Part 32 (1/2)

Devon's mom gasps.

Dom presses her lips together. Crosses her arms. ”Look, you need to think this over, Devon. Very carefully. As I said before, there's no hurry. We'll talk about it tomorrow. The pros and the cons.”

”No.” Devon keeps her eyes focused on Dom. She doesn't blink. Not even once. ”I've already thought this over very carefully, Dom. I'm not going to change my mind. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

Dom and Devon stand like that for a long moment, each watching the other.

There's a battle going on there, behind Dom's wire frames. Devon sees Dom's lips move. She has something more she wants to say.

Dom lets her breath out slowly. And nods.

”Okay, Devon.” Dom drops her arms down to her sides. ”Okay. I'll work hard to get you the best deal that I can.” She shrugs. ”I don't know if I agree with your decision, but the decision has to be yours.” She shakes her head, sighs. ”Not mine.”

Devon throws her head back, smiles up at the ceiling.

She's never felt so free from something in her life.

She'd won.

author's note.

The ”Dumpster baby” phenomenon is an invisible American tragedy, poorly understood, and rarely acknowledged.

Though most people would consider the behavior inexplicable and unusual, its occurrence is disturbingly common. Approximately one baby is abandoned to a trash can every day in the United States, and when an American child is slain by a parent, 45 percent of those killings occur within twenty-four hours of birth.1 After conducting a study of the issue over the nine-year period between 1989 and 1998, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded that ”the homicide rate on the first day of life was at least 10 times greater than the rate during any other time of life.”2 This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Experts believe that the vast majority of discarded babies are never found. No statistic exists for those babies. They lie in the unmarked graves of numerous munic.i.p.al garbage dumps across the country.

I first became interested in ”Dumpster babies” while living in Philadelphia in the mid-nineties. My husband was a law student at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, and my third child, Arianna, was about five months old. A few days before Christmas 1995, I was listening to public radio when I learned that earlier that morning an off-duty Philadelphia police officer had found a baby in the trash. He had been out walking his pit bull when the dog started barking and straining toward a trash bag set out at the curb near a couple of garbage cans. Inside the bag, the baby was still alive. The emergency room nurses nicknamed the newborn ”Baby Nick” because he was miraculously rescued in ”the nick of time” during the holiday season. Given the twenty-two-degree temperature that morning, had he been discovered even fifteen minutes later, Baby Nick would've undoubtedly died. This story strongly affected me. I had three little children of my own at the time, and though money was very tight for us in those days, I couldn't fathom what desperation would lead a woman to throw away her helpless infant.