Whose Baby?

“I’ll give this to Daddy next time he comes,” Shelly announced. “C’n you save it for him, Mommy?”

“You bet, sweetie,” agreed Lynn, hiding her dismay. How was she going to explain to a three-year-old why Daddy wasn’t visiting anymore?

Giggling, Shelly wormed her hand into the pocket of Lynn’s faded, zip-front sweatshirt to deposit her find. The chunk of agate joined the crab claw and the mussel shell entwined with dried seaweed that she’d already collected.

For a moment Lynn watched as Shelly wandered away. She looked so cute in her denim overalls and rubber-toed sneakers, her mink-brown ponytail straight and sleek. Lynn tried hard to see what Brian did, but how could she? This was her daughter.

So what if her own hair was a warm, wavy chestnut-brown, if Brian was blond? So what if Shelly’s eyes were brown, while Lynn’s were green and Brian’s blue? Kids didn’t always look just like their parents. In fact, they hardly ever did. The genes that created a person were like…like the threads of color in a Persian carpet, thousands of bits of wool, woven together with a complexity that defied any ability to say that a certain blue came from such and such a sheep. Shelly might look like some forgotten great-grandmother. Did it matter that her face wasn’t a reflection of her father’s?

Apparently it did to Brian. He’d always been unreasonably jealous, both before they were married—when Lynn considered possessiveness romantic—and after. The marriage had been a mistake, a terrible mistake. Guilt ate at Lynn every time she thought about Brian, because she knew the failure was hers. She shouldn’t have married him. He was right, when he had believed she didn’t love him enough.

But she had never been unfaithful. There hadn’t been another man; probably never would be, now that she knew she wasn’t capable of the kind of passion a lifetime commitment required. She hadn’t given Brian any reason to suspect she was seeing anyone, so it outraged her that now he should claim Shelly wasn’t his.

Lynn bitterly resented having to put a three-year-old through the scary process of having blood drawn, but she’d done it. Not just because she needed Brian to keep paying the child support, but also because Shelly needed her dad.

So why wasn’t she tearing open the envelope? Lynn wrenched her gaze from Shelly, crouched on her heels ten yards down the beach staring with intense fascination at something, and studied the return address on the envelope. McElvoy Laboratories, Seattle, Washington.

A different lab. Lynn hadn’t taken Shelly back to their regular clinic for the second blood draw. She’d driven to Lincoln City. Of course she should have marched back into their doctor’s office, waving that stupid piece of paper and proclaiming her indignation at the mistake. She shouldn’t have had to pay for the second round of analysis. But she’d felt…cautious.

She made a face. Gun-shy. Brian had made her paranoid. She didn’t want to give him any ammunition. If he knew about the first results, he wouldn’t believe the second ones. He’d want more, instead of accepting the truth when she handed it to him.

Anyway, a voice whispered, what if it wasn’t a mistake? Shelly doesn’t look like either parent.

“Oh, right!” she said out loud. For Pete’s sake, she’d been awake and present during her awful labor. Sure, because of the hemorrhaging, she hadn’t seen her newborn daughter for the first hours, but then they’d laid the tiny red-faced baby at her breast, and she’d held her and loved her ever since. And, damn it, so had Brian! Only, now he had to get suspicious. Or cheap. He was late sometimes with the child-support check. Think what a good excuse this would be not to pay at all!

Lynn glanced up again; her daughter was in the exact same spot. A miniature tide pool, probably. Shelly had learned not to take living creatures from them, only to observe. She’d seen the difference between the rich color of a sea star clinging to a rock beneath the water and the dull hard body of a dead preserved one. She loved the scamper of tiny crabs, the dart of brown sandpipers, the hoarse roar of sea lions on the rocks offshore. This was home, magical and familiar at the same time.

Like having a child. For fleeting moments, Lynn saw through her daughter’s eyes and became three years old again. Wondering, awed, frightened, reassured by simple comforts.

Other times, Lynn was perplexed by this complete, small person her daughter seemed to be. It was as if she’d been born whole, finished, and all Lynn could do was open the world to her. The idea that a parent could shape her child was as silly as believing the same blood type meant two people were mysteriously akin.

Open it.

Lynn couldn’t understand her reluctance. She kept fingering that damned envelope. She’d peeked at all the bills, even flipped through a couple of publishers’ catalogs as if their spring lists mattered more than the blood that traced pale blue lines beneath the translucent skin of her daughter’s wrists, that beaded crimson when Shelly skinned her knee. Lifeblood.

Still Shelly crouched in the same spot, her attention span astonishing for a child her age. She didn’t need her mom right now, except as home base. A pocket and a smile and a hug.

