Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee

the storm, the cry was gone almost before it came. In the next moment it came again, and then again.
    There’s a baby out there
, Georg thought.
    He looked at his mother, her eyes closed tight against the driving rain and the tears that were blinding her. Across the street now filled by raging floodwaters, the old woman had put her arms around her pig and was holding it as if it were a child. The infant’s cry came again, and young Georg felt his heart contract. He crouched and scanned the surrounding huts.
Where was the child?
The cry came again, and it was then that he saw her. Wrapped in a yellow blanket, placed in the forked limb of a black locust tree, as if someone in great haste had tried to do the one thing she could think of to save her child. Georg knew that it was up to him and him alone to bring the child to safety. Who else was there? Who else had heard the child’s cry?
    His mother had buried her head in her hands by then. Unseeing, unhearing, she was lost in a chanted prayer for Georg’s father, still at the forge.
    Quickly, before he lost his courage, Georg scrambled back into the loft and then down the peg ladder into the kitchen. Water had reached the halfway mark of the wall, and Georg lost his footing. Before he was swept under and out the door, he managed to take off his boots and soaked tunic. Then he was in the water, and part of the flood.
    Getting across the street, which had become a torrent of water and debris, took many minutes. Every time he was swept under the surface of the frantic water, Georg held his breath and struggled to find his footing, struggled to the top again, gasped in a great lungful of air and shook the water from his eyes.
    The baby cried, and cried again. Led by the thin wail of the baby’s fear and sorrow, Georg found himself at the scarred trunk of the black locust, fighting to stay upright. Above him the faded yellow of the blanket hung suspended in the crotch of the tree. A tattered corner dangled in front of his reaching fingertips. The baby’s cry was the cry of all babies, lost and alone and bereft.
If I could just reach that baby, if I could just—
    Do you see how it happens? Can you feel it growing inside your own heart? An old man tilts his shoulder in a certain way, or rubs his eye, and then it all comes over you. The yellow blanket, the raging floodwaters, a boy’s mother crouched on a thatched roof crying for her lost husband. It all comes tumbling out.
    T he real story of my birth is that there was no midwife.
    Angelica Rose Beaudoin, American Midwife, never lived or breathed. She never delivered two twin girls in a truck in the ditch in the middle of winter. She never stayed with my grandfather and Tamar, sharing her chocolate bars and telling jokes and stories, making sure Tamar was resting and recovering and not bleeding to death, until the Glass Factory Road snowplow came through. It never happened.
    There was only Tamar and my grandfather and me: me crying, Tamar half-passed-out and bleeding, my grandfather not knowing what to do with my baby sister who lay wrapped in a scrap of blanket on the seat between them.
    That’s what I see when I think of the story of my birth. That’s why I prefer to think about Angelica Rose Beaudoin, the brave young midwife.
    Had there been an Angelica Rose Beaudoin, she would have seen immediately what the problem was. A trained midwife would have known what to do. She would have breathed life into my sister, rubbed her tiny chest, warmed her until she was a living being. The midwife would have stripped off the space blanket her husband had packed for her in the recycled coffee can emergency road kit, wrapped my sister up in it and handed her to my grandfather, who would have cradled her and rocked her.
    Then I would have been born. I would have been strong and healthy, screaming from the first.
A healthy baby girl
, the midwife would have said to Tamar.
Two healthy baby girls
. A story with a happy ending, the kind of