The baby from the train that fell from the sky.
The story swirls and entwines with the paths of our three stars. You, me and the child, Annie Beth Morningstar. We couldn’t give her much, but we gave her that name.
Didn’t it all happen sometime around New Year’s?
First, you.
Calling you back across the years to remember the night with me. Winter was howling outside the second floor picture window of the smoky dark club looking out on the baseball stadium. You stood at the bar with a group, drawing the stares of any breathing male.
I was never one to just stare. Even if I had to wait in line. So I simply stood in front of you, saw your eyes register some kind of mystery, and I said, “You are so far out of my league, it would be an honor just for you to tell me to get lost.”
Something faraway shifted the dancing of the winter winds, I saw the smile you thought was hiding in your eyes and then you stared hard enough to see my future. “Anybody with a line that cheesy needs work.” Your laugh was like a river running straight from your soul. “How can I tell you to get lost? You obviously need a lot of help.” We both laughed then, an unspoken promise made.
The rhythm of a late night shifted. We started talking, the crowds thickened, we slid into some kind of dancing. Then your back up against the scratchy exposed brick wall, you looked up, your arms around my neck, “I don’t do stuff like this,” you said. A kiss that made us both forget our names. Then there was no one in that smoky loud room but you and I.
A week later came the accident that choked the whole city with pain. The accident and the baby on the train, Annie Beth Morningstar.
They’re called “El” trains, elevated maybe two stories above the street. Built on a rusty iron superstructure that separated every ray of sun brave enough to shine. They circle the loop of downtown Chicago, rumbling through the sky. Any human being in downtown Chicago looking up at the trains has asked themselves at some point: what if one of those screeching steel monsters were to fall off the track?. . . but no. That could never really happen.
Until it did.
At 5:23 on a rainy gray winter evening, the streets jammed with rivers of people and vehicles, a motorman paused at just the wrong moment – maybe there was a little bit of something he smoked, maybe not – and one car slammed into the back of another train. Two train cars jackknifed in slow motion into the air, wheels leaving tracks. Screams, stopped hearts and terror blanketed souls like sweat as glass shattered, two cars full of people tumbled over the side of the track and smashed on the street forty feet below. Another car, also jammed with terrified commuters, was left hanging.
Dangling horror. The train car pointed down, maybe ten or twelve feet from the hard, cold street, swinging in the winter wind.
Eleven people died hard deaths. The screams of the one hundred and eighty injured filled the night, crushing the heart of the city.
The ambulances started lining up, engines humming, red lights whirring against the steel supports where the one train car still dangled, as if hanging from the sky.
The hospitals ran out of beds, so they started putting people on the psych wards. Had to. No other choice. On the adolescent psych ward where I worked as a counselor, we set up cots in the day room and took five people.
We also took the baby. Larissa the head nurse, having seen everything the street had to dish out, a woman who knew what the word triage meant…even she was stopped by the site of the baby.
We pushed two armchairs together in the nurse’s lounge. There were no cribs. Another one of the old nurses, we called her Aunt Sally, shook her head and said our own Lil Baby Jesus. To which Larissa replied then Baby Jesus is a girl, Sally.
The tiny stranger didn’t seem the least bit scared. Bruised, cut, battered but breathing. Eighteen. Maybe nineteen months, Larissa said. But I tell you people, I did not know that babies could fly. EMT says that she was in one of the cars that bounced off the ground. Nobody made it around her. No one. Just this one little child. As if she could fly.
Later that night, I remember calling you to say I was working a double shift and wouldn’t be home until morning, and telling you the story. You asked me her name, and I said no one knew. That’s when you came up with “Annie Beth Morningstar.” So that’s who she became.
The next morning we had breakfast at Nookie’s. Over the eggs and sausage and coffee, we decided that you’d come visit little Annie with me.
I remember that morning, walking back to your place after breakfast, for love and the only rest we could find.
Late that afternoon, you went in to work with me. Little Annie had been moved to the Prentice Women’s hospital on the other side of the building. But you got to see her. I’ll never forget your face when you first saw her; you looked ready to sit down and start making plans with her.
It took almost a week to find the parents. So we’d go see her every day. The nurses always let us in so we’d sit with her, sing to her, rock her to sleep. Sometimes she’d smile and look at us as if we shared a secret.
For awhile she was just ours.
Then, after Annie, we took a road trip together. Just about the time that we both decided our paths would be charted separately, in different directions after all. But there was our one last trip.
We were on the Outer Banks, camping amid the salty smells and sounds of the ocean, as we drifted off to sleep.
Until it started to rain – I mean rain. The tent collapsed, and we gathered up everything. Soaked to the skin, we ran for the car and started driving through the green forest Carolina night. Bound for your parents’ roof three hours away, singing Beatles’ songs at the top of our lungs. We talked a lot about Annie and you told me something you told me our very first night together, when people tell each other the big things, to see if the little things will work.
Laying there on our backs, both of us spent and sweaty, breathing hard, smiling at the world, you said hey, so you’ll never have a kid. So I don’t have to worry about birth control. Besides, life should hold some mystery. And if you knew the reason for everything there wouldn’t be any mystery!
If you knew the reason for everything, there wouldn’t be any mystery. Like the mysterious survival of Annie Beth Morningstar.
Then, for our three stars, we sang one more Beatles song in the Carolina rain.
One more song for the baby for the baby from the train that fell from the sky.