Baby Gracie

Gracie sat in the middle of the living room rug, shaking her favourite rattle. Erin watched her baby from the armchair, clutching her sweaty hands together and trying to work up the courage to open her mouth. 

“Keith?” 

“Yeah?” he said, turning around from the desktop computer in the cramped corner between the stairwell and the entrance to the kitchen. 

“There’s something I think you should know.” 

He glanced around, first at the clock over the kitchen door frame, then back to the computer, then to his wife. “Okay.” 

“Uh….” She took a deep breath. “The baby isn’t ours.” 

Keith’s eyes slowly migrated to baby Gracie, minding her business on the carpet, arms inside an empty margarine container. 

“Where’d she get that?” he asked. 

“What?” 

“Where’d she get the margarine container?” 

“From the recycling?” Erin shifted in the armchair. “She seemed interested in it when I was putting it away, so —”

“Yeah. Alright.” 

Keith rolled the office chair back. A wheel caught under the rug. Gracie reached over to feel the new lump the wheel had made, swatting at the hard plastic underneath. 

Keith stood up slowly, folding his arms tight across his chest. 

“So she’s not ours.” 

“Yeah.” 

“What does that mean?” 

“Keith, I think we took the wrong baby. From the ward.” 

He sighed. “I don’t think so.” 

“No, I’m pretty sure we did. She doesn’t look like either of us; haven’t you noticed?” 

“Well, she doesn’t, but —”  Keith frowned. “I thought tentacles ran on your side of the family.” 

“No…”

“And scales?” 

“No.” 

They watched Gracie shove the margarine container on her head with her hands while she continued to poke the lump in the rug with one of the tentacles protruding from her back. She shook her rattle fervently with the other. 

“When did you notice?” asked Keith.

“When she was five weeks old. The day we tried out the formula. She latched onto the bottle so hard, I couldn’t get her off it. Then I saw she’d pierced the nipple. With fangs.” 

“Huh.” He studied his daughter, chewing on her teddy. “And you don’t have any cousins with fangs?”  

“No, Keith, and neither do you.” 

“Right.” He glanced at the ceiling, thinking. “Are you sure?” 

“Keith, I’ve asked everyone in my family who’s visited Gracie if there was any chance that a recessive gene cropped up. None of them had any memory of anyone in the family that resembles her. Mom even pulled out the family tree when I went to her place. You know, the one with all the photos? Goes back four generations, and we still didn’t find anything. Closest thing she’d seen to Gracie was a neighbour kid when she was growing up who had antlers.”

“So your whole extended family knows about this already?” 

“And you didn’t, I know. You’ve hardly been home; the studio keeps you all day, and then when you’re home, you have to keep doing revisions. I’d have sat you down and told you earlier, but I couldn’t find the right time.”

Erin glanced to the side table next to her chair, where an open spiral notebook lay covered in scratchy writing, a ballpoint pen with a broken clip set on top. “I’m not even sure this is the right time, but frankly, I was getting sick of budgeting. Heads up, I might need to take remote work.”

Keith sighed. “Well, at least one of us will still be home with her.”

They watched a third tentacle shoot out of Gracie’s back to grab her teddy from where it lay near the bookshelf. She brought it to her face and shoved its head into her mouth, trying to give it a kiss.

“She’s getting big,” Keith said. “Six months, and I feel like I’ve hardly seen her at all.”

“She’s eight months old, Keith.” 

“Has it been that long?”

“It’s May. Her birthday is September 19th.” 

“Of course.” He shook his head. “I was so busy.” 

“Yeah. You brought your drawing tablet to the hospital.” 

“There was a full episode’s storyboard due the next morning. It was that, or no paycheck.”  

“I know…” Erin put her elbows on her knees, and her chin in her hands. “You know, I kind of got used to all her little changes. She’d roll over one week, and she’d sprout more scales the next… at some point, it was all the same to me. The doctor hasn’t even had anything to say about it. Just that getting her vaccinated was a little harder than with most babies.”

“Why’s that?”

 “Oh, sometimes new eyes pop up on her forearms. He almost poked one by accident. But he was impressed at how well-behaved she was…and she doesn’t have any health problems. That’s been a godsend.”

She winced. “But everything’s been a little much since Sunday, I’ll admit. When she said her first word.”   

“Oh, you mentioned that. What was it again?” 

“See, that’s the thing. I don’t actually know. I was trying to get her to say ‘mama’ and she just…made this sound? I can’t even describe it.” 

Keith scratched the back of his neck. “Has she said ‘dada’?” 

“Not yet.” 

Erin got down on her knees next to the baby. “Gracie, can you say ‘mama’?” 

Gracie looked up at Erin, removing the teddy from her mouth. It was missing a tiny bite-sized chunk in its head. 

“Can you say ‘mama’? ‘Ma-ma.’” 

“Mmm…” said Gracie, the beginning of the word sliding into a low, deep gurgle. The sound seemed to spread into every surface, radiating off the walls and making the furniture shake ever so slightly. The living room lights flickered rapidly, and the computer monitor glitched patches of contrasting colours before blinking off. 

“I hope you hit save on that file,” said Erin. 

“It autosaves. Should be fine.” 

Erin sighed. “This is why I didn’t need the baby monitor this week. This happens every time she tries to call for me.” She glanced at her husband. “It hasn’t given you any trouble when you’re working, has it? Before tonight.” 

“Computer’s old,” Keith said, shrugging. “Old computers crash.” 

Gracie reached to her mother and batted at her knees with one of her scale-covered hands. When Erin picked her up, Gracie wrapped her tentacles around her gently. Snuggling in, she made a contented sound. The reading light near the armchair flickered. Keith watched, hands on his hips. 

“What do you think we should do?” he asked. 

Erin bounced Gracie ever so slightly. “She seems happy, doesn’t she?” 

Keith nodded.

“I don’t know, honey…” said Erin. “If we brought her back to the hospital, is there anything they could even do? Who knows who has our real baby?” 

Keith walked up next to Erin, wrapping his arm around her waist. “For what it’s worth…I think we’ve got a lovely baby right here.”

“We do…. It seems wrong to trade her out, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why I waited so long to tell you.” 

“We’ll sleep on it,” Keith said. He kissed his wife on the cheek. Then he kissed Gracie on her soft, wispy-haired head. Gracie looked up and shot him a fanged smile. 

“Can you say ‘dada?’” Erin asked. 

“’Dada’”, Keith repeated. “Da-da.’” 

“Da…” Gracie began. Keith beamed. 

The sound dragged out, deepening, submerging itself in the walls and the floorboards below. The furniture jittered across the floor. An empty coffee mug fell off Keith’s desk, shattering at the foot of the rug. 

Gracie’s face took on a vacant expression, her little eyes wide and hollow. 

“You okay?” Erin said, trying to bounce her. She felt nothing. When she looked down, a small gap had formed between her arms and her baby. Gracie was rising, slowly, up. Her arms and tentacles lifted in an almost meditative pose. 

The lights flickered faster than they ever had until the beams left their lightbulbs and gathered around her, pulsating, enveloping her. 

Then they emerged altogether in a great flash, and Gracie was gone. 

Her parents stood around the empty air where their daughter had just been, still as the lights slowly turned back on. 

“Has she done that yet?” Keith asked. 

“No. No, she hasn’t, Keith!” said Erin. “Oh God, oh no…” She began pacing on a two-foot square of floor, hands pressed against her temple. “What do we do?” 

Keith stared at the rug, his arms folded across his chest.

 “Where’d she go?” Erin’s eyes flickered around the room. “Will she be back?” 

Keith’s eyes drifted up to his wife, watching her try to slow her rapid breaths. He took a couple paces toward Erin, and lightly placed an arm around her quivering shoulders.

“We’ll be here,” he said.

Erin pulled her hands from her face. “You think she’ll come home?”

“When she needs us,” Keith said.

The lightbulb in the ceiling above them flickered twice, as if in agreement.