Bloodchild (25 page)

The thing that shocked her the most, however, was the complete change in hair color. There was absolutely no trace of the carrot tint, neither in his head of hair nor in his eyebrows, which were now coal black. His skin was darker too. It was as if he had been sunbathing. She thought the child looked too old and too big to breast-feed.

"Colleen…" Dana finally said. There was something in the way Dana pronounced her name that tore at Colleen's heart. It was as though she were pleading for something, calling out, appealing for help.

"Dana, what's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," Nurse Patio whispered loudly from behind. "Don't even suggest that anything is wrong," she ordered.

"What is it, Dana?" Colleen asked, ignoring her. She thought Nurse Patio grunted or made some kind of a strange, guttural sound just as Dana opened her mouth to speak. Instantly the baby's eyes snapped open, but instead of looking up at Dana, he looked at Colleen.

His face twisted as his eyes widened. He lifted his little fists in the air and screeched. The high pitch and intensity of the wail was so sharp, it made Colleen close her eyes and step back. Dana clutched the child frantically to her body, but his screaming continued, growing even louder and more intense. Nurse Patio came forward to stand between Colleen and the baby. As soon as her body blocked Colleen, the baby's cries were subdued. Soon he was only sniveling.

"What is it?" Colleen asked. Nurse Patio turned on her abruptly. In the darkened room, with the subdued light behind her, Nurse Patio seemed more ominous. Her dark eyes, draped in shadows, were like empty sockets. Colleen felt she was looking into the face of a corpse. Indeed her cheek and jawbones seemed to rise up against the skin, pressing out emphatically when she spoke.

"It's that cross," she said, nodding at Colleen's chest. "The baby is frightened by it."

"What?" Colleen reached up and put her right hand over the silver cross. It felt positively hot. "I don't understand."

"It catches the light, and the gleam is frightening to the baby," the nurse said.

"Where did you get that?" Dana asked. Nurse Patio didn't move out of the way, however, so Colleen had to talk around her.

"Audra gave it to me when she visited me in the hospital yesterday," she said, and heard her voice crack.

"Don't wear it in here," Dana said. "Don't wear it near the baby," she added, as if the words had been memorized.

"I won't… I'm sorry, Dana," she said. "I only wanted to see how you were. I'm sorry." She turned and ran out of the room, quickly retreating behind her own door. Once safely in her own bedroom, she caught her breath and then sat on her bed. She touched the cross and turned to her vanity mirror. There was no question that it stood out, but why should a baby be frightened by such a thing?

She remembered now how Nikos had first reacted to Audra. Audra had been wearing the cross then too. Maybe Nurse Patio was right. But how could she know such a thing so quickly? Was it because she was an expert with babies? That's what Harlan would say, she thought. She was positive of that.

It seemed like she couldn't do anything right. Here she was home only a few hours, and already she had had a bad confrontation with Nurse Patio and had disturbed Dana and the baby. Tears streamed down her face. It wasn't all her fault, was it? she wondered. It all made her so tired, she wasn't sure she should go to the game.

Then she thought of Teddy. It would be better if she got out of the house for a while, anyway, she concluded. She dropped the cross inside her sweatshirt and left her room. The hallway was empty and quiet. Dana's bedroom door was closed. She went downstairs quickly and looked for Harlan. She found him on the couch in his den, just sitting there staring down at the floor.

"Are you okay?" she asked when he looked up at her.

"Yeah." He forced a smile. "I'm all right. Off to the game?"

"Uh-huh. What about dinner? Did you want me to get something or make something?"

"It's all right. Nurse Patio's cooking liver."

"She's doing the cooking again?"

He nodded. "You'd better take it easy, Collie. Come right back, okay? You'll have a good dinner tonight. No junk food. I promised Dr. Lisa you would eat right and rest for a day or two."

"I will," she said. "Harlan, I…"

"What?"

"I'm sorry about what happened before, but she does seem too bossy."

"That's the way some professional nurses are. They have to be like that because they have a great deal of responsibility," he said, but she didn't think he sounded convincing.