Lynn tore open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of paper. Unfolded it, and stared down at the bald black letter B. There was more, but she didn’t see it.

Her heart pounded so hard she wouldn’t have heard Shelly scream. Her vision misted, and she had the eerie sensation of being alone on the beach after a late-afternoon fog had rolled in. Everything was gray, indistinct, abruptly looming in front of her and then swallowed behind her.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

There had been no other man. Only Brian, ever. If Brian wasn’t the father of Shelly Schoening, then she—Lynn—wasn’t her mother, either.

How was that possible?

She moaned and hugged her knees. How?

She could think of only one answer. Somehow, two babies had been switched in the hospital. The little girl laid to nurse at her breast wasn’t the one she’d carried for nine months. Her own baby had been given to another mother.

Somewhere, a toddler with bright blue eyes like Brian’s or chestnut-brown hair like Lynn’s called another woman Mommy.

Lynn whimpered again.

“Mommy?”

Swallowing her terror, Lynn looked into Shelly’s frightened brown eyes. “Yes, honey?” She sounded only a little hoarse.

“Is Mommy sick?”

To death. Her whole world was her daughter. Not that unknown child somewhere, the one who might look like her, but this child—the one she’d nursed and diapered, whose toes she’d tickled and counted, the one who squeezed her hand and waited for an answer.

“No,” she said. “Yes. Mommy’s tummy felt funny for a minute. Like this.” She burrowed her hand inside the OshKosh overalls and tickled until Shelly’s elfin face crinkled with a giggle.

Shelly wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and pressed her cold, plump cheek against Lynn’s. “I wanna cheeseburger,” she confided. “And chocolate milk.”

Lynn hugged back. Hugged until the toddler squeaked with alarm.

“You know what?” Lynn said. “A cheeseburger sounds good to me, too. And chocolate milk. What do you say we go home?”

Shelly nodded vigorously. Lynn rose from the log, feeling as stiff as an old woman. She collected her pile of mail and took her daughter’s small hand. Feeling numb, she turned her back on the waves, her sneakered feet accustomed to the way the beach stones and sand gave with each step. One forward, half back. A struggle that strengthened the body.

Her daughter chattered. Lynn heard not a word, although she smiled and agreed.

She focused passionately on only one thought: Shelly was hers. Nobody must ever know that maybe, somehow, she wasn’t.

After lunch, while Shelly napped, Lynn sat at the kitchen table and convinced herself that Brian couldn’t insist on this blood work. She’d give up the child-support money first, tell him he could think what he liked. Even agree that he was right, although she hated the idea of letting him believe she’d sneaked around and had sweaty sex with some man she hardly knew—because, after all, she had no real friends who were male.

It took until five o’clock for Lynn to get angry. She put water on to boil for macaroni and went to check on Shelly. She was curled at one end of the shabby velveteen couch watching Dumbo for the thousandth time. Her flowered flannel blanket was tucked under one arm and her thumb was in her mouth. On the dentist’s advice, Lynn had been trying to break her of sucking her thumb, but tonight she didn’t say anything, just kissed the silky top of Shelly’s head and breathed in her essence before going back to the kitchen.

Things like babies getting switched in the hospital didn’t happen! she thought incredulously, then more firmly. Parents were always afraid they would, but hospitals took such precautions these days. Lynn still had the plastic band that had been around Shelly’s plump wrist when she was released from the hospital. It had exactly matched Lynn’s.

No. There had to be some other explanation.

This lab was wrong, too?

She poured the macaroni into the boiling water and frowned.

Wait! Could Brian have lied about his blood type? She stirred the macaroni and tried to remember. Had she said what hers was first? It would be like him to try to create a fiction to make it sound as though they were destined for each other. He’d wanted her from the first time they’d met, in the bookstore where she’d worked after she graduated from college.

Closing her eyes, Lynn tried to replay the scene. A popular professor at the university had been in a car accident, and the English department had held a blood drive. She’d been resting after giving a pint, when the nurse pushed back the curtain and said, “If you’ve finished your juice, you’re all set!”

And there Brian was, on the next gurney. Still lying down, he’d turned his head and grinned. “Hey, they’ve been sucking blood out of you, too, huh?”

He’d come into the bookstore for the first time just the previous weekend. Or, at least, she’d noticed him for the first time. And how could she not have noticed him? He was six feet two inches, with short sun-streaked blond hair and bright blue eyes. He was tanned from skiing at Mount Hood. She’d asked, because it was winter and most people in Portland were pale. He looked like a surfer, broad shouldered and athletic and golden.

“Well, it was voluntary,” she’d said shyly.