Free The Replacement Child by Christine Barber

wouldn’t be protected by Our Lord until after the baptism.
    At first, Maxine kept Daniel’s crib in her and Ernesto’s room. She would lie awake, staring at the crib, until she heard Ernesto snoring next to her. After she was sure that Ernesto was asleep, she would get out of bed and quietly take Daniel from his crib. She would lay him down next to her in bed with her arms around him and watch him until morning.
    But Ernesto found out what she was doing one night when he reached for her. The next night, she moved both herself and Daniel into the nursery. Daniel never slept in the crib again. Instead, she would rock and nurse him all night in the blue easy chair Ernesto had bought her when he found out that she was pregnant. She eventually had a small bed moved into the room after Daniel got too big for her to hold all night. She didn’t stop nursing him until he was three and a half, when she got pregnant with Ron.
    Maxine’s mother had nursed Maxine’s oldest brother until he was five, even after her mother had given birth to Maxine’s sister. There hadn’t been enough milk for both children, so her sister had been weaned after four months. Her brother stopped nursing only after her mother’s milk had dried up when Maxine was born. Her mother had been angry at Maxine and hadn’t put any coral in her crib. The same reason Maxine hadn’t put any coral in Ron’s crib.
    But she had put it in Melissa’s.
    Maxine set the piece of coral back down on the shrine and picked up Daniel’s baby picture. He was smiling in the picture, his dark eyes almost covered up by his baby fat. It had been taken on his first birthday. For his first-birthday party she had made him a two-layer chocolate cake. She and Ernesto sang as Daniel, with his fat hands flying around, bounced in his high chair and watched the candle burning on the cake. Maxine had been ready to slap Daniel’s hand away from the candle, but he ignored it and instead threw his face into the cake, covering his cheeks and nose with chocolate frosting.
    Ron had grabbed for the candle on his first birthday, but Daniel had gone for the cake. Had that been a sign from God? Something she should have paid attention to? Maybe if she had, Daniel would still be alive.
    She hadn’t even known that Daniel was taking drugs. She got a phone call one day from the auto shop where Daniel worked. They asked, “Where is he?” Ernesto went looking for him and found Daniel in his mobile home, the needle still in his arm.
    It was over just like that. She never had to beg Daniel to stop the drugs or to visit him in a drug center. She hadn’t made any trips to the emergency room to be by his side. She never had to take him to the
curandera
to be healed or a priest for a blessing.
    Everything had been normal. Daniel had come home every night for dinner and called her every morning. She went to his mobile home once a week and cleaned it. She did his laundry every Sunday. She had seen Daniel the day before he died. He’d talked about going into the army. He’d smiled and teased her about the tomatoes she was trying to grow and had mentioned his girlfriend.
    They buried Daniel in the family cemetery. She turned forty a month later. She would kneel three times a day in front of the shrine she had to Daniel in her bedroom, praying the rosary for him. She spent the rest of her time at home in herhousecoat, cutting out every article she could find about drug abuse. She looked at newspapers only for stories about drugs, throwing them to the floor if there were none. Ernesto would clean up the papers when he got home from work. If Ron came home, he would step on them or kick them into the corner. When she found an article, she would sit at the dining-room table and highlight phrases—
distances self from family
and
seems uninterested in normal routine.
But Daniel had been fine. Everything had been fine.
    She kept the articles in a shoebox on the dining-room table and would spend hours rereading