inmate who asks for it?”
    “Ah, yes,” Gross said. “And now you’ve just hit on it. Any inmate who
asks for it
. But we don’t go around asking each one every day if she feels OK. The inmate has to speak up and let us know there’s some problem. A raging infection with a high fever, for example. And your daughter never said a word.”
    “My daughter. I think you must be confused. I have no children.”
    The detective’s face went blank. “Lenora Bates was not your daughter?”
    “No.”
    “What was your relationship to the deceased?”
    “None, really. I never met her. I’m just the man who found her baby in the woods.”
    “So no relation to her family at all?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Oh, my. This
is
embarrassing. I