Chapter 2 - The Mud and the Cry
The cold didn't register until Eleanor was already halfway down the yard.
Her joints shrieked in protest. Her breath rattled in her lungs, tasting of copper and cold iron. She was sixty-four years old, a woman who spent her afternoons reading historical biographies and watering ferns, but in that single, distorted fraction of time, every year of her life fell away, leaving only the raw, desperate instinct of a mother whose child was in danger—even if she didn't yet know whose child it was.
She didn't stop to think about her slippers, which sucked off her feet within three strides of the soggy lawn. She didn't think about her bad hip or the warning her doctor had given her about her blood pressure.
She crossed the boundary where the grass gave way to black, alluvial mud. The earth grabbed her bare feet, cold and greasy, pulling her down with the suction of a swamp. She stumbled, falling forward onto her hands and knees, palms sinking deep into decaying leaves and sharp gravel.
"God help me," she wheezed, pushing herself back up.
When she reached the water's edge, the lake didn't feel like water; it felt like ice water poured directly into her veins. It soaked through the hem of her housecoat, heavy and clinging, turning her clothes into a leaden weight.
She looked out across the surface. The ripples had faded, smoothing out into the dull, leaden gray of the overcast morning. There was no sign of the suitcase. It had gone down ten yards out, right where the old oak stump sat submerged beneath the surface—a notorious snag where fishermen lost their tackle every weekend.
Eleanor didn't hesitate. She stepped off the shelf of red clay into the drop-off.
The lake bottom vanished beneath her feet. The water rose instantly to her waist, then her chest, stealing the air right out of her lungs with its sub-arctic mountain chill. A sharp gasp tore from her throat, her chest seizing as the cold wrapped around her ribs like a steel band.
She began to wade forward, arms thrashing blindly through the murky brown water. Her shins scraped against hidden branches and sharp freshwater mussels buried in the silt.
"Where is it? Where is it?" she muttered, tears mixing with the spray on her face.
She took another step, her toes brushing against something hard, round, and unyielding submerged in the muck.
Clunk.
It was the brass corner of the suitcase.
Eleanor dove her hands down into the freezing slime, her fingernails scraping against wet leather. She found the handle—the same leather handle Daniel had gripped when he walked out of the house for his honeymoon four years ago—and hooked her fingers around it.
It was impossibly heavy. Filled with water, soaked through its thick wool and canvas lining, the bag weighed easily thirty or forty pounds, acting like an anchor embedded in the clay.
"No," Eleanor sobbed, planting her feet against the submerged roots of the oak stump. "No, you don't."
She hauled upward with every ounce of strength left in her upper body, using her legs to push off the muddy bottom. Water churned around her in a violent brown froth. Her shoulder muscles tore with a white-hot agony, but she didn't let go. She dragged the sodden mass forward, stumbling backward out of the deep channel until her knees hit the shallows.
With a final, guttural cry that scraped her throat raw, she heaved the suitcase up the muddy bank and onto the flat gray rocks of the shoreline.
It slumped there like a massive, drowned animal, water pouring in streams from its seams, trailing dark, silt-heavy puddles across the stones.
Eleanor collapsed onto her knees beside it, gasping for air, her hands shaking so violently she could barely control her fingers.
And then she heard it again.
It wasn't the wind through the pines. It wasn't the creak of the old dock timbers.
It was a sound so small, so impossibly fragile, that it seemed almost unreal against the vast, indifferent expanse of the lake.
Ehh... ehh...
A tiny, clicking whimper. A breath that caught in a throat too small to form words.
Eleanor froze, her breath suspended in her chest.
The sound came from inside the suitcase.
"Oh, sweet Jesus," she whispered, her hands clawing desperately at the heavy brass zippers.
The metal was jammed, clogged with lake silt and swollen leather. She pulled, her fingernails breaking against the brass, blood welling up beneath the nails without her even feeling the pain.
Ehh...
Another weak, rattling sigh from within the dark confines of the bag.
"Hold on," Eleanor cried out, tears streaming down her cheeks, mixing with the muddy water dripping from her hair. "Hold on, baby, I've got you!"
With a frantic, tearing jerk, the zipper finally gave way, sliding halfway down the perimeter of the lid.
Eleanor threw the flap back.
The world seemed to stop spinning. The gray sky, the cold water, the distant highway—everything vanished, compressed into the narrow, horrifying rectangle of the open suitcase.
Inside, wrapped tightly in a thick, soaked blue wool blanket, was a baby.
He couldn't have been more than a few hours old. His skin had that terrible, translucent blue-gray tinge of someone who had crossed the border between life and the deep cold and was already slipping away. His tiny chest was barely moving, rising in frantic, shallow hitches that produced almost no air.
His face was cold to the touch—not cool, but ice-cold, like a smooth river stone.
And around his tiny, purple neck, the umbilical cord had been severed crudely, tied off clumsily with a length of coarse, white sewing thread. There was no hospital clamp, no sterile hospital blanket, no footprint card stamped in pink or blue ink. He had been born in the dark, in secret, wrapped in cheap fabric, and packed away like discarded garbage to drown in twenty feet of lake water.
"No, no, no, no!" Eleanor screamed, the sound tearing out of her like a wounded animal.
She didn't hesitate. She plunged her hands into the freezing interior of the suitcase, scooped the tiny, lifeless-seeming bundle out of the damp lining, and pulled him straight against her bare chest, right over her thundering heart.
The baby was so light it felt like holding a bundle of dry twigs.
"Breathe," Eleanor sobbed, rocking back and forth in the mud, pressing her cheek against his cold, wet forehead. "Breathe, please, God, please breathe. Look at me. Look at your grandmother."
The baby gave a faint, pathetic shudder. His tiny mouth opened, a bubble of pink-tinged water slipping from his lips, and then his chest hitched in one long, agonizing intake of oxygen.
Waaaah...
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It was the weakest, saddest cry in the world—no louder than the mewl of a newborn kitten—but to Eleanor, it sounded like the blast of an angel's trumpet.
He was alive.
