“Was it hard for him?”
“No,” said Mr. Amory. “Because when I carried you past his window, he saw you.”
He had been told the baby was out.
That was the first thing he asked, and it was the first time he stopped saying baby. A young man in a yellow raincoat, with a pocketknife in his teeth and a soaked blanket in his arms, went down on one knee in the mud beside the driver’s window and said, She’s out. She’s okay. She’s right here.
He held her up.
“He put his hand through the window,” said Mr. Amory. “Through the broken glass. He couldn’t reach her. He just opened his hand, and I put your foot in it.”
Nobody in that office said a word.
“You were eleven weeks old. You had a pink hat on. He held your foot for about a minute and a half.” He was looking at the carpet. “And then he said the thing I’ve been trying to deliver for seven years.”
I reached across the desk and took Wynne’s hand.
What Lennox Linwood said, in a ditch on County Road 12 at a quarter to eleven on a Tuesday night, has been written down since in three different places. I will give it the way Mr. Amory wrote it that night in the back of a fire department logbook, in pencil, standing under a tarp.
