Whose Baby?

She didn’t wait for a response. She hung up the telephone in a righteous rage that deserted her too quickly. How could she get mad, when Shelly wasn’t Brian’s daughter? Maybe she was the one who was blind! Maybe she should have realized immediately that something was wrong, that the baby the nurses handed her was a changeling.

But she hadn’t, oh, she hadn’t. Instead, the connection had been deep and instant, a mother’s love for this child and only this one.

Well, the fierceness of her love hadn’t diminished. She would tell Brian that she wasn’t going to get Shelly tested, and if he cut his daughter off, so be it. She would let him live with a creeping feeling of shame. It would serve him right.

She stood up, as wearily as if she’d just overcome a violent bout of flu, and turned off the kitchen light, using the glow from the bathroom to find her way to her bedroom.

Life might get harder; Shelly would be hurt that her father didn’t want her. But no one must ever know.

THE DREAM CAME EVERY NIGHT from then on. She was searching desperately for someone. For her little girl. First she was on the beach, and she’d been reading her mail, and the fog had rolled in, and she looked up suddenly and realized she couldn’t see her.

“Shelly!” she began crying. “Shelly, where are you?” She leaped to her feet and spun in every direction, crying over and over, “Shelly!”

She began stumbling toward the water. Boulders reared from nowhere, tripping her. The roar of the surf filled her ears, and she knew with sickening certainty that Shelly had been caught by a wave.

But, no, she wasn’t on the beach at all. She was in a city, although the fog still played tricks with her eyes. The sound was from traffic. Oh, no! How could she have looked away, even for a moment? The sea was merciless, but cars were deadly.

She searched the sidewalks frantically for a bright chestnut head. People passing ignored her. Then she saw her, out on the median, cars racing by without slowing at all for the toddler who teetered there. She wore rags; she looked like Cosette in Les Misérables, wretched and unwanted. Brimming with tears, her bright blue eyes met Lynn’s momentarily through a break in the traffic, but without recognition.

My daughter doesn’t know me, Lynn realized with horror.

“Stay where you are!” Lynn screamed. “Wait! I’m coming!”

But her voice meant nothing to this child, and with greater shock Lynn discovered she didn’t know her own daughter’s name.

Sobbing, the little girl stepped from the curb.

And Lynn awakened, as she did every night, her screamed “No!” trembling on her lips and tears running down her cheeks.

With a moan she curled into a ball and shuddered. At last she went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, then stared hopelessly at herself in the mirror.

Of course she was having dreams; their content was hardly subtle.

Somewhere out there was another little girl, one she’d carried in her womb. How many promises she’d made to that baby as she dreamed of the future! She sang to her and laughed and tickled her own belly when a tiny toe or elbow surfaced. She played music and danced and read aloud, just so her child would know her voice, would know she was loved.

But, through no fault of her own, she hadn’t kept those promises. Her baby had never heard her voice again. Someone else had taken her home. Did these other parents love her and sing to her and tickle her toes? Or had she gone home with a teenager who hadn’t really wanted to get pregnant? Perhaps she was in a foster home, or had an angry father who shook her when she wouldn’t quit crying. What if she was slow to develop, but nobody was patient? Or what if they loved her, these parents, but they were raising her the only way they knew how, by spanking her when she got cranky or broke something, by screaming at her with the anger of their own childhoods in their voices?

“If only…” Lynn breathed soundlessly. If only she could know. See that this other little girl was loved and cared for, read to and hugged, that her artwork was on the refrigerator for all to admire.

If she knew, the dreams would go away.

But how could she ever find out, without contacting the hospital and telling them? Without taking the chance of losing Shelly?

That was the torment. Risk the little girl who was the center of her life, who meant everything to her, for the sake of one who couldn’t possibly remember her voice. Who would have forgotten her songs and the stories she’d promised to finish someday, when they could giggle together.

