Easter Sunday

A cop was running frantically around a grey minivan. Children sat inside, still buckled in, their Sunday dresses fluffed into clouds of lace and satin.

"Where's the baby?" I asked.

"Mommy took him away in a car," the youngest girl answered.

It was almost one those calls. Those calls that stay with you forever.

We were basking in the Easter sun when the radio crackled: "Six-Kilo and Ten-Zebra for the arrest..."

I looked over at my partner. Umm, okay, I thought, giving it about a 50/50 chance that it was a legitimate cardiac arrest. We stretched out our arms and yawned before reading the text in onboard computer message. It read:

"CARDIAC ARREST....2 YO BABY IN THE STREET... "

Without saying anything, I put the ambulance into gear.

I had been on a cardiac arrest involving a baby before and the memory has never left me.

When we pulled up, I was expecting someone to come running at us with a dead, floppy baby. But instead there were just three little girls, a thirty-something year old man, and a similarly aged woman, apparently their aunt.

A lone cop was on scene, trying to get the full story. He said the mom had left in a taxicab doing CPR on her two year-old baby. Word was that they had gone to Jacobi hospital, miles away, bypassing several closer hospitals. God, please tell me they didn't go to Jacobi, I thought.

But what had happened--it was still a mystery.

Then we saw it: a single, dime-sized bullet hole in the side-door of the mini-van. Someone had shot the kid.

If I had believed in god, I would have told him to go fuck himself.

"Hey, let's get these kids checked out, make sure none of them are injured," suggested the cop.

Good idea, I thought. "Okay, girlies," I said, "we're gonna take you over to the ambulance and check you out and make sure you're not hurt, okay?"

They nodded in unison.

Just then, another ambulance pulled up. My partner explained the story and pointed at the bullet hole.

"That's so funny," the EMT said, ""we heard a bunch of gunfire earlier and I said, 'someone's gonna get shot.' I just never thought it would be a little kid."

I sat the girls in the back of the ambulance, checking them for hidden gunshot wounds.

"What happened?" I asked.

The middle one, who had been crying, started talking and bumbling. "Stop, let me explain," interrupted the older one, her hair held up by a pink ribbon. "Or else they won't understand."

"We were driving down the street," she continued, her voice high and girlish, "and there were gunshots and one of them hit my baby brother right here [she lifted up her left arm and placed a hand over the left side of her chest]."

"Uh huh," I nodded, "and then what happened?"

"And then my baby brother stopped talking," she said.

Tears crested in my eyes when she said this, her voice so innocent. I stopped for a moment, then walked them back to their aunt as she sobbed in the street.

"Okay," I said to my partner, "let's get out of here."

We drove in silence down the street. I held back tears as I imagined how it might have been if the woman and the baby had still been there.

The sun was still high in the sky, and outside people laughed and barbecued in their Sunday finest. Everywhere, people were happy.

At the hospital, we found a dead baby, a grieving mother, and a newsvan.

"The baby's dead, they cracked his chest open and everything," a friend in the ER told my partner and I. "The bullet took out one of the valves of his heart. But don't say anything, the mom doesn't know yet."

Family members gathered around the door to the ER, pushing each other out of the way to peer inside.

The woman, nicely dressed, rocked herself back and forth as she sobbed. I took one look at her and shook my head.

It was a holiday, I thought. I need to get some air.

Comments

[Steve]

I know you said you dont believe, but regardless, you, your partner, that family and everyone else on-scene are in my thoughts and prayers.

[Stacey]

I am so sorry that you had to go through that. If I knew you I would track you down and give you a hug.