Page 2 of I Found You
It had probably been close to fourteen years since I firstmet Ronnie. Back when I was using a fake ID—completely successfully, I would like to note—until a fucking buddy of mine yelled to the entire place that it was my twentieth birthday, hollering that I was now only one year away from being able to drink legally. Ronnie was pissed that I’d pulled one over on her and immediately kicked me out. I was pissed that one of my good friends outed me like that. I came back one year later to celebrate with her on my twenty-first birthday, and she had been cool with me ever since.
My feet hit the pavement outside of the bar, and I could hear all of the noise and revelry that I was leaving behind. I couldn’t wait to crawl into my bed and pass the fuck out. The night air was still thick and humid, salt from the ocean settling low in the sky, but it was a lot better than earlier in the day. I started walking the couple of blocks back to my house when I heard a strange sound. My head was pounding already. I knew this hangover was going to kick my ass. I kept walking, but still it persisted.
What is that?
It almost sounded like… I don’t know, maybe a bird or an animal or something. Again, I tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. The noise still sounded from somewhere around me, relentless. I stopped.
I’m just going to check it out.
It was kind of loud and sounded like it might be in pain or something.
There were bushes and shrubs that lined the border between a wooded patch of land and the street. The noise sounded like it was coming from beneath the brush. I dropped to my hands and knees, nausea churning in my stomach instantly, and used my phone’s flashlight setting to see better. I had noidea what I was thinking, but something about this was not sitting right with me.
Shining my light, I scanned the area. Something was wrapped in cloth, a shopping bag left on the ground next to it. People sucked. Why did they just leave their shit lying on the ground? Some poor animal was probably stuck in one of those plastic ring things. I went to grab the cloth out of the way so I could reach behind it for the shopping bag, but the bundle was heavier than I expected. As soon as I grabbed hold of it, it clicked. That the noise I’d been hearing was coming from this bundle of cloth, not some animal in the bag.
My heart stopped for a solid three seconds while my drunk-as-shit brain tried to comprehend what I’d found. Moving the brush out of the way as best as possible with my left hand so that when I dragged the cloth bundle out, it didn’t scratch anything… anyone…
What the fuck? Is that a baby? A real, live human baby? Just lying on the ground, wrapped in a blanket?
Pulling the baby to me, I immediately unwrapped him or her. There were no scratch marks on it—or at least no noticeable ones—but the little thing was wearing some little one-piece outfit, so I couldn’t see all of it. I cradled the baby in one arm and lay on my other side so that I could grab the shopping bag too. It got snagged on some undergrowth, but I tugged it free. It was really light. Inside was a baby bottle and a ball of something white. It smelled like shit. Literally and figuratively. It must have been a dirty diaper that whoever left this baby must have thrown in the bag as they changed her or him.
The baby was still screaming in my arms. The bottle didn’t have much left, but I tried to give it to the baby. It took asecond for the little thing to realize that it was there, but once it did, it latched onto the bottle and stopped screaming.
Was this real life right now or some weird-ass hallucination? I didn’t think I’d taken any recreational drugs tonight, and liquor didn’t typically make me hallucinate, but this couldn’t be real. Right? I had to take the bottle away from the baby so I could use my hand to give myself a lift off the ground, but I gave it back as fast as I could before it started screaming again.
Now that I was on my feet, I searched around for anyone else. This poor little thing’s mother, or father, or someone.
“Hey,” I yelled. “Is someone out there?” Walking around the area, looking under brush and trees, I tried to find someone. Ten minutes must have passed while I shouted and walked through the wooded area. I didn’t know what to do. My brain was not functioning the way it should. Everything was foggy. My feet started moving of their own accord while I tried to process what the hell was happening. I realized that I was still holding the baby, now sleeping with a bottle still perched in its mouth, when I went to find my key, and my hands were full. I shoved the bottle into the pocket of my jeans so that I could pull out my house key and unlock the door.
I put the baby down on the kitchen island, along with the shopping bag that I was somehow still holding on to. Opening the bag, now that I had a second to go through it, not that there was much here to see, I found that the bottle the baby had just finished off was the only milk they left behind. A clean, unused diaper was hiding under the dirty one. I took the clean diaper out of the bag, threw the rest of it away, and took the bottle to the sink to wash it out. Spinning around in a panic, I realized I’d left the baby unsupervised on the kitchenisland. I looked back to see that the baby hadn’t moved at all. Was the little thing even old enough to move yet? It looked really small.
“Fuck. That could have been bad,” I breathed out.
I needed to stop calling the little thing “it.” There were some little snaps at the bottom of the baby’s one-piece outfit. I unsnapped them and found a soaking wet diaper. I had that clean diaper with me, so I checked out what I was working with here. This couldn’t be too hard, right? I mean, I was thirty-three years old. A fucking adult. I could figure out how to change a diaper, even in my drunken state.
Lifting the front and back of the outfit out of the way, I un-velcroed the tab things and pulled the soiled diaper away. A girl. Okay, now I could stop referring to her as “it,” at least. Whoever left her behind wasn’t thoughtful enough to include wipes along with the diaper. Tissues from the tissue box I had on the counter would have to do. I did not want to get all up in her little baby business, so I just kind of patted around, hoping that would be good enough. With the clean diaper laid out, I shuffled her baby butt onto it, pulling the front of the diaper up between her legs and velcroing the tabs. I carefully picked her up, and her knees immediately pulled into the front of her, making her look like a little baby ball.
Too tired to even bother snapping up the one-piece outfit, I brought her to the couch with me and laid her on my chest. Her chest rose and fell against mine as I held her close to me and let out a large sigh. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do, but whatever it was, it was tomorrow Wyatt’s problem. Right now, I was going to take a page out of Baby Girl’s book and sleep.
2
Wyatt
My stomach was wet. Why was my stomach wet? And why did it feel like I had a bowling ball on my chest? My eyes flew open, and I stared at the actual reason I was woken up. The miniature-sized person was screaming again.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I ran my hand down my face, my other hand still holding the baby close to me.
Did I seriously take a baby home with me yesterday? What the fuck was wrong with me?
I didn’t have a single clue about what to do with a baby. Clearly, including changing a diaper since that must have failed, according to the piss all over my shirt. I rolled Baby Girl and myself off the couch, my head still spinning from last night, and tried to calm her down.
“Hey, Baby Girl. Shh. I’m already awake—you don’t need to scream anymore,” I said. “Last-night Wyatt was real dumb, and now you and I are in this together, okay?”
She didn’t seem to give two shits that I was talking to her. I brought her with me into the kitchen. My house was a remodeled cottage-style home. The previous owners hadtaken down the wall between the kitchen and the living room to make an open-concept floor plan.
“At least last-night Wyatt washed the bottle, but what the fuck do you eat? I’m not going to be quite as helpful as your mama would be where the food source is concerned.”
Opening the fridge, I took out the milk, looking between the milk in one hand, the bottle on the kitchen counter, and the baby cradled in my arm. “Can you drink regular milk? Is that allowed?” I asked her.
