The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Silently I went on to the next statement:

  Vanessa Goldstein, Feb. 16.

  Nobody passed the nurses’ station! I swear it. No one was up there but Ruth and me. Dr. Weybridge examined the baby and said for us to follow the standard routine, and we did. I put the drops in her eyes and the lab sent up Sandra Lewis to draw blood. We printed her and got a diaper and gown on her. I put the Baby Doe bracelet on her, started her chart. She was eight pounds, one half ounces, twenty inches long. Normal reflexes.

  I glanced at Kersh in annoyance, but he seemed fascinated by swirls in his coffee cup or something. I picked up the next paper:

  Jane Torrance, M.D., Feb. 17.

  Dr. Weybridge simply made a mistake, that’s all. And the nurses were overworked and shorthanded, as they said. I examined Baby Doe at eight-thirty in the morning and found an infant who was at least ten days old. She was alert and active, her eyes were tracking well. Her cord had dropped off and the navel was healed.

  Feeling exasperated, put upon, ignored by Kersh who was still absorbed by the contents of his coffee cup, I continued to read:

  Lilian Tully, March 12.

  I took her in. There was all that publicity, people lining up wanting to adopt her, you know. But you can’t just farm off a kid like a sack of potatoes or something. There’s channels. I run a foster house for kids, specialty is newborns, and I was next on the list, so I got her. And lie! Boy, did they lie! I don’t know what they’re trying to pull, them social workers, but if that kid was a newborn, then so’m I. I mean she already had teeth. Anyways, there she was and at first I thought I’d just go with it, keep her, start her education. You gotta start them young learning about rules and proper procedures. I teach them, and when they go on their way, they know a thing or two about discipline and obedience. Start them young and they stay straight, believe you me. Little kids need schedules, they need routines, but that one! Contrary from the day I laid eyes on her. You don’t have to spank them or hit them, there’s other ways to get their attention, but when I started to pinch her ear a little, to make her stop bawling for food off schedule, she bit me. A real devil she was. Sitting up in her bed, watching me like a witch. I couldn’t keep restraints on her for beans. Sometimes you have to do that, keep them still for a little bit. Not her. Oh, I called them and told them to come get the little devil. Put her in a kennel or something. I didn’t want nothing more to do with the likes of her. I told them to check their records. I specialize in newborns, I told them.

  I turned to the first page and checked the date there, and the date that was on the statement I had just read. Kersh was watching me with a blank expression, as if he had fallen asleep with his eyes open.

  Marilyn Schlecter, August 20.

  I don’t know how it happened! We’re trying to keep up with more than two hundred cases, and we don’t have enough people, or facilities. We don’t even have a proper working computer. It eats records, erases information, misfiles things. It just happened. Her records got mislaid, misfiled. I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t even know how many different case workers handled her, none of them comparing notes, and some of them even renamed her. She obviously was not a six-month-old baby; she was a toddler, eighteen months to two years old. She was taken out to temporary homes two or three times until we could place her, and those records are a mess, different names, ages. But our supervisor had left and people were trying to fill in. No one can blame them for what happened. If we had more people and some office help.… Somehow she got in our books as Mary Jo Goodman and she was sent to Winona Forbush under that name. I don’t know how it happened. But when they tried to get an identification for this other little girl, she turned out to be Mary Jo. I called Forbush and explained that a mistake had been made and arranged to collect the child the following day, but when I went out to pick her up, the house was empty. That’s all I know. I just know she isn’t Mary Jo Goodman. I don’t know where she is, or who she is. And yes, I’m crying. And I’ll keep crying.

  I was reading more slowly, bewilderment and anger in about equal amounts my reaction to the stuff in the statements.

  Max Godel, September, near the end of the month.

  I’m sittin’ there in Sylvie’s trailer, you know, reading the want ads. Nothing for me. Never’s nothing, but what the hell, I look. And the phone rings and it’s Marsha, for chrissake! I mean, Marsha! Man, when she took a walk she didn’t leave me nothing but a tattoo, and she’d a got that if she’d had a scraper. And there she is, and she goes, is Sylvie at work? She deals blackjack, why’d she be home at ten? And I go, so what? And she goes, wait’ll you see. This is the biggest, just the biggest. I just got in town. I’m coming over. And I go, no way, babe. But she’s already gone, and pretty soon she’s pounding on the door, and I open it and she goes, you look good, Max. Sylvie gone? And I go, get lost, bitch. But she goes, look, Max, what I found. Or what found me. And it’s just a kid. No two ways about it, Marsha’s a fast worker, but this, for chrissake! It’s a kid up and walking, and Marsha was with me for a couple of years, up to last spring. I mean, not even Marsha can’t work that fast, but the kid is holding her hand like she’s Mama, all right. Blonde, brown eyes. Not the towhead the papers showed, not the saucer eyes either. Just a little kid, two, three years old, I mean little. Marsha sort of shoves the kid inside and she whips the door right outta my hand and slams it and stands pushing it with her back, like the army’s out there and going to bust in any minute. Play with the cards, kid, she goes, and the kid goes to the table where I been playing solitaire. Before I read the want ads, I mean. And she starts to mess around with the cards, and Marsha goes I need to hang out a coupla days, Max, and I go Ha! Ha! And she goes, it’s the biggest thing we ever got us in, Max. Look at her, and I look at the kid and I think yeah, could be. The papers always get things wrong. And I look at Marsha and I go, you snatched her? You did that? And she goes, no way, Max. I was going back to the city—she thinks New York is the only city in the world—from Philly and I heard it on the radio, you know, the crash and all, and I was almost on top where it happened and I thought what the hell I’d have a look, but there’s all them cops and god knows who else stopping everything that moves, and I go shit, it’s not worth the pain. Know what I mean? And I’m in this line of cars, all trying to get the hell out of there, turning around, backing up, like it’s crazy. So I turn off to a blacktop road, me and a zillion others, we all turn off, but I stop at this roadhouse for a beer and the place is full of talk about the crash and the kid that’s been snatched, and I get an earful and split. All’s I can think of is depart, get the fuck out of there, back to the city where you know what’s what, and I’m driving, looking for the way back to a highway for god’s sake, and she sits up in the back seat and asks are we going to be home pretty soon? The kid’s over there at the table messing around with the cards all this time. She’s got them all separated in suits. Diamonds, spades, like that, and she’s got the face cards lined up and she’s working on the rest of them, putting them in order, ten down. I don’t know, it makes me nervous. I mean, she’s just a little kid. Anyways, she ain’t dressed in pink pants with flowers on the sides, or a pink shirt, and I shake my head. No way, I go, it ain’t her. But Marsha goes she had to buy her something to wear, her stuff was too small. She opens up the bag she’s got, and there’s the clothes the radio and TV yammered about all day. We gotta talk, she goes and she puts the kid in on the bed and closes the door, and pretty soon Sylvie comes back and her and Marsha are screaming and yelling at each other and then both of them screaming at me, and finally I go, we gotta call the cops, for chrissake! And they both scream and yell some more, and for chrissake it’s three in the morning, and we decide to get some sleep. Marsha puts some covers and a pillow on the floor for the kid and she takes the sofa and me and Sylvie hit the hay. And next thing I know the screaming starts again and Sylvie goes you son of a bitch what’ve ya done with the kid, and I go you’re crazy. You know that, you’re plain crazy.
But the kid’s gone, all right. And Sylvie goes, this’ll lose me my job, you creep. You know that? And she calls the cops.

  Breakfast had been delivered while I was reading the last page. I finished reading and then carefully shuffled the papers into a neat little stack and fastened the paper clip back on them before I glanced at Kersh.

  “I know. Craziness,” he said, eating.

  I started on my eggs. Not just crazy, I thought, not just that. Creepy. It was crazy and it was creepy. I didn’t believe the implications of what I had read, and if Kersh did he was crazy, but he wasn’t alone, he had backup, superiors, underlings, and some of them must have believed it, too, and that was the scariest part of all. “Two different children,” I said after a few minutes of silent eating.

  He shook his head. “I wish,” he said gloomily. “The link is the woman Winona Forbush. We recovered her body from the plane crash, and her boyfriend’s body. They found themselves with an unidentified kid and flashed on the Milliken kidnapping and thought they could make a killing.” He groaned. “No pun intended.”

  “That’s what I mean. The kid they had obviously was not born last February. The social services office screwed up the records royally. The woman admitted it. It’s a screw up all the way.”

  He looked almost apologetic. “We lifted prints from the Forbush house and checked them against the Snow Storm Baby. That was the only child the Forbush woman had. It’s her.”

  I remembered it then, the Snow Storm Baby was what the papers had dubbed her, the child who mysteriously appeared at the hospital last February.

  “You must have found out how she got to the hospital, who left her there,” I said, working at controlling my anger. I didn’t know what he was trying to put over, why he was telling me all this, and it was too much to take in with scrambled eggs and toast first thing in the morning.

  “Well,” he said mildly, “we weren’t involved in that. Reverse kidnapping? What would you call it? Anyway, the Philadelphia police didn’t find anything, and we didn’t start looking until after the Milliken case opened again. Then we backtracked, and we’re still backtracking. One more statement you should see. Saved the best for last.” He pulled another paper from the briefcase and held it. “We already have statements from everyone connected with the hospital—workers, the medical staff, visitors, patients—or they’re still coming in. It’s a lot, Seton. A lot. This one might interest you.”

  I didn’t want to read another one. I didn’t want to think about this any longer, but my hand took the paper, and my eyes began tracking the words.

  Rae Ann Davis, February 16.

  I’m a nurse’s aide, in the premature baby ward. I’ve worked there for twenty-four years. The night of the storm we had triplets delivered, poor little things, we knew they wouldn’t make it, but you always act like they have a chance and do everything you can. And we had a drug preemie come in and he needed detox, and we were shorthanded, like everyone else that night. So we were all running. So I came back from my break and I went in the bathroom that visitors use because if I’d went in the nurses’ lounge they’d have put me to work again and I needed a couple more minutes. So in the bathroom on the counter there was this little bundle, something wrapped in a little towel. I looked at it, and it was this preemie. Not even that yet. More like a fetus, like a miscarriage or abortion, still had the placenta. It wasn’t just right, like the cord was too long for one thing. It wouldn’t have lived even if she’d carried it to term. I could have cried. Some poor little girl probably scared to death by what happened to her, and now this. But it’d been cleaned up and wrapped up just like somebody thought it could have made it. And they left it in the right place, not the preemie ward, I don’t mean, but a Catholic hospital where the nuns would christen the poor little thing. Anyways even if it was still warm, it was dead, that’s what I thought, and I wrapped it up again in the towel and took it with me to the nurses’ station and then one of the real preemies went into a convulsion, and the triplets weren’t hooked up yet, and it was like I knew it would be. They had me running with the rest of them for the next hour or more, and I just forgot about the fetus in the towel. I left it on the counter at the station and forgot it, God help me. And when I seen it again I got scared because I didn’t call the head nurse or the nuns or do anything for the poor little thing, and I just put the towel and everything in my bag. I thought that when I got off work I’d put it on the doorstep, like in books, and let somebody else find it, nowhere near the ward, but out by the door. At twelve when I left it was snowing too hard to go home, and a couple others were down at the door talking about sleeping over, and I didn’t have a chance to do anything with it, so I went back to the nurses’ lounge and it was still in my bag. But I couldn’t get any rest until I did something, and finally I went back to the visitors’ rest room. I meant to put it back where I found it, only it was different, not so little, more like a real baby, but small. And there’s no placenta, like I thought before. Bigger than most of the preemies we get, though. I freaked out and I ran out of there, took the elevator to the canteen and had me a cup of coffee and a smoke. I thought I was going crazy, seeing things wrong, seeing things that maybe wasn’t even there. Anyway I went back and it was still there, a baby girl, pink, warm, big enough for the baby ward, and I knew I’d been working with preemies too long, seeing them where they weren’t even there. That’s when I tied off the cord. I don’t know why, just seemed like somebody should. I knew that if I waited a little bit Ruth would go get the baby I seen her take to the mother, and I could slip this one in one of the cribs and let them take care of it. I couldn’t say I found it, not now. I mean nobody but me had been in the bathroom since nine. They’d ask why I didn’t find it before. And that’s what I did. They didn’t see me and the baby finally got a bed, and it all worked out all right, only I had to take some time off because I kept getting a headache from worrying about seeing things again. After I settled down a little I remembered the macaroni salad I ate that night in the cafeteria and I knew what I’d had was food poisoning, made me see things. Never seen anything I shouldn’t since then.

  Kersh was watching me narrowly when I finished the papers.

  “Jesus bloody Christ!” I muttered. “You buy that a kid born prematurely last February is the equivalent of a four-year-old now? You choose to believe that instead of a mess of fucked-up records and two different kids?”

  “By the time she left the hospital at least seven nurses and four doctors had examined her, each one giving a slightly different report. Then a dozen social workers, five foster parents had her, had somebody. Not exactly inexperienced observers,” he said softly. “To say nothing of Max and crew, and then there’s your statement.”

  The restaurant had filled up by then, and the noise level kept rising. Kersh glanced around, leaned forward, and said in a voice so low I could hardly hear it, “We had a psychologist go over your statement last night. She says you noticed a difference in the child from one day to the next, even if you weren’t aware of it at the time. Day one you treated her like a three-year-old, the where’s-mommy routine. Few people know what to say to a child that young. You bought her the ice cream and she skipped away. Day two, you actually talked to her, warned her about strange men. The way you’d talk to a four-year-old.”

  He picked up the bill. “My treat,” he said reaching for his wallet.

  His tame psychologist was right, I realized. But she didn’t know the reason. When I lifted the child up to the seawall, I had been surprised by how much heavier she was than I had expected. That’s what made me warn her. I shook my head hard.

  “You wanted to know why we asked you to help,” Kersh said, getting to his feet. “Because we might not recognize her; you might not either, but she might recognize you and trust you again. Let’s take a walk.”

  We went outside and stopped at the Thunderbird. He ran his hand over the hood as he had done before. “I don’t suppose you let anyone else take it out for a spin?”
/>   “You suppose right.”

  “You need to think,” he said. “You’re the kind of man who drives and thinks, but head south, will you? Plenty of trees on the way. Like the man said, see one, you’ve seen them all.”

  “And you’ll be right behind me, I suppose.”

  “Or someone else,” he said, smiling. “We’ll talk again later.” I unlocked the door and opened it. His hand held it open for another moment. “Seton, think fast, will you? Milliken has hired a herd of private investigators, and we don’t want them to find the child first. We really don’t want Milliken to take her.”

  “Life as a princess? Isn’t that what he has to offer?”

  “For how long? What do you suppose he’d do when he realized she isn’t exactly what he ordered up? In all likelihood he had his son-in-law killed. No proof, no accusation even, but his daughter believed it and ran. We don’t want him to have this child, Seton.”

  “And what will you do with her?” I asked bitterly.

  His eyes took on that peculiar steely glint again. “Not my department,” he said. “But it would be better than what he has to offer.” He closed the car door, patted the top, and then walked away to his black Ford. When I pulled out of the parking lot, he was behind me.

  * * *

  I drove to the Delaware Water Gap where I had planned to spend the day hiking. After only an hour on the trail, I returned to my car and stood looking at the scenery. The trees were turning nicely, but they had not yet acquired the full blaze I had anticipated. They would be better on my way back, I thought, and wondered how many times I had thought the same thing already.