A few minutes later, I stood very still and counted the cribs in my memory, because I was suddenly not sure how many children were in this house.
On the footage, at three in the morning, the father came into the nursery carrying a baby I did not recognize. Not the little one I care for. A second infant, smaller, wrapped in a hospital blanket, crying the thin exhausted cry of a newborn who has been through too much. He walked that baby back and forth for an hour, whispering, until the crying stopped.
I had never seen this child in the daytime. That was what frightened me. A baby that appears in a house at three in the morning and is gone by breakfast.
The explanation, when I finally found the nerve to ask, was the last thing I expected. This family is licensed for emergency foster care. I had been told they had one child. What I had not been told, because it had only just begun, was that they had signed up to take in newborns who arrive in the middle of the night with nowhere else to go, the ones a caseworker calls about at two in the morning with an hour of warning.
The baby I saw had come in overnight and had been placed with a relative by the following afternoon. The father had walked the floor with a stranger child until dawn so that this one, for one night at least, would not be alone.
I had been ready to run from the most open-hearted thing two people can quietly decide to do.
In the morning he made coffee and joked like always, worn out, not knowing the camera had recorded the long night. I smiled back, and I felt small for what I had assumed.
I asked if I could help. The next time the phone rang in the dark, I was up before either of them, warming a bottle, laying out blankets, so that a father who works all day did not have to face the whole night by himself.
Since then a handful of babies have passed through this house, each for a night or a week, each held and fed and kept warm and then handed on to wherever they were meant to be. I have learned that you can love a child for three days and let them go and be glad you did, because for three days they were not alone in the world.
I did not pack my bag. I asked for a key to the linen closet instead, so I would always know where the small blankets are. There is nothing frightening in this house. There is only a family that leaves a light on for children who have no one, and now there are two of us who do.
