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.
“Yeah, so they say.” He waved away the orange juice and sat up without taking it slowly. How like a man!
Somehow they ended up walking out together. And…yes! He’d asked, “What type blood do you have?”
She did volunteer the information first. She distinctly remembered the way he’d turned and said, so seriously, “That means the same blood runs through our veins. We must be meant for each other.”
She’d made it a joke; they’d both laughed, but a small thrill had run through her at the idea, presented with the intensity and gravity of a marriage proposal.
The more fool her!
She dumped the macaroni into the waiting colander, jumping when the boiling water splashed her hand. She should have known better. The single, chipped porcelain sink was shallow, and she was always careful.
Tears sprang to her eyes. “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered, turning on the cold water and sticking her hand under it.
Why, that creep! All this anguish, and he’d lied!
She told herself she was furious, but really relief flooded her in a sweet tide. Such a simple explanation! And after she’d come up with such a convoluted one.
The relief lasted all evening. She played Chutes and Ladders with Shelly, then told silly stories and every knock-knock joke she could think of at bedtime, buoyed by that wash of exquisite release from fear.
She thought about calling him, the scumbag, and saying, “I might think about checking our daughter’s blood type, if I knew what yours really is.”
But, although she should be madder than she was, Lynn still thought she should cool down before she confronted him. Besides, she wanted to be sure of herself.
She could ask his mother. No, better yet, she could call the blood bank and say that he’d been in a car accident, and she didn’t remember his blood type but she knew he’d donated.
That was the moment when she remembered. There she was, checking to be sure the bathroom door was open enough to cast light into the hall so Shelly wouldn’t get scared if she woke up later. One part of Lynn’s mind thought, six inches, that’s perfect, and another part was wondering if she shouldn’t add more books on tape to her stock downstairs—a man, a tourist, had asked for them Sunday, and left without buying anything after looking at what she did have—and oh yes, she had to pick up peanut butter at the store tomorrow, since Shelly practically lived on it.
Through all her other preoccupations, she felt the onset of fear and the prickle of goose bumps on her skin even before a memory came to her. A woman from the blood bank had called, not long after Lynn and Brian got married, and she’d asked Lynn to encourage her husband to donate blood again.
“He’s got Type O, you know,” she said, “and we’re terribly short.”
Lynn had said helpfully, “My blood is O, too,” and she’d promised she would ask Brian, but she’d definitely come down to the blood bank herself. She had, and he must have, too, after work, not romantically together this time. That part didn’t matter; what did was that the blood bank had specifically wanted him to come in because he had O.
Instead of going to bed, Lynn felt her way back along the narrow hall to the kitchen, with its tiny refrigerator so old she had to regularly defrost the freezer part, the linoleum with the pattern worn to a blur, the brand-new shiny white stove, bought when the old one gave up the ghost at the worst possible moment, the way it always went. In the brightness when she switched on the light, the cheery yellow she’d painted the cabinets looked garish, a disguise as obvious as a clown’s red nose.
The living quarters of the house were crummy; she’d put all her money into the downstairs, the bookstore. She’d had to. She and Shelly could make do, Lynn had told herself. Until the store became really profitable. If bookstores ever did.
But now she couldn’t help looking around and imagining what other people would think. If, for example, Shelly’s real, biological parents were trying to take her back.
I wouldn’t look very good, would I? Lynn thought. Her knees crumpled, and she sank onto one of the two mismatched chairs that went with the tiny, scarred Formica and metal kitchen table. I don’t have much to offer Shelly materially, and I’m divorced, and my ex-husband thinks I must have cheated on him.
Those other parents, they could take Shelly away from her. She remembered a photo from some horrible child custody case, when the little boy was screaming and reaching for the only parents he’d ever known while the biological father carried him away. How painfully easy it was to transpose faces: she was the one trying to be brave, make this seem like the right thing, while Shelly was ripped away from her like one of the beautiful sea stars from a slick wet rock.
Oh God, oh God, oh God.
She drew up her knees and hugged herself and shook, panting for breaths. She could hear herself gasping. She must be in shock, she felt so strange. Cold, and frightened, as if an intruder had crept in and violated her, as if she would never feel safe again.
Nobody must ever know. That was her only hope. Nobody. Ever.
Eventually the shaking