She crept down the hall like a ghost to her daughter’s room, hovering in the doorway because the bed nearly filled the space, which in a house of this era had probably been meant as a sewing room or a nursery. Sunny yellow and black cats frolicked among sunflowers on the wallpaper that climbed the slanted ceiling. Yellow curtains covered the tall sash window. Under a pale lemon-yellow and white comforter, Shelly slept peacefully. Lynn could just make out her face in the glow from the hall, and thought, Ruth is right. She looks like a Celt from old stories, a fairy child, with that small, pointy chin, that high curving forehead and glossy brown hair as straight as promises that were kept.

Risk her, for the dream child?

Lynn closed her eyes on a soft, agonized exhalation. How could she?

How could she not?

CHAPTER TWO

LATE AGAIN.

Adam Landry swore at the driver of the car in front of him, which hesitated just too long and missed the one and only opening to make a left turn before the light became red.

Damn, he thought bitterly. They’d both be sitting through another full light. And he was already—he snatched an edgy look at the clock on his dash—ten minutes past the closing of his daughter’s preschool.

This was getting to be routine, and if he wasn’t careful they’d ask him to make other arrangements for Rose. But the Cottage Path Preschool and Day Care was the best.

Oh, hell, why lie to himself? He didn’t know if it was best. He didn’t know a thing about it, except that Jennifer had chosen it, an eternity ago when she was pregnant and joyful, not planning to go back to work but figuring she’d need a place for drop-in sometimes.

Over dinner, she’d told him about it, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “It’s the Cottage Path Preschool. Isn’t that perfect? Can you believe it? Our Rose will trip up the path to the cottage. Oh!” She shivered in delight, and he’d momentarily seen the vision that had become the center of her life: a little girl with the same mahogany brown hair as her mommy, her legs skinny, dimples flashing and her giggle a trill like a flute solo that reached for heaven and found it.

Their child.

And him? What had he said? A gruff, “You’re not letting the name of the place suck you in, are you?”

She’d only laughed at him, her joy undimmed. “Don’t be silly. It’s a wonderful preschool! The director’s written a book about early childhood development. They have animals—chickens and goats and this big lazy dog that lets kids climb all over him and only grunts. And puzzles and books and blocks and puppets! It’s wonderland.”

Pain stabbed now and Adam rubbed his chest. He’d never considered any place else for Rose. He was trying to raise their daughter as Jennifer would have wanted to, which meant he scraped his memory for nuggets his wife might have dropped, perhaps in bed when he scanned the financial news a last time while she chattered on in her light voice as if oblivious to his lack of attention.

Adam took another savage look at the clock and swore. Was he screwing up one more thing Jennifer had wanted for Rose?

But maybe it wasn’t the best choice now. Maybe he should go for a nanny.

He tensed when the light turned green and willed the driver of the Buick to make a dash before cross-traffic began. But, hell, no. The car didn’t even inch forward. The heel of Adam’s hand was on the horn when he clenched his teeth and made himself wrap his fingers around the wheel again. Shit. If he hadn’t stayed for that last goddamn phone call, he wouldn’t be in such a hurry he wanted other drivers to take their lives in their hands just to get out of his way. Why hadn’t he walked out, ignored the ringing?

He couldn’t do everything.

He had to try. He owed it to Rose. And to Jennifer.

An interminable five more minutes had passed before he barreled into the parking lot, yanked on the emergency brake and killed the engine, slamming his door before he strode in.

The director of the preschool, a woman of his own age named Melissa Gearhart, waited in the entry, eyes cool.

“Mr. Landry. Rose has been worried.”

His intense anxiety made itself felt in a long huff of breath. “God, I’m sorry. I’ve done it again.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to start charging you when staff has to stay late, like today.”

“I understand.” He swallowed. “Where’s Rose?”

The dark-haired woman with tired smudges beneath her eyes turned. “Under the climber.”

He stepped past her into the main activity room, where the floor was covered with bright mats to pad falls from the slide and wooden peg climber. He had to circle a playhouse before he saw his daughter, lying on the mat with her thumb in her mouth.

Wearing clothes he’d never seen before. Ill fitting and mismatched.

“She had an accident again,” Melissa said softly behind him. “No big deal. I’ve got her clothes in a plastic bag for you. Just bring those back when you’ve washed them.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, acknowledging more failure. Or maybe not—he hadn’t had the guts to ask the mothers who picked up their three-year-olds whether they had potty accidents still, too. Or the occasional father, none exclusive parents the way he was. Adam didn’t even like to ask Melissa, because he didn’t want to know something was wrong, that he’d already warped his beloved child.

