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 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