"Dana looks awfully tired, Harlan. Are you sure that woman's helping her?"

"Tired?" He thought for a moment. "She goes up and down. It'll be like that for a while. At least that's what Nurse Patio said the doctor said."

"The baby seems so big. Maybe Dana shouldn't be breastfeeding him, Harlan."

"Don't worry about it, Colleen. I told you, we have professional help now," he said sharply.

"But—"

"Please!"

She saw the frustration and the anger building in his face, so she looked away.

"All right," she said, turning back to him. "I won't make any trouble, but I don't like that nurse," she blurted, and left the den and the house before he could respond.

Harlan rose slowly from the couch and walked through the wake of Colleen's dramatic exit. Her words lingered in the air like the stale odor of decaying flesh, for despite what he had told her, he still felt something was indeed degenerating here: his marriage; his relationships with the people he loved; his very life. And the thing that was so painful, that made it so hard to accept, was his failure to understand how it all had occurred and why it had occurred so quickly.

Sure, he could blame his sexual encounter with Nurse Patio the previous night on many things, not the least being his own weakness; but the fact was that it had happened—he had made love to another woman right under his wife's nose—and it had left him feeling drained and compromised. That complicated everything, especially having Nurse Patio here to assist Dana. The truth was, he didn't feel he could place his full trust in her.

For one thing, he didn't know the doctor who had sent her, and he didn't know anything about her background. All he knew was that Dana liked the new doctor and Nurse Patio. He wanted to speak up about this and might have before, but now, after what he'd done, it wasn't going to be easy. He rationalized his failure by telling himself it was for Dana's sake, after all, that they had Nurse Patio at all. He realized his desire to get rid of her was purely selfish. He wanted to get rid of her so he wouldn't be reminded of what he had done last night. Now, because of that realization, he was overcompensating and defending her to Colleen when Colleen was right. Nurse Patio had no right answering their phone and turning away their friends without consulting him first.

Poor Colleen, he thought, he would have to find a way to make it up to her, especially after what she had just been through. Oh, well, he thought, Nurse Patio won't be here that long. The trick now was to get through the period during which she would.

He went upstairs to see Dana and found her asleep in bed, so he tiptoed out and went in to see the baby. Nurse Patio was in her own room with the door closed. Nikos must have just been put into his crib, Harlan thought, because he was still moving around, even though his eyes were closed.

Harlan studied him. Colleen wasn't exaggerating—the baby had grown considerably in a short period. In fact, to Harlan, the child looked at least a foot or so longer. He thought he must have gained ten pounds or more as well. He was disappointed in how quickly his hair color had changed. He didn't have the same reaction to the baby's face he had had when he first set eyes on him in the hospital and immediately afterward. Then the baby had been pudgy and cute, his face full of possibilities. His features had become sharp and more definite, and, as stupid as it was to feel bad or complain about it, the baby looked like someone else's child.

But it had always been someone else's child; Harlan had been wrong to fan the illusion that it was theirs. Now, because the baby was taking on its true identity, he felt bad about it. This was his own fault, he decided. And, anyway, if Dana wasn't having this kind of reaction, why should he?

Of course, Dana had a stronger tie to the child. Because of the breast-feeding, the infant was dependent upon her and obviously had developed a strong physical attachment to her. As he continued to look down at the baby, he wondered how he would go about developing a relationship with Nikos. Shouldn't he start caring for the infant soon too? Right now the child barely knew him, if he knew him at all.

This was another reason to resent Nurse Patio. As long as she was here, she would stand between him and his adopted son. Whenever Dana wasn't caring for it, Nurse Patio was. He was totally blocked out of the experience. Such a thing probably wouldn't have been as important to him if the child was really his child, he thought. It was part of the irony, but there would have been inbred things, genetic things on which to depend for a strong relationship. But here, in this case, he felt a need to work at developing a relationship. It wouldn't come naturally.

The baby grimaced, and Harlan figured it was gas. That was something he knew about babies—they had a lot of gas. They had to be burped properly. Surely Nurse Patio had done that.

Harlan was tempted to reach down and pick up the infant. The truth was that he hadn't even held him since they had brought him home. He wasn't really asleep yet, anyway, he thought. He leaned over the crib, but as soon as his fingers touched Nikos, Nikos opened his eyes. Harlan laughed at the look of surprise on the baby's face.

"Don't you know who I am? I'm going to be your old man, buddy. Yes. I'm your father."

He affectionately touched the baby on the chest with his right forefinger. Nikos didn't cry, but his eyes followed every one of Harlan's movements closely. Harlan felt that the baby's body was tense. The infant didn't trust him.

"Hey," he said, "it's all right. I'm not going to hurt you. You're getting to be a big boy fast." He felt the baby's shoulders. There was a surprising firmness to them. "In fact, you're a little football player. I know, don't tell me, it's the good food."

The baby stared up at him with such intensity, Harlan had to laugh again. He ran his right forefinger up the side of the baby's face and over the top of his head, exploring the child with the same kind of curiosity that a baby would have for the things in its immediate world.

"In a way we're both developing, Nikos. This is just as new for me as it is for you. Believe me, little buddy," he said. The infant's eyes moved all the way to the side, watching where Harlan's fingers went. "I can sense it. You're going to be a tough one, maybe a Dennis the Menace, huh? Nobody's going to push you around. Nobody's going to threaten and intimidate Nikos Hamilton. Yeah."

The baby turned its head toward Harlan's right hand as Harlan brought his fingers around to the baby's chin. Nikos opened his lips gently.

"Uh-uh. No. This is not another feeding, you little hog."

He started to take his fingers away from the baby's face, and the infant lifted his head from the sheet and literally seized Harlan's right forefinger between his lips. Shocked by the quickness and the firmness of the move, Harlan didn't withdraw his hand until he felt a stinging sensation at the end of his finger. Then he pulled his hand back quickly and looked at the tiny pinhole in his skin, from which a small bubble of blood was beginning to emerge.

"What the hell…"

He looked at the baby.

"You little devil. How could you…"He reached in with a determined curiosity this time and brought his thumbs to the sides of the baby's mouth, pulling the lips up and away to expose the gums. He saw two distinct spots of white enamel in the top gum and ran his thumb over them, feeling their sharpness. "Cutting teeth? Already? God, they feel sharp. How does Dana—"

"Mr. Hamilton!"

He released his hold on the baby and turned around to face Nurse Patio.

"What are you doing?" she demanded, her hands on her hips. At this moment she looked more like a Marine drill sergeant than a nurse.

"Visiting with my son, or is that against some rule?"

"It is if you prevent him from taking his needed nap and get him riled up. Dana just fell asleep and—"

"All right, all right," he said. He looked down at the baby again. It continued to stare up at him with the same intensity. It didn't move, didn't utter a sound. "He's cutting teeth already. And they're sharp."

"So?"

"Well… how will Dana… I mean… can't the baby hurt her?"

She smiled at him condescendingly and then uttered a short, thin laugh, shaking her head.

"Of course not. The baby instinctively knows where its source of food comes from and won't do anything to harm that source. There's a relationship between the infant and its mother that's positively spiritual," she said, changing her expression quickly to one of deep reverence.

He was impressed. "No kidding?" He looked down at the baby again. "Quite a kid, quite a kid."

"Yes, he is."

"You've taken care of babies before—a number of them, I assume."

"So?"

"Is there anything unusual about him? I mean, he seems to be growing so fast and—"

"No. There's nothing unusual. He's just an exceedingly healthy and content child right now, and it's all working well for him. Don't do anything to disturb it," she warned.

"Why should I do that?"

She straightened up, the material tightening around her bosom as though that were answer enough. He blanched.

"I gotta get to work," he said. "Got a late-afternoon class."

"I know. I have your schedule pinned up in my room."

"You do?"

"Of course. I have to know when you are available, Mr. Hamilton," she said, but he thought she said it in a very seductive tone.

"I see. Okay. Dana's asleep, so I'll just leave. Tell her I'll—"

"I know what to tell her," she said. "Don't worry about Dana."