If only he knew what the hell he was doing.

If only Jennifer were alive to help him do it.

“Hey, Rose Red,” he said softly, crouching. “Ready to bloom?”

“Daddy!” She erupted to her feet and into his arms, her sky-blue eyes flooding with tears. “You’re late, and I’m hungry, and I had a accident, an’…”

He stemmed the flow. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Here you were, all by yourself.”

“Except for Lissa,” Rose mumbled against his shoulder. She snuffled. “Lissa didn’t leave me.”

He felt the crushing addition, Like you do. Every day.

She’d taken lately to holding on to him and screaming when he tried to drop her off in the morning. He felt like the worst parent in the whole damned world when the day-care workers had to pry his daughter’s fingers off him and haul her away, when the last thing he saw was Rose’s round tear-streaked face. Those desperate, pleading eyes haunted his days, gave him a feeling of self-loathing.

But, goddamn it, he had to work!

Rationally he knew that other kids cried in the morning, too, that it was probably just a stage. Reason didn’t quell the guilt that ate at his gut like too many cups of coffee.

She needed her daddy, and he wasn’t there.

He hustled her out to the car, belatedly grabbing the white plastic garbage sack that held Rose’s own clothes. That meant laundry tonight. He didn’t want to leave these for Ann, their twenty-something housekeeper-cook. When Rose wet the bed, he always changed it, too. Three and a half wasn’t so old, he tried to tell himself, but he hadn’t seen those discreet plastic bags go home with Rose’s friends Rainy and Sylvie, either. Not in months.

His daughter fell asleep during the drive home, worn out by a ten-hour day, and more guilt stabbed him. Poor Rosebud. How did a little girl grow into a woman without a mother to lead the way? What did he know about girlish secrets or adolescent crushes or makeup or menstrual cramps?

Well, he’d damn well learn. He was mommy and daddy both, determined not to foist his daughter’s upbringing on a series of nannies. Jennifer wouldn’t have wanted that.

I didn’t mean it, he said silently, speaking to her as if she were listening. No nanny.

A nanny would be a replacement. A substitute mother. No one could be Jennifer, petite, quick moving, eternally optimistic, alive.

Dead, in every meaningful way, long before her daughter was cut from her belly.

He hadn’t even looked at Rose when doctors performed the C-section. He’d been holding Jennifer’s hand, although Jennifer didn’t know it, would never know it, because she was brain-dead. He’d been saying goodbye, because the shell of her body had no purpose anymore, now that it wasn’t needed to sustain her child. He had agreed that she would be unhooked from machines as soon as the baby could survive on her own.

“I’ll do my best,” he had whispered to the love of his life. One last promise, he thought, praying she didn’t know how he had dreaded the birth because it meant severing any last wisp of hope that the doctors were wrong, that she would yet wake up.

How could she be gone? He had gripped her hand so hard it should have hurt, but she only lay there, eyes closed, breast rising and falling with the hissing push of the respirator, unaware of her daughter’s birth, of his tears and whispered, wrenching, “Goodbye, Jenny.” Unaware when he blundered from the room.

Unaware when her heart stopped, when the last breath caught in her throat.

His bright-faced, pretty, otherworldly wife was already dead when her daughter began life.

He named her Jenny Rose, and called her Rose, this little girl who showed no signs of looking like her mama, to his relief and disappointment both. Her hair had developed red tints and curls, and the deep blue of her eyes never changed, as everyone said it would.

Some days, Adam was intensely grateful that he didn’t have to think about his lost Jenny every time he looked at his daughter. And yet, he’d wanted to hold on to a part of her, remember her, never lose sight of her pixie face, but sometimes now he had to pick up the photo that sat on his bedside table in a silver frame to remember her. Sometimes she faded to the point that he thought perhaps her face was round, like Rose’s, or her nose solemnly straight; perhaps her hair had a forgotten wave, or she had moved or talked with a deliberateness that spoke of long thought.

