Whose Baby?

“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.