Page 9 of The Voices are Back

It wasn’t like I could fix it, either.

Hell, I was the undesirable one now.

I was the one that had gone to prison. I was the one that didn’t have a steady job. I was the one that my son didn’t really like hanging out with.

And definitely not for lack of trying on my part. I did everything I could to relate to the kid, but it was as if he just couldn’t wrap his head around who I was to him.

Which fuckin’ sucked, because he was the reason I’d gone to prison. Why I hadn’t been around.

Not that he knew that.

He was a boy. He saw me leaving as a betrayal.

I’d never been a part of his life, even if, at the time, my doing what I did had been because of him.

How, you say, was it because of him? How could I blame my kid for what had happened?

The truthful answer was, I couldn’t.

I’d done something stupid. I’d allowed my temper to get the best of me.

I should’ve handled the entire thing a hell of a lot differently, and I hadn’t.

When Bowie was still a newborn in the hospital, a male nurse had tried to switch him with another newborn. Danyetta, at the time, had been dead to the world after a traumatic birth. I’d walked in with food in my hand for the two of us after a long as fuck day, expecting to find my newborn.

Yet, he hadn’t been there.

When I’d woken up Danyetta to ask, she’d said that the nurse had taken him for testing.

That’d been my first real clue that something was wrong. Before I’d left, I’d specifically asked if there would be any more testing done, and the nurses had assured me that he was done, and wouldn’t need anything additional done to him until he was at the pediatrician’s office.

After that, I’d left thinking Danyetta could hold down the fort while I grabbed food. So when I got back and he was gone, my radar had been pinging.

I’d gone looking for him and the nurse, only to find a different person’s kid in my kid’s rolling bassinet.

When I’d confronted the male nurse about it, he’d assured me that it was my child.

But he couldn’t have been more wrong, and just remembering it made me slip back into that fog-induced rage.

• • •

“That’s not my kid,” I said stiffly, looking at the baby. “It’s a baby, sure. But that one is definitely not mine.”

The nurses in the station all exchanged a look.

One of which I could tell was a “he’s paranoid, what the fuck?” look.

I wasn’t paranoid.

In fact, I was so dead sure that I pulled out my phone, pulled up the last photo I’d taken of my son, and showed it to the closest nurse.

“That’s my son,” I said. “He has a birthmark on his neck. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but that kid doesn’t.”

The nurse’s eyes widened as she looked at the photo, then at the kid in the bassinet, then back at me.

She got me.

“What did you do?” I snarled. “Where’s my son?”

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