But the sight of her face, even in the photograph, reminded him of her high cheekbones and pointy chin, turned-up nose and full yet delicate lips, always parted as she breathlessly waited for the chance to launch into speech. How often she’d had to crinkle her nose in apology, because she had been untactful or indiscreet, words flowing without thought. Even when she was hurtful, he’d found her spontaneity endearing, innocence to be treasured and guarded.

Adam had wanted the same for Rose, that she should grow up free to chatter. He wanted her to believe, always, that what she thought and felt was valued.

Instead his Rose was a quiet child, as thoughtful as her mother had been airy. Their daughter was in personality more his than Jennifer’s, although she didn’t look much like him, either.

He paused at the curb long enough to grab the mail from the box, then drove straight into the garage. Rose didn’t stir when he turned off the engine. When he went around to unbuckle her car seat, he set the mail on the car roof. A card for her from Jennifer’s parents, he noted with one corner of his attention. Good, Rose loved to get mail. A credit card statement, probably a demand for money from the utility company, the usual junk hoping he’d buy a new bedroom suite or refinance his house, and something from the hospital where Rose had been born.

The bills for Jennifer’s protracted death and Rose’s birth had been horrendous. But paid, every last one of them. The insurance company, bless them, hadn’t balked at a one.

The doctors and nursing staff had been compassionate, patient, gentle and kind. And he never wanted to see any of them again. Never wanted to walk those halls, smell cleansers and death. He’d go to any other hospital in the city in preference.

Unless perhaps, he thought, easing his sleepy, grumbling daughter from her car seat, Rose was seriously ill or hurt. Then he could endure the memories, for her.

In the house, Adam plopped her on the couch and put on a video. Winnie the Pooh, her current favorite. Hurrying to the kitchen, he took a casserole covered in plastic wrap from the refrigerator and put it straight into the microwave. High, twenty minutes, Ann had written on the sticky note attached to it. She was a gem. The kitchen sparkled, as always, and her cooking was damned good.

The one thing she didn’t do was child care. She’d made that plain from the start. Her disinclination suited his reluctance to pass any part of his job as parent onto someone else, even though it would have been handy to have a housekeeper who would watch Rose when she was sick and couldn’t go to day care, or to pick her up when Adam had to stay late in the office. But he’d known how easy it would be to slide from that into having Ann pick her up every day, feed her dinner, then perhaps make her breakfast and drive her to the Cottage Path Preschool, until in the end he wasn’t doing much but kissing his daughter good-night.

So he and Ann had a deal: in return for weekly checks, she was like the shoemaker’s elves, invisible and indispensable. Rose had scarcely even met her, and Adam and she communicated by sticky notes left on the fridge, but the house was clean and she always had dinner ready to go in the oven or microwave. Saturdays he cooked himself. Sundays, he and Rose usually went out for dinner, her choice, which meant McDonald’s or Renny’s Pizza Parlor, but he didn’t mind.

While the microwave hummed, he thumbed through the mail and discarded three-quarters of it, setting aside the card for Rose when she was a little more alert. The envelope from the hospital Adam fingered. He was strangely reluctant to open it. Some kind of follow-up, he supposed, or maybe they wanted him on their board of governors, or…

Well, hell, find out.

He read the letter through the first time without understanding it. A distressing discovery had been made. At this point, hospital officials didn’t know where to assign blame. He could be assured an investigation was under way. In the meantime, Jenny Rose Landry should undergo testing.

Testing for what?

He knew and wouldn’t let himself see the sentence that began, “Because of unusual circumstances, the mother of a girl born on the same day as your daughter in this hospital has found that she has been raising a child who is not a biological relation to her.” The letter continued by raising the possibility that two of the six baby girls born that day had been switched in the nursery. Administrators were asking that parents agree to blood tests to determine whether this was, indeed, what had happened. He was particularly urged, because his child had been born within twenty minutes of the girl in question.

When Adam did, finally, make himself see, and when he grasped all that this could mean, anger roared through his veins, darkening his vision.

