Whose Baby?. Janice Kay Johnson

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