“He took your butterfly clip,” I said, and I held it up. The little pink plastic butterfly. One of its wings was snapped off.
Birdie’s eyes went wide.
“It fell off when I was crawling,” she said. “In the pipe, near the front, where it was still a little bit light. And Edgar came down and picked it up in his beak. I thought he was stealing it.”
She looked at the clip for a long time.
He wasn’t stealing it.
He was bringing it home.
He’d flown it half a mile back to our house, past fifty searchers and a bloodhound and a dive team, and dropped it at my feet. Because he knew I’d recognize it. Because he knew I’d follow him.
The paramedics treated Birdie for mild hypothermia. Her core temperature was 94.6 degrees when they brought her into the emergency room at St. Luke’s Meridian. The doctor, a tired, kind woman named Dr. Sarah Tran, said that another hour in that pipe, with the water rising and the temperature dropping, and it would have been a very different conversation.
“You got lucky,” she said.
“It wasn’t luck,” I said. “It was a crow.”
She looked at me like everybody looks at me when I say that. Then she smiled.
“Well. Whatever it was, I’m glad.”
Birdie spent one night in the pediatric unit. They kept her on warm fluids and checked her every two hours. I didn’t sleep. I sat in the chair beside her bed and held her hand and watched her breathe.
In the morning, she was pink and warm and hungry and asking for pancakes. A volunteer from the hospital gift shop came by with a cart, and Birdie picked out a stuffed black crow with shiny button eyes.
“His name is Edgar Junior,” she announced.
The hospital bill came three weeks later. $6,840 for the ambulance, the emergency room, and the overnight stay. My health insurance through the pediatric clinic covered most of it. My share was $1,500, my whole deductible.
I paid it the same day. I didn’t even do the columns first.
Best money I ever spent.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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