Could they really be so incompetent as to make a mistake of this magnitude? Babies were supposed to be tagged immediately so this wasn’t possible! Hadn’t they put a wristband on Jenny Rose while she was still bloody, still giving her first thin cry?

He hadn’t seen. Adam bent his head suddenly and gripped the edge of the kitchen counter as panic whipped around the perimeter of his anger, as if it were only the eye of a hurricane.

They might not have followed the usual procedures, because the circumstances were so unusual. Respecting his grief, nurses might have carried the infant girl straight to the nursery before taking the Apgar and banding her wrist.

Even then—his anger revived—how could they screw up so royally? What did they do, leave babies lying around like Lego blocks in a preschool? Had the nurses wandered by sometime later and said, “Oh, yeah, this one must be the Landry kid?”

But the panic was more powerful than the anger, because his basic nature wouldn’t let him be less than logical. If a mistake had been made that night, his daughter had all too likely been part of it. No mother or father had been hovering over her; she had never been placed at her mother’s breast, and she wasn’t held by her father until hours after her birth. Adam inhaled sharply, swearing. Hours? God. He hadn’t thought about Jenny Rose until the next day, when his grief had dulled and he’d remembered that his wife had left a trust to him.

Only, by that time, the baby that had been lifted, blood-slick, from Jennifer’s belly might have accidentally been switched with another little girl born the same hour.

Where had her parents been? he raged. How could they not have paid more attention? Why hadn’t they noticed the switch?

He breathed heavily through his mouth. The microwave was beeping.

“Daddy?” Jenny Rose was saying from the kitchen doorway, the single word murmured around her thumb.

Think, he commanded himself. Then, Don’t think. Not now.

“Yeah, Petunia?” He sounded almost normal.

She gave a hiccuping giggle. “Rose, Daddy! Not Petunia.”

It was an old joke. “Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “I knew you were some flower or other.”

“Daddy, I’m hungry.”

“Lucky for you, dinner’s done.” He hadn’t put on a vegetable, but right now he didn’t care.

He dished up the casserole in bowls and carried them out to the family room where he joined Rose in watching Tigger and Pooh Bear try to patch up Eeyore’s problems, in their bumbling, well-meaning way.

Like the damned hospital officials.

Why contact me? Adam wondered. Was that mother dissatisfied with the child she’d been given? Did she want to trade her in for another one? Fresh anger buffeted him. Wasn’t his biological child good enough for her?

Not just his. Jennifer’s.

That’s when it hit him: In this other home, there might be a little girl who did have Jenny’s pointed chin and quirky smile and ability to flit from idea to idea as if the last was forgotten as soon as the temptation of the next presented itself.

He groaned, barely muffling the sound in time to prevent Rose from wanting to know if Daddy hurt. Could she kiss it and make it better?

His Rose. By God, nobody was taking her from him.

But. Jennifer had left their baby in trust to him, and he might have lost her. He hadn’t even looked at her. If only he’d seen her tiny features, he would have known, later, when they handed him Rose.

He made his decision then, as simply as that, although not without fear greater than any he’d felt since the phone call telling him his wife had been in a car accident.

Nobody would take his Jenny Rose from him. But he had to let her be tested, and if she wasn’t his daughter, wasn’t Jennifer’s…

Well, he had to see the child who was. Find out what he could do to make her life right, from now on. Earn the trust he’d been given.

ADAM DIDN’T TAKE his Rosebud to that hospital. He didn’t trust them, although he never defined the sins he thought them willing to commit. He only knew he had to protect Rose. So he took her to her own pediatrician for DNA testing. And then Adam went to the hospital with the results in his hand.

The results that had told him Jenny Rose was neither his daughter nor Jennifer’s.

There, he listened to repeated expressions of regret, saw in their eyes the intense anxiety that meant officials had lawsuits dancing in their heads at night like poisonous sugarplums. He didn’t quiet their fears. Hadn’t made up his mind about a lawsuit. They deserved to pay until they hurt. But he didn’t want or need blood money. And no justice he could exact on them would make up for what they had done to him and Rose. To his other daughter. And perhaps, to Rose’s biological parents, although it wasn’t yet clear to him whether they shared his agony, or were hoping to steal Jenny Rose.