For the Girls' Sake (2 page)

Still Shelly crouched in the same spot, her attention span astonishing for a child her age. She didn’t need her mom right now, except as home base. A pocket and a smile and a hug.

Lynn tore open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of paper. Unfolded it, and stared down at the bald black letter
B.
There was more, but she didn’t see it.

Her heart pounded so hard she wouldn’t have heard Shelly scream. Her vision misted, and she had the eerie sensation of being alone on the beach after a late-afternoon fog had rolled in. Everything was gray, indistinct, abruptly looming in front of her and then swallowed behind her.

Oh no, oh no, oh no.

There had been no other man. Only Brian, ever. If Brian wasn’t the father of Shelly Schoening, then she—Lynn—wasn’t her mother, either.

How was that possible?

She moaned and hugged her knees.
How?

She could think of only one answer. Somehow, two babies had been switched in the hospital. The little girl laid to nurse at her breast wasn’t the one she’d carried for nine months. Her own baby had been given to another mother.

Somewhere, a toddler with bright blue eyes like Brian’s or chestnut-brown hair like Lynn’s called another woman Mommy.

Lynn whimpered again.

"Mommy?"

Swallowing her terror, Lynn looked into Shelly’s frightened brown eyes. "Yes, honey?" She sounded only a little hoarse.

“Is Mommy sick?"

To death. Her whole world was her daughter. Not that unknown child somewhere, the one who might look like her, but
this
child—the one she’d nursed and diapered, whose toes she’d tickled and counted, the one who squeezed her hand and waited for an answer.

"No," she said. "Yes. Mommy’s tummy felt funny for a minute. Like this." She burrowed her hand inside the OshKosh overalls and tickled until Shelly’s elfin face crinkled with a giggle.

Shelly wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and pressed her cold, plump cheek against Lynn’s. "I wanna cheeseburger," she confided. "And chocolate milk."

Lynn hugged back. Hugged until the toddler squeaked with alarm.

"You know what?" Lynn said. "A cheeseburger sounds good to me, too.
And
chocolate milk. What do you say we go home?"

Shelly nodded vigorously. Lynn rose from the log, feeling as stiff as an old woman. She collected her pile of mail and took her daughter’s small hand. Feeling numb, she turned her back on the waves, her sneakered feet accustomed to the way the beach stones and sand gave with each step. One forward, half back. A struggle that strengthened the body.

Her daughter chattered. Lynn heard not a word, although she smiled and agreed.

She focused passionately on only one thought: Shelly was
hers.
Nobody must ever know that maybe, somehow, she wasn’t.

After lunch, while Shelly napped, Lynn sat at the kitchen table and convinced herself that Brian couldn’t insist on this blood work. She’d give up the child-support money first, tell him he could think what he liked. Even agree that he was right, although she hated the idea of letting him believe she’d sneaked around with some man she hardly knew—because, after all, she had no real friends who were male.

It took until five o’clock for Lynn to get angry. She put water on to boil for macaroni and went to check on Shelly. She was curled at one end of the shabby velveteen couch watching
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 to go out with 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 as she turned on the cold water and stuck 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 more profitable. If it 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 no, oh no, oh no.

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 attacked her, as if she would never feel safe again.

Nobody must ever know.
That was her only hope.
Nobody. Ever.

Eventually the shaking passed, and she saw again her kitchen, tidy and spotlessly clean, however shabby, and on the refrigerator Shelly’s bright crayon drawings that were supposed to be sea stars or seals or horses, those inner imaginings that her short fingers were not yet capable of rendering. It was home: loving, safe, clean and ordered. What else mattered? Certainly not money.

Nor blood. She didn’t care whose ran through Shelly’s veins. She would never let it matter.

But first, she had to be sure.

The blue plastic clock on the wall said eight-thirty. Not too late to call Brian’s mother.

Ruth Schoening’s voice held caution, once she knew who was on the phone.

"Lynn. My, it’s late in the evening to be calling."

Not:
Oh, gracious, Shelly is all right, isn’t she?

Lynn noticed the lack, and decided on honesty. "Brian’s told you he doesn’t think Shelly is his daughter, hasn’t he?"

The pause resonated with awkwardness. "He did say something."

"I would never..." The automatic denial caught in Lynn’s throat. She might someday have to claim she
had.
She took a breath. "You don’t believe that, do you?"

Really, she was begging,
You
know
me.
Please say that you have faith in me, that you love Shelly no matter what.

"It’s not really my business," her ex-husband’s mother said, the constraint in her voice obvious.

"She’s your granddaughter."

"Is she?"

She had begun to shake again, Lynn noticed with peculiar detachment. "This is so ridiculous," she exclaimed, trying to laugh and failing.

"I hope so," Ruth said. "But, you know, he’s right—Shelly doesn’t look like anybody in the family."

"When my grandmother was a little girl..."

"Brian said he’d looked through your family album, and Shelly doesn’t look like anybody on your side, either. She’s so...so dark, and with that pointy chin she makes me think of, oh, a pixie from a fairy tale.
My
children were round and sturdy and blond. Like little Swedes."

She always said that as if Swedish children were fairer than any other kind. She never addressed the fact that Schoening was a German name, not Scandinavian.

Obviously, there would be no assurances of unfailing love no matter what. Shelly would lose her grandparents, too, if it came to that.

"Well," Lynn said, "the reason I’m calling is that I’m considering having Shelly tested so we can lay this foolishness to rest. It makes me mad to have to subject her to needles and all that scariness, but I might do it. So what I wondered is, do you remember what Brian’s blood type is?"

"Oh, yes," his mother said promptly. "He’s O positive, just like me. What a good idea, Lynn! Doubts should always be laid to rest, don’t you think?"

Fury kindled in her breast. Now that she’d gotten what she wanted, she let anger have its rein, sharpening her voice. "What I think is that all this is incredibly insulting. I understand that Brian’s still angry about our divorce, but you know me better than to believe this...this hogwash. You claim to love Shelly. You always say I should bring her for visits more often, that she’s adorable, that I should send pictures so you can show all your friends, and now you talk about her as if she’s tainted and you’ve always known something was wrong with her. She’s...she’s a bright, beautiful child whose eyes don’t happen to be blue. Well, I’m not
Swedish,
and I don’t expect my daughter to look like she is!" Lynn ended with a snap. "
That’s
what I think."