Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey Read Online Free PDF Page B

matter what happens, you are and always will be my daughter. The switch … it doesn’t change anything.”
    “Actually …” A shadow flickered in her eyes. “It changes everything.”
    This hit me like a punch. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, I’m not related to you. I’m not your kid. And it’s not even like I was adopted. If I was adopted, you would have picked me, you would have consciously chosen to bring me home and make me a part of your family. But you didn’t. I just showed up. Like junk mail.”
    I actually smiled. “Did you seriously just compare yourself to junk mail?”
    “Yes. And not the good kind, either.”
    “ Is there a good kind?”
    “I don’t know, I guess I was thinking of catalogues. But definitely not J. Crew....” She shook her head in a gesture of dismissal. “Wow, this conversation has gone off on a pretty strange tangent.”
    “A tangent! So you listened in geometry as well as Sunday school, huh?”
    Bay shot me a sideways smile. “Why does everyone around here get such a shock out of me knowing things?”
    “Hmmm, I dunno. Shall we talk about your last report card?”
    “I’d rather not.” Bay laughed, then surprised me by laying her head on my shoulder. Instantly, my arms went around her, and I knew that there was nothing on this earth that could get me to let go.
    “You will always be my daughter,” I said softly, against her hair. “You will always be our daughter, our little girl, our baby. Not adopted, not accidental, not junk mail.”
    I felt her relax beside me, felt the tension drain from her shoulders. She snuggled closer to me and I squeezed her tighter.
    “And you will never be my J. Crew catalogue,” she said softly.
    I took that for the compliment she’d intended it to be and laughed.
    “You’re stuck with me, kid,” I whispered.
    “Thank God,” she whispered back.

Chapter Three
    Five weeks and three days after finding out that our Bay had come home with us by accident, the hospital spokesperson (a generic term if ever I heard one) called the house. It was 9:15 on a Tuesday morning; I remember because I should have been halfway to my Bikram yoga class by then. But I wasn’t. The mood I’d been in for the last month hadn’t exactly been conducive to outside activities. Absently, my hand went to the limp ponytail at my neck. When had I last washed my hair?
    We took the call in John’s den. He hit the button for speaker phone, and the counselor cut right to the chase.
    “I have excellent news. We’ve found the other child.”
    My stomach reacted in much the same way that it had two years ago when Bay dragged me onto the Rock ’n’ Rollercoaster at Disney World.
    “Where is she?” I heard myself ask; my voice was shaking.
    “Nearby, actually,” the counselor reported. There was a note of triumph in her tone, as though this fortunate proximity was somehow her doing.
    “And when can we …,” I swallowed hard, “meet her?” The thought of being introduced to my own child put me back on the roller coaster—dead center in the upside-down and backward loop, to be precise.
    “Soon.”
    But I had been waiting and wondering for over a month, and soon did not sound soon enough for me.
    “The hospital board will be meeting day after tomorrow to decide when you can—”
    “Excuse me,” John interrupted. “Are you telling me that the hospital board is going to tell me when I can meet my own daughter?”
    “It’s complicated, Mr. Kennish,” the counselor explained.
    Before John could reply to that, I cleared my throat. “Can you tell us where she is, at least? Where she lives, exactly?”
    There was a pause, followed by an evasive answer. “Missouri.”
    Like “soon,” this told us nothing.
    Struggling to maintain his cool, John asked, “Can you narrow that down?”
    Of course she could. But she wasn’t about to.
    “Nearby,” the counselor repeated. “As I said, it’s complicated. But we think … that is to say, we here at the