For the Girls' Sake - By Janice Kay Johnson Page 0,2
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.