The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,24

time at home in her housecoat, cutting out every article she could find about drug abuse. She looked at newspapers only for stories about drugs, throwing them to the floor if there were none. Ernesto would clean up the papers when he got home from work. If Ron came home, he would step on them or kick them into the corner. When she found an article, she would sit at the dining-room table and highlight phrases—distances self from family and seems uninterested in normal routine. But Daniel had been fine. Everything had been fine.

She kept the articles in a shoebox on the dining-room table and would spend hours rereading them. Looking for something she should have noticed so that she could have known, could have saved him. There must have been a sign.

Two years after Daniel died, she woke up one morning with the flu. She couldn’t move when the doctor told her she was pregnant. She sat in his office chair not breathing, until Ernesto whispered in her ear, “A gift from God.”

Melissa Esperanza Baca was born at six pounds four ounces, a month before Maxine’s forty-second birthday.

At her first-birthday party, Melissa threw her face into the cake and ignored the candle.

Maxine was still kneeling in front of the shrine, listening to the people in the living room talk. She picked up the coral again and held it in her hand, turning it over several times, before throwing it as hard as she could against the wall, barely missing the crucifix above her head. The coral shattered and a few splinters flew back at her face.

Lucy sat in the afternoon news meeting with the other editors, not listening. They were crowded into a conference room, with the overflow of people trailing out the door. The assortment of city editors, photos editors, copy editors, graphics editors, and Web editors either sat or stood according towho got to the meeting on time. John Lopez, the managing editor, always sat at the head of the table, whether he was late or not. Dad’s chair.

Lucy was bored and was using her red pen to fill in all the hollow letters in the words Capital Tribune printed at the top of her news budget.

They had already discussed how they were going to handle the Gomez trial—a below-the-fold story on the front page with a single photo. The trial was continuing tomorrow, so it didn’t deserve better play yet. When the verdict was announced in a few days, they’d banner it.

Now they were talking about the bigger story—the woman who had been thrown off the Taos Gorge Bridge. They had found out that her name was Melissa Baca. One of their photographers had a picture of the cops pulling the girl’s body off the bridge. The frame showed her covered body on the stretcher with a hand visible. The assistant photo editor wanted to use the shot.

Lucy knew they would never use a dead-body photo. Northern New Mexico is one big small town. Many of their readers would know Melissa or her family. It would be bad PR for the paper to use the photo. The assistant photo editor argued that the picture represented the scene on the bridge. Besides, he said, it wasn’t any worse than what you saw every night on CNN.

Lucy was surprised that Lopez was even listening. She would have shut up the photo editor long ago. They had run a body shot only once during her three years at the paper. It was of a car crash that had killed a city councillor. The car, with the body in it, had been in the background, with cops cleaning up the accident scene in the foreground. They had thought the body wasn’t that noticeable. The next day, they were besieged by phone calls from outraged readers.

Lopez nodded as the photo editor went on, as if he were really listening. They had been talking about this for five minutes. Lucy was having a hard time hiding her impatience. Why discuss something that was never going to happen?

She interrupted. “So, are we going to have a graphic, maybe a map of where the bridge is? I mean everyone knows where the bridge is, but copy desk might need another design element for the page. Who’s designing page one?”

A copy editor across the room yelled, “Yo,” in an exaggerated Sly Stallone Rambo voice.

“Do you have room for a graphic? How do pages look?” The copy editor handed her the page layout dummies. There was