Love Saves the Day

Word was spreading. The judge was going to issue a temporary restraining order. The restraining order was on its way! Quick as light beams, from person to person, this message was communicated. Somebody shouted it to John Moriarty from the OEM. He took out a cellular phone and made a call. Nodded a few times in response to whatever the person on the other end said. Then he hung up and spoke into his walkie-talkie.

“Do it now,” he said.

The rattle of the diesel engine was drowned in a new sound—a loud, continuous hum. People screamed and sobbed. I could hear the wailing of children. For the first time, the police seemed nearly overwhelmed by the force of the crowd struggling to break through the tape and barricades.

“My cat!” Mr. Mandelbaum cried out. Tears coursed thickly down his wrinkled face. “She’s a living thing! She’s still in there! Please! She’s all I got!” The plastic bag he still held twisted convulsively in his hands as he fell, kneeling on the pavement. “She’s all I got!”

“Laura!” I yelled, bending toward Mr. Mandelbaum. “Laura, help me!” I looked up, and then I fell silent.

Laura wasn’t there.

“Laura?” I rose to my full height, stood on tiptoes. Laura and I were both tall. Even in a crowd like this I should be able to see the top of her head. So why couldn’t I? I left Mr. Mandelbaum with Hugo Verde, Maria Elena’s father. Watch him, I mouthed, pointing from my eye to Mr. Mandelbaum. Hugo nodded and leaned down to help Mr. Mandelbaum, still crying, shakily to his feet. I angled through the crowd, turning sideways to slip through crevices between bodies, using my hands to push people out of the way. I no longer felt separate from the crowd, from its terror and frenzy. I was a part of it. “Laura!” I called. “Laura, where are you? Laura, answer me!” I remembered when she was three, when she’d slipped away from me once at a block party. I’d found her that day, but I’d always had nightmares since then. Nightmares just like this. Laura was missing in a crowd, and I couldn’t find her. Anything could have happened to her. What if she’d fallen? What if the crowd was trampling her? “Laura!” The hard pain in my chest was now a black hole of panic. “I’m your mother! Answer me, dammit!”

The crane, fully powered up now, swung back to gather momentum and made its first test swing at the top of the building. The deafening crunch of metal against brick echoed over the heads of the crowd.

Then the head and shoulders of a girl pushed their way through an open window on the third floor. A fair-skinned girl with long brown hair. She wore a red cotton T-shirt. The sky was black now, the clouds had finally thinned, and the girl, the building, the metal containers waiting to swallow them on the ground below, all of them were spotlit by the blazing lights from the lighting trees. They looked superimposed against the black sky. Unreal, dreamlike. The girl waved her arms furiously. “Wait!” she shouted. “Wait, I’m in here!”

“LAURA!” I shoved my way through the crowd again, so hard this time that people fell back as I muscled past them. Dear God, what if I couldn’t get to the barricade in time? Already the crane was pulling back, preparing for another swing. Its jaws gaped, glinted in the artificial white light. “Stop them!” I screamed. I kept screaming. “Stop them! Somebody stop them!” But my screams were swallowed in the crowd. Finally I got to the barricade and clawed at the arm of the nearest cop. “My daughter is in that building!”

The cop looked at me and said something terse to the officer standing next to him, who rolled his eyes upon hearing it. The two of them motioned to a third officer to guard their post as they turned and ran into the building. The OEM official barked something into his walkie-talkie, and the crane was still.

Needle-thin raindrops darted silver through the glow of the lighting trees. The crowd, emboldened by the unexpected pause in the crane’s movements, flailed against the police barricades with renewed frenzy. My fingers curled, convulsing in rhythm to my anguish. How many more raindrops, how many more seconds, minutes, eternities until Laura was safely in my arms.

Finally, the cops reappeared in the doorway, wrangling a struggling Laura between them. They’d put her in handcuffs, the metal glinting cruelly against the soft flesh of her wrists. My heart clutched in horror. My child, my child.

When they reached the barricade, one of the officers unlocked the cuffs and pushed Laura toward me. I stumbled as the weight of her body fell awkwardly against mine, and my arms automatically rose to encircle her. My hands moved from her head to her shoulders, down her arms. Checking to see if anything was hurt, anything broken. “We could lock her up for disturbing the peace,” the cop told me. “Keep an eye on your kid, will ya?”