Free Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) by Valerie Laken Page B

meet one desperate boy seemed almost a heroic mission. To sit in an office and have babies paraded for your approval was something else. A shopping trip.
    Meg made hesitant, disapproving sounds, but then she consented. The woman went out into the hall with Artur and they were left alone waiting for a long time.
    “Maybe this—” Meg whispered.
    “What?” Josie hissed back, trying not to lean too close to Meg. She had the unlikely sensation that they were being watched.
    “Nothing.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Could this have been a bad idea?” Meg’s eyes were flashing from side to side, scanning the bare walls.
    “It’ll be okay,” Josie said. “This is natural. I mean, the nerves.”
    “But what if—”
    The door opened and the woman in the lab coat came in, walking backward to hold the door with her shoulder. In her arms, they realized as she turned, was a baby. No blanket, just a gray sweater and tights, and a shock of coarse, platinum hair.
    It was seated in the crook of her arm, and when it saw Josie and Meg, it neither cringed nor smiled. It glanced at them with vague disinterest, then let its gaze land on the blank wall behind them.
    “This is Sveta,” Artur said. “She is seven months.” Josie stood up, then remembered her role as bystander and nudged Meg forward.
    “Hello, Sveta,” Meg whispered at the baby. She was very tiny; Josie would have guessed she was only three or four months old. The woman jiggled the baby a little, trying to make her smile. Instead, the baby lunged at Meg’s red bangs and clamped on, pulling them back and forth with a ferocity that stunned them all.
    “Ostorozhno!” The woman slapped Sveta’s little red hand away, and Josie braced for tears. But the baby just stared back, revealing nothing.
    “It’s OK,” Meg said, trying to hide her alarm. She leaned forward to let Sveta take her hair again if she wanted. But Sveta drew back, and then lost interest entirely, staring at the wall again.
    Josie stepped into her line of sight. She was wearing a dark green sweater with white trim, and the baby stared at the contrast in colors for a long time but wouldn’t look at her face.
    “Hi.” Josie nudged one finger against Sveta’s fist, waiting for her to latch on. “Privet, Sveta!”
    Sveta looked from one person to the next without emotion.
    “Look at her little eyebrows,” Meg cooed. Josie took away her finger, for the baby refused to grab it.
    They smiled and waved; they made funny noises. They shifted Sveta around from knee to knee, bouncing her, tickling, rubbing her warm, knobby head. They didn’t think of head lice. She smelled very clean. She seemed, in fact, flawless but for her indifference. They took pictures of her, and then they got to the business of the videotape. They’d been advised to video the child and show the tape to a pediatric specialist at home. There were certain behaviors, apparently, that might reveal something important. Josie and Meg didn’t know exactly what to look for. Sveta’s eyes moved in tandem when tracking objects, and though she didn’t respond in any way to her name, she seemed to notice sounds around the room. The woman in the lab coat demonstrated this, going off in a corner behind Sveta and making different noises—clapping, whistling—to illustrate Sveta’s response.
    “She has some mild hearing loss in her medical records,” Artur explained. “But you can see that she hears quite well.”
    After a while they took Sveta away, and Artur and the woman went over the baby’s medical records with them. She had tested negative for hepatitis, syphilis, and HIV. She had been suffering from malnutrition when she first arrived, but she had plumped up nicely since then, they thought. They offered no information about her birth parents.
    “If you want to,” Artur said when they were done, “you can also meet the boy, Nikolai.”
    Meg sighed. “It feels like a lot to take in.”
    Josie put down the video camera. The picture of