Giftchild Read Free Page A

needed us all to be supportive, to be sure.
    Otherwise, the stress was going to kill her.
    I couldn't blame Dad, though. We were all tired. This was the last leg of a long race. We had so little left to go, but I still wasn't sure if we could make it.
    Dad walked me down the hall to Lily's hospital room. Lily sat cross-legged on her bed, with the quilt Mom had made for her wrapped over her knees. She wore a hospital gown, but she'd already put on eyeliner, though not as thick as she usually wore it. I guessed Mom had told her I was coming to take pictures, and she didn't want to go without it.
    Lily waved at me as I walked in the door. "Penny!" she said. "Come hold the baby!"
    Mom had the baby in her arms, but she beamed up at me as I walked toward her. The infant was wrapped up in a tight little bundle, with only her head showing. She had about an inch of dark black hair already, though Lily's was blond.
    "Anna," I said.
    Lily wrinkled her nose. "Maybe. We were talking about Tina, too."
    I frowned, and looked at Mom. She had been calling this baby Anna for the last month. I'd never heard anyone talk about Tina.
    Mom didn't argue, but she didn't agree, either. She just ran a finger through the downy hair of the baby—my little sister.
    Lily was only six months older than I was. To tell the truth, it was easier to think of her as my sister, since she was right between me and Athena.
    "Do you want to hold her?" Mom asked.
    "Pictures first," I said. I walked to the door, making sure that every light in the room was on. I knelt on the floor in front of Mom, snapping some shots of her looking down at the baby.
    "Can I have her?" Lily asked. "Would you take some with me?"
    I lowered my camera. I'd only just begun taking pictures of Mom. I opened my mouth to tell Lily to give us a minute, but Mom was already taking the baby over and placing her in Lily's arms.
    Lily leaned her face down over the baby and smiled. I dragged my camera over and snapped a few photos from the end of the bed, and then moved closer, kneeling on the floor to get some of Lily looking down at the baby.
    "That's enough," Mom said to me. "Don't overwhelm her." But when Lily looked down at the baby, she didn't look overwhelmed. She looked happy.
    "It's okay," she said. "You can take a few more."
    Please , I thought at her. Don't do this to my mother.
    I stood above her, snapping away.
    I'd give her all the pictures she wanted. Hundreds. Thousands. I'd give her pictures of her daughter from now until Anna graduated from college, if only Lily wouldn't break my mother's heart.
     
    Rodney picked me up outside the hospital half an hour later. I wanted to stay until the papers were signed, but I could tell I was jittering, watching Lily hold the baby in her hospital bed like she was the mother. Once Anna came home, we could start feeling our way into a new normal, with our two new family members.
    "How'd it go?" he asked as I climbed into his car.
    "Good, I think," I said. "Let's go to my house. I can show you the pictures before we study for physiology."
    "The first part sounds great," Rodney said. "Sure your parents won't freak out?"
    I shook my head. "They're too worried to notice. Plus, studying. They can't argue with that, right?"
    Rodney did not look pleased.
    "It's a necessary evil," I said. "The test is tomorrow." I flipped through the photos on my camera's screen. It was sometimes hard to tell if I got anything good when the pictures were so small. I hoped the well-composed ones were in focus.
    "You should have taken these," I said. "You're better than me. Plus she's a baby. They don't really move around much."
    He smiled. "Moving, I can handle. But people want baby pictures to look cute. I don't do cute."
    I rolled my eyes. He needed to get over that. We'd been talking about running a photography business together, and the easiest jobs to get were in family portraits. "Once Anna's home, you can take some edgy black-and-whites, okay? Maybe Mom will let you