The Nest Read Free

everything?”
    She laughed. “Everything is a tall order! But we know enough to know what’s wrong with the baby. It’s congenital.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œHe was born with it. Don’t you worry—I know you’re a worrier—it’s not something you can catch, or get later in life.”
    I wondered how she knew I was a worrier. But I guessed angels knew all sorts of things without needing to be told.
    She said, “It’s just a tiny little mistake inside him, and we can fix that mistake.”
    â€œYou can?” I said with a rush of hope.
    â€œYou know about DNA, don’t you?”
    I remembered it from science: all the little pieces inside each of our cells, like a spiral ladder, that made us who we were.
    â€œWell,” she continued, “sometimes the bits get mixed up. It’s the tiniest mix-up, but it can lead to bigger problems. People are very complicated inside.”
    â€œWhen?” I asked. “When can you do all this?”
    â€œSoon enough. You’ll see.”
    And then I woke up.

I WAITED THREE DAYS BEFORE I TOLD M OM about the dream.
    I wasn’t going to at first, because I had a lot of weird dreams, and sometimes they seemed to worry her; so I’d stopped telling her. I didn’t want her to worry. I didn’t want her to think I was a freak. But today she was looking so tired as she fed the baby, I thought this one dream might make her feel better. She smiled when I told it, but it was a wistful smile. “You’ve always had the most interesting dreams,” she said.
    â€œMaybe it means things will be okay.”
    When I was little, she and Dad had sometimes gone to church, but they pretty much stopped a few years ago. The occasional Easter or Christmas. We didn’t talk about God or anything. Nicole blessed people at night, and she must have gotten that from Mom or Dad. But Mom also read her horoscope every day; she said it was just for fun, so I didn’t think she took it seriously. Once I’d heard her say there was more than us in the universe, but I wasn’t sure what she meant by that exactly. Aliens, or some kind of supernatural forces, maybe? I didn’t know if she believed in a god, though.
    All I knew was that this dream made me feel better. Waking up from it, I’d just felt happier. It happened sometimes, a dream that cast a kind of hopeful light from the night into the daytime.
    Mom was feeding the baby from a bottle. She’dtried to breast-feed him, but he wasn’t very good at nursing. Something about the mouth muscles not being strong enough.
    Afterward the baby was sleepy, and Mom put him back into his crib. When I looked at the baby, here’s what I saw: a baby. He looked normal to me, ugly, like a turtle, his neck all wrinkly. Tight little red fists. Nicole had looked like that when she’d been born. And I’d looked the same too, in the pictures.
    Here’s what the baby could do: He slept a lot. He made funny faces. He kicked his arms and legs. He stuck out his tongue. He cried. He made pterodactyl sounds. He was a noisy gulper. Sometimes he spluttered and choked, and Mom patted him on the back. He gripped your little finger with his fist. He looked at bright lights. He looked past you, and sometimes right at you. Sometimes his eyes werehalf-open; sometimes they were wide open and bright and curious. He kicked his skinny legs and struck out with his arms at nothing at all.
    But when I looked at the baby, mostly what I thought of was all the things I couldn’t see—all the things that were going wrong inside him.
    I felt stupid having a babysitter. I didn’t need one, but Nicole did, and I didn’t want to have to look after her all the times Mom and Dad were at work, or taking the baby to his appointments.
    Her name was Vanessa and she was a zoology student at the university. She was taking a course over the summer, and the rest of