Whose Baby?

by Janice Kay Johnson

  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 logic
al. 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.

  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 go
t 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.