Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey by Kathryn Kennish, ABC Family Read Free Book Online Page B

insensitive crack about the third base coach signaling him to steal second! He didn’t, thank God, but if he had, he wouldn’t have meant it as anything other than a joke to lighten an incredibly awkward mood.
    We were all doing our best.
    Isn’t that what all parents do? Their best?
    Of course it is. But sometimes, as we were soon to find out, even your best gets tested.
    Bay tested us, a week later, by getting arrested. I’m sure that wasn’t her plan when she tried to buy beer with a fake ID, but that’s what happened. And since she now found herself the daughter of two mothers, she opted to use her proverbial single phone call to reach out to the one she thought would go easier on her: Regina.
    When John and I went to pick Bay up at the police precinct (a phrase, believe me, I never thought I’d have occasion to use), I will admit that I behaved badly.
    How badly? Well, let’s see … basically, I accused Regina of being responsible for the meningitis that caused Daphne to go deaf (and blamed that negligence on her having been a raging drunk) and then I threatened to sue her for custody of both Bay and Daphne. But the irony was that while I was shouting at Regina and calling her a bad parent, Bay, the daughter I had raised, slipped out of the police station right under my nose.
    She was gone for most of the night. We didn’t know where she was, and I was terrified as we searched for her. (I wondered: Was this to become some kind of sick pattern in my life? Looking for my daughters and not knowing what I’d find?)
    Bay went missing for hours. It was a miserable night.
    But miraculously, something wonderful came out of it.
    The next night, as we were getting ready for bed, I said to John, “Bay had a thought....”
    “Did she?” He flung aside a throw pillow. “Did it have anything to do with never getting arrested again as long as she lives?”
    “It had to do with the guesthouse,” I said