Where is the Baby? Read Online Free Page B

cocktails-and-canapés bash when she got the call to photograph the Kmart child. Although she was habitually early for assignments, she took a couple of minutes to phone and let the hosts know she might be a little late. Then she grabbed her camera bag, threw in extra film, and went downstairs to the car. As she headed off to the hospital, gearing up for the coming encounter, she was reminding herself as always that she was doing her small part to help right a terrible wrong.
    The only child of holocaust survivors, she’d grown up not only translating her parents’ native Polish into English but also interpreting their fraught silences and sudden fear-filled starts. She’d spent countless hours of her childhood at the library, reading what survivors had written about their experiences, and studying large-format compilations of black-and-white photographs: heaps of bodies tossed into pits, warehouses filled with mountains of suitcases, bins brimming with jewelry or with hair. The worst images were of the hollow-eyed skeletons covered with skin, living corpses in the last stage of starvation: the Musselmen (a corruption of the German word for Moslem,
Musselmannen
, so-called because their weakness caused them to sway from side to side, or back and forth, giving the impression they were bowing in prayer), staring out from behind wire enclosures; cattle cars disgorging hundreds of terror-stricken men, women and children; ominous bathing rooms where poison gas, not water, emerged from the shower heads; the open doors of massive ovens where bones could be seen in the ashes. She studied the photographs obsessively. Then she returned home and used her expanding comprehension to deal with her parents who, in the early immigrant years, were fearful and uneasy, prepared to take flight at the merest hint of perceived danger: a car door slamming in the night, heavy footsteps on the stairs, voices in the hallway outside their apartment, unexpected knocking at their door. So many things aroused the sleeping fear.
    With time, though their fear diminished, her mother and father almost never spoke of what they’d endured, and eventually Connie gave up asking. She knew that for them to speak of their time in hiding and then in the camp was to relive the horror in every minutely recalled detail. They could scarcely bear the scenes recreated during their sleeping hours that caused them to awaken abruptly, crying out, hearts pounding with dread in the night-time urban stillness.
    Gradually, the effects of the past seeped beyond their consciousness to penetrate their daughter’s, endowing her with a substantial measure of survivor’s guilt that seemed only to be briefly assuaged by confronting modern horrors. So when a detective she’d dated for a time had asked if she’d come photograph a young rape victim, she had, after the briefest consideration, said she would. It was an excruciating experience, but strangely rewarding.
    What she saw on the face of that first twelve-year-old was identical to what she’d seen in photographs from the camps: horror and disbelief combined with physical pain to round and glaze the eyes so that they stared inward at the violation, while simultaneously looking blankly outward, focusless, in shock. Her heart, her very being seem to expand in order to absorb and share the trauma, in some small way making it a little bit less by offering kindness and consideration as balm for the unseeable injuries.
    Subsequently, Connie never refused the work, regardless of prior commitments, because it became an ongoing repayment of a debt of gratitude for the lives of her parents and for her personal freedom, a continuing effort to be among the Righteous.
    But nothing she’d read or seen or experienced prepared her for the child asleep in the ER cubicle, watched over by a young cop she hadn’t met before. Putting down her bag, she offered her hand, whispering, ‘Hi, I’m Connie,