father, the skills still need to be learned. So, for the next few weeks, Charlie did little but care for the tiny stranger in his house. She was an alien, really - a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine - and he didn't understand anything about her species. But as he tended to her, talked to her, lost a lot of sleep over her, bathed her, watched her nap, and admonished her for the disgusting substances that oozed and urped out of her, he started to fall in love. One morning, after a particularly active night of the feed-and-change parade, he awoke to find her staring goofily at the mobile over her crib, and when she saw him, she smiled. That did it. Like her mother before her, she set the course of his life with a smile. And as it had with Rachel, that wet morning in the bookstore, his soul lit up. The weirdness, the bizarre circumstances of Rachel's death, the red glowing items in the shop, the dark, winged thing above the street, all of it took a backseat to the new light of his life.
He didn't understand that she loved him unconditionally - so when he got up in the middle of the night to feed her, he put on a shirt and combed his hair and tested to see that his breath was free of funk. Within minutes of getting poleaxed with affection for his daughter, he started to develop a deep fear for her safety, which, over the course of a few days, blossomed into a whole new garden of paranoia.
"It looks like Nerf world in here," Jane said, one afternoon when she brought in the bills from the store and the checks for Charlie to sign. Charlie had padded every sharp corner or edge in the apartment with foam rubber and duct tape, put plastic covers on all of the electrical outlets, childproofed locks on all cabinets, installed new smoke, carbon monoxide, and radon detectors, and activated the V-Chip on the TV so that now he was incapable of watching anything that didn't feature baby animals or learning the alphabet.
"Accidents are the number one cause of death among children in America," Charlie said.
"But she can't even roll over on her stomach yet."
"I want to be ready. Everything I read says that one day you're breast-feeding them and the next day you wake up and they're dropping out of college." He was changing the baby on the coffee table and had used ten baby wipes so far, if Jane had the count right.
"I think that might be a metaphor. You know, for how fast they grow up."
"Well, it's done when she's ready to crawl."
"Why don't you just make a big foam-rubber suit for her, it's easier than padding the world. Charlie, it's scary-looking in here. You can't bring a woman here, she'd think you're nuts."
Charlie looked at his sister for a long second without saying anything, just frozen there, holding a disposable diaper in one hand and his daughter's ankles scissored between the fingers of the other.
"When you're ready," Jane stumbled on. "I mean, I'm not saying that you'd bring a woman here."
"Okay, because I'm not."
"Of course not. I'm not saying that. But you have to leave the apartment. For one thing, you need to go downstairs to the store. Ray has turned the point-of-sale computer into some kind of dating service and the truant officer has stopped by three times looking for Lily. And I can't keep doing the accounts and trying to run things and do my job, too, Charlie. Dad left you the business for a reason."
"But there's no one to watch Sophie."
"You have Mrs. Korjev and Mrs. Ling right here in the building, let one of them watch her. Hell, I'll watch her for a few hours in the evening, if that will help."
"I'm not going down there in the evening. That's when things are radioactive."
Jane set the stack of papers on the coffee table next to Sophie's head and backed away with her arms crossed. "Play what you just said back in your head, would you."
Charlie did, then shrugged. "Okay, that sounds a little crazy."
"Go make an appearance at the shop, Charlie. Just a few minutes to get your feet wet and put the fear of God in Ray and Lily, okay? I'll finish changing her."
Jane slid in between the couch and the coffee table, nudging her brother out of the way. In the process she knocked the dirty