Whose Baby?

“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.

They talked of an investigation. They were interviewing nurses, although it was taking time, they said, sweating. Several on duty that night no longer worked there, or even lived in Portland. But babies were always banded in the birthing room, that was hospital policy. Somebody would surely remember why, on this occasion, policy hadn’t been followed.

Adam knew why it hadn’t, in the case of his daughter. Although it should have been. How could the nurses and doctors not have realized how doubly precious his daughter would be to him, once the lines on the monitors flattened, once the machines were unplugged and the illusion of life was taken from his wife? Seeing his grief, how could they have been so careless?

And how the hell could two mistakes so monumental have been made on the same night?

The other mother—the hospital’s representatives cleared their throats—Jenny Rose’s biological mother, that is, had been hemorrhaging. Doctors had feared for her life. Had been concentrating on saving her. Thus, in this case, too, the baby had been an afterthought. Nurses had hustled her away, so she didn’t distract the doctors. Neither parent had looked at her; the father had been intent on his wife, and she had been semiconscious. The mistake was inexcusable, but—ahem—they could understand how it had been made. Or, at least, how it had been set up, they said. Two bassinets next to each other in the nursery, two baby girls born within twenty minutes of each other, both brown haired. And newborns could look so much alike.

He vented his rage at this point and they quailed. But what good did his rage do? What satisfaction could he take in frightening a bunch of lawyers and administrators who hadn’t been there that night, probably hardly knew what wing of the hospital housed the delivery rooms or the nursery?

None.

“The future,” they suggested tentatively, and he bit back further rage even he recognized as naked fear. Nobody had said, She’s not your daughter. It won’t do you any good to go to court and fight for custody. The biological parents will win, given that this situation is not their fault any more than it’s yours. But they were thinking it.

“All right,” he said abruptly, voice harsh. “I’ll meet with these other parents.”

It would be only the mother, he was told. She was divorced, and the biological father was not at this point interested in custody. She was anxious to talk to him, they said. Could he please bring a photograph of Jenny Rose?

The hospital set it up for the next afternoon. Each parent could bring an attorney. Adam chose not to, although he knew it might be foolish. Right now, he just wanted to see what he was facing. He expected the worst.

The woman had begun this horror in a quest to find her natural daughter, apparently never minding the cost to the innocent child she had raised.

Adam fully expected to detest her.

A nearly sleepless night followed a half-a-dozen others. He’d forgotten how to sleep, except in nightmarish bursts from which he awakened to the sound of Rosebud screaming. But when he rolled from bed and stumbled into the hall, he invariably realized the sobs, the terror, were in his head. She slept peacefully, he would see, standing in the doorway to her room, able to make out her round, gentle face in the soft glow from her Pooh Bear night-light. He hadn’t told her about any of this. She didn’t know that a woman she’d never met wanted to tear her away from her home and her daddy. He might not be the best parent in the world, he thought in anguish, but she trusted him. He’d given her that much.

He left her that morning at the Cottage Path Preschool and let her cling longer than usual before he handed her, crying, to a day-care worker. Navigating Portland’s old freeways like an automaton, Adam arrived at the hospital early. His eyes burned from lack of sleep, but he otherwise felt numb. He wanted to see her before she saw him, before she knew who he was. As he locked his Lexus and walked toward the entrance, he searched the parking lot for any woman who could possibly be the mother of a child the age of his daughter. Daughters. Of Jenny Rose and… Shelly. Shelly Schoening.

But of course he was denied any kind of anonymous entry. A receptionist was poised in wait to usher him onto an elevator with murmurs and more regrets and an “Oh, dear” when she got a good look at his face just before the elevator doors shut.

A lawyer took over when the doors sprang open on the third floor. “The conference room is just down this way.”

They were so damned helpful, Adam was reminded of an old football trick: help your opponent up as fast as you knocked him down. Never let him rest.

The carpet up here was plush, the plants glossy, the artwork hanging on the papered walls elegant. This part of the hospital was completely divorced from the trenches, where babies were born and surgeries performed, where death happened. Up here they knew bills and statistics. He could have been in a law firm.

The conference room was smallish, holding one long table and eight chairs upholstered in an unobtrusive oatmeal. The air had that hushed quality that told him the room was well soundproofed. A place where grieving parents and spouses could be persuaded to sign away their loved ones’ body parts. He might have been here, back then. He didn’t remember.

Not even this air could muffle the anxiety crackling from his escort. It warned him before he saw her, sitting alone at the table, facing the door.

This slender woman with curly auburn hair had also wanted to be here early; wanted to see him before he saw her. She, too, clutched at any minor advantage.

This round, she’d won.

Poleaxed, he was barely aware of walking to the other side of the table and pulling out a chair. Sitting down, gripping the wooden arms, and looking a hungry, shocked fill.

She was Jenny Rose’s mother. He would have recognized her in a crowd. A round, pleasant face, pretty rather than beautiful, a scattering of tiny freckles on a small nose, a curve of forehead and a way of tilting her head to one side…all were Rose. And that hair. God, that hair. Shiny, untamable waves, brown lit by a brushfire. He’d shampooed that hair, eased a brush through it, struggled to braid it. Kissed it.

“What,” he asked hoarsely, “do you want?”

CHAPTER THREE

HE STRODE IN, just as she’d feared, a big angry man with a hard face. From the moment he sat down, she felt his hostility like porcupine quills jabbing and hooking her skin.

“What do you want?” he asked brusquely.

No preambles. No introductions. No “we’re in a tough spot, aren’t we?”