PART 2
I let him in. I made tea, because that’s what you do when your hands don’t know what else to do.
He sat at my kitchen table and unfolded the paper. It was a page from a NICU discharge file. Old and creased. At the bottom, in a nurse’s handwriting, someone had written:
“Only calms for the Tuesday volunteer. Mrs. F. She sings him a lantern song.”
“My name is Ansel,” he said. “I was Baby Boy 14.”
I put my cup down before I dropped it.
“My foster mom adopted me when I was two,” he said. “She used to hum me to sleep, and one night I hummed back a song she’d never taught me. She asked where I learned it. I didn’t know.”
He smiled a little.
“I kept humming it my whole life. When I turned eighteen, I asked for my hospital records. That note was in them. Mrs. F. Tuesday. It took me a year to find you.”
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Coralee,” he said. “The night nurse. She still had your address on an old Christmas card list.”
Then his face got serious.
“She told me you were sick. That you need a kidney. And that you have nobody.”
“Ansel, no. You’re a child. You have your whole life.”
“I’m eighteen,” he said. “And I already got tested. Last week. Coralee helped me.”
He slid another paper across the table.
Blood type: O positive. Same as mine. Tissue match: strong.
“You held me for four months when nobody else would,” he said. “Let me hold on to you now.”
I couldn’t speak. I just reached across the table and held his hand.
The surgery was in December.
The news got out, the way news does in a hospital. A nurse told a doctor. A doctor told the board.
And the board found out that Mr. Prescott Klein had cut the cuddler program without asking anyone. And that the “infection risk” he talked about didn’t exist. The NICU’s infection rate had actually gone up after the volunteers left, because the nurses were stretched too thin.
Mr. Klein was let go two weeks before Christmas.
The new administrator came to see me in my recovery room. She brought my volunteer badge back.
“We’d like you to come home,” she said. “When you’re ready. And we’re naming the program after you. The Lantern Program.”
Ansel was in the next room. When they wheeled me past his door, he was awake, and he was humming.
I hummed back.
It’s spring now. My new kidney works perfectly. The doctors say Ansel’s single kidney is strong and healthy.
He comes over every Sunday. He’s studying to be a nurse. He wants to work in the NICU.
And every Tuesday night, I’m back in my wooden rocking chair, holding a baby nobody came for.
Sometimes, now, Ansel sits beside me.
And we sing it together.
THE END.
