Be My Baby
When I was twenty-three, I lived in an apartment on 35th Street, two blocks off Broadway. Before I had the baby, I took a bus to work everyday, traveling to and from my apartment through the city’s gray tones . At lunch, I’d sit along the river and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watch barges prowl past.
I worked for a firm that did the accounting for product importers, so the boats were a very real component of my life, as I would later be cataloguing their contents—Siesta Bowls, Turquoise, set of 100—their sku codes and weights.
More than once, I saw a homeless couple engage in acts of love along the river without the screen of foliage. I became fearful of taking a wrong turn in life. I imagined only a thin veil existed between such indignities and my own personal luxuries, and so I stayed employed at the importing firm. I had the sense at the time that I was living on the cusp of no return, teetering between great decisions, and there was little time left before everything became inevitable.
Two years later, when the baby was born, my boss called to congratulate me. My parents thought that was really something. I hung up the phone and wondered if I could keep up the whole charade of responsibility. I leaned over my baby’s crib and thought she was the most beautiful person in the world.
Ten weeks into maternity leave I stood at the window watching a bus pass on the street below when someone knocked on the door. No one ever came to our door—it was a second-floor apartment over a Christian Science bookshop. I passed by my daughter’s room and saw her sleeping through the slats of her crib. The bundle of her body seemed impossible to me. I pulled the door shut.
Through the peep hole I saw a harried-looking white woman. Though she appeared younger than me, her hair was brittle and frizzed and her cheek bones stuck out painfully. She was curled over a package buried against her chest. It was wrapped in a blanket and had the form of a human.
I opened the door. “Yes?” I said, offering a smile.
“There’s been an error,” she said. “At the hospital. This is your baby.” She pulled the bundle from her chest and offered it up.
I dropped the smile. “What?”
I saw then that she was distressed, and I couldn’t close the door on her. The little thing was sleeping. Perfect cheeks, fuzz of blond hair. A cherub wrapped in a ratty blanket that was damp from the recent drizzle. I worried about the child’s feet being cold.
“My baby is asleep inside,” I said.
The woman shook her head. “No. This is your baby.” She pushed it toward me, and I stepped back.
I knew that a hospital would not send the mother of the baby over to do its dirty work, had it indeed switched a baby at birth. The woman must be deranged, and she certainly looked like she was on drugs.
“I have a friend who works at the hospital,” she said. “She gave me your address.
I wanted to shut the door and send her away, but she had that precious baby who needed help. I glanced behind me into the apartment, then looked back at the woman.
“Wait here,” I said. I shut the door, locked it, then fell against the wall. I eyed the phone on the wall and wondered if I should call the police. My legs shook as I walked over and touched the receiver. But what if? What if? Could they take my baby away from me? Make me take hers? What if they wanted to take both babies in for an investigation? What if they then got switched in the handling of the affair?
I rushed to the linen closet and pulled out a few blankets. I kept extra formula in there too, and I grabbed two canisters and stuffed them in a canvas bag. I stopped by my daughter’s room and put my fingers on the doorknob. That woman’s baby did look alarmingly like my own. Same shaped head, same rounded cheeks, same pale coloring.
Back at the front door, the woman said “Please, you have to take her.” The skin around the woman’s eyes was gray and sunken. I shook my head and handed the canvas bag to the her. She took it limply, but seemed to have a hard time hanging it on her shoulder while holding her baby. “Please hold her while I arrange myself,” the woman said, again offering the baby to me.
I glanced back inside then stepped onto the porch. I imagined the woman bursting into the apartment to get my/her baby while I fumbled in the doorway with her/my baby. I couldn’t thrust the poor thing down and chase after her.
She placed the baby in my arms while she bent over to arrange the items in the bag I’d hastily put together. I studied the infant’s nose line, the arc of her brows, the thin sheath of hair that lay flat over her tender skull. I was looking at a mirror image of my daughter. Could a woman have twins and not know it? Was it possible this second child had been clandestinely taken from me after labor? Perhaps the nurses had been intent on giving her to a more deserving, more capable mother. Someone who would not return to work after twelve weeks. Something had told the doctor: one baby is enough for this woman; two will do her in.
The woman had rearranged the bag and was shaking out a warm blanket to wrap the child in. I took this as a sign of good mothering. She recognized the thin, damp blanket on the baby was inadequate. As she lay the cloth over top of the child and began to pull her out of my arms, the baby’s head rocked to the left and my breath caught in my throat. She had a small freckle just under her ear—exactly where my daughter’s freckle was.
How had I forgotten about the freckle? It was the first day in the hospital that I noticed the small brown dot just south of her little ear lobe. It had seemed to me at the time both banal and singular, a symbol of how much I loved that mysterious child in that moment. It had been a hard labor that transgressed into a c-section, a rough recovery with some complications. I won’t say I loved her right away. She was an alien against my chest in those first hours, a stranger in my room the next day, but by day three, my hormones had shifted and a sudden crush of love like an avalanche pummeled me. While I fed her, I ran my finger over that freckle and pondered the miracle of her existence.
