Baby.
“There was a car seat in the back,” said Mr. Amory. His voice had gone quiet, and not quite steady. “It had flipped with the car, and the harness was holding. She was hanging upside down in it and she was not crying. That’s what frightened me. She was looking at me.”
He had been the smallest man on the crew.
He got his shoulders through the broken rear window, in a foot of cold water, with a pocketknife in his teeth, and he cut the straps. He did not remember doing it. He remembered the weight of her, and the yellow blanket, which had been in the car seat and was soaked, and the fact that she was perfectly warm underneath it, and perfectly silent, and had put one hand on his collar.
“I carried you out of the ditch,” he said, to Wynne.
She looked at him.
“Were you scared?” she asked.
He made a noise somewhere between a laugh and something else.
“I was terrified,” said Mr. Amory. “Nobody had ever told me what a baby weighs.”
Wynne considered that.
“Not much,” she said, with great authority.
I put my hand over my mouth.
I should say how the clipping got to school, because I asked her that night, in her room, with the lamp on.