But coming home had been so overwhelming. The crying started, the nights and days blurred. My husband returned to work, and I’d forgotten all about the freckle until now.
The woman had wrapped the blanket snugly around her baby and situated her against her own chest. “Listen to me!” she said. “This is your baby. There was an error. They were switched.
“That doesn’t happen anymore. They have tags to identify them.”
“I was there. I saw it.” The woman was gaunt. Her frame hollowed out where a fetus would have been three months ago. Her shoulders hunched, her skin mottled. “I was watching through the window at the nursery. I saw them make the switch. They took the tag off one and put it on the other. I banged on the window and started yelling. A nurse took me back to my room and gave me morphine. The next day they said I had to leave.”
“Are you saying someone did this on purpose? Why would they do that?”
“I don’t even want the other one,” the woman said. “I’m not in a position right now to be a mother. Keep both. Please.” She held the baby forward.
It was fall—two years exactly after I watched homeless couples resort to public fornication on park benches outside of my office building. Now, the incessant rain had soaked most of the tree’s leaves, resulting in a disarray of yellow and red on the ground. I had a wind chime that hung from the ceiling of the porch off my front door. Its delicate ting sounded other-worldly.
When I think back to that moment, I’m pretty sure the wind picked up right when the woman offered me her child for a third time. I’m pretty sure that chime ting-ed. Sometimes I wonder if time is indeed a dimension that folds around us, if our future selves can give our past selves some warning sound, something like, take that baby.
“I — I can’t take your baby.”
“But she’s yours.” The baby woke. Her eyes fluttered open. Brown like molasses. I jumped back, tripping against the threshold of my door, and fell into the apartment. The woman bent down. The baby began to cry.
“I can’t take your baby.” I backed up into the hallway. The woman was lying about not wanting my daughter. She’d wait for me to take her baby and then run and grab my daughter from her bedroom. I jumped up and slammed the door before she could take a step in. Outside the baby wailed. The chime sounded. I couldn’t tell if it was from the wind or if the woman had whipped the canvas bag over her shoulder and knocked it into orbit.
I didn’t tell my husband. I feared I’d made a grave mistake. He would tell me I should have taken the baby on the spot and sent the woman away. He’d say, Sisters! He’d say, Kelsey, you gave our baby away! How could you?! He’d stand up suddenly, jerking his chair back. He’d say, It’s my baby too! How dare you make that decision without consulting me? It was true. It was his child too—his little life out there somewhere.
For the last two weeks of my maternity leave I cried everyday. My husband told me it would be okay. That it would be hard, but lots of women do this. He suggested we visit the daycare facility again.
But I had spent three months alone with my daughter in that apartment, pretending I was a stay-at-home mom. We had gone for stroller-walks in the morning. I had stopped for coffee I couldn’t afford. I envisioned my daughter one day going off to pre-school and imagined that my husband had had many promotions by then, that I could quit my job, make homemade soup and do the grocery shopping. I could go to yoga class.
Now, I held my daughter against me all day, terrified the authorities would come and take her away and give me a stranger in her place. And I worried desperately that my real baby was living on the streets with a drug-addicted mom. I thought of the child as she grew. She’d eventually be taken away from the woman. She’d go through foster care, end up with a family that had always wanted a child and could never have their own. But she was my child. She had my genes. I had abandoned her and was buried in guilt and shame.
Four years later I hurried home from work, picked up my daughter from daycare, and rushed into the house to get dinner started. Back then, I tried to make healthy meals for her every night—something green, some kind of beans, whole grains.
I started the bath for her while I stayed busy in the kitchen. I could hear her giggling over the water rushing into the tub. “What are you laughing at, Sweets?” I called to her.
“My sister is telling me a secret!” she called back.
I stopped chopping carrots and waited.
“She says there is a secret tunnel between our houses!”
I set the knife down, walked into the bathroom, and turned off the faucet. “Who’s this sister?”
“Miranda is her name. We talk through our heads.”
“Ah, interesting.” I sat on the edge of the tub.
I thought about the months that followed after the woman came to my doorstep. I had succumbed to a festering fear over my decision and become nearly non-functional. At work I had mixed sku codes so many times my boss had to pull me aside. My doctor said it was postpartum and prescribed me medicine. It worked, and eventually I stopped thinking incessantly of the woman, the bundle against her chest, the fear that the authorities would take my child, the fear that my real child was homeless.
My daughter lay back in the water, her hair floating outward, wavering away from her neck. The memory came to me. Again, I’d let the evidence go—the proof that this child was my own. The freckle. In all my obsessive thoughts, I had let that detail slip away, and had not thought of it since seeing the freckle on that baby on my front porch. I leaned down and turned my daughter’s head to the side. Her nape was smooth and clear of markings. She had no freckle.
I sat up straight while she squirmed in the water. She smiled up at me. And I wondered, how had I ever made such a thing up?
Harli Palme is a writer living in Asheville, NC. Their work has appeared in several literary journals, including Jabberwock Review, descant, Permafrost, and The Gateway Review. Their work can also be found on their web site, harlijames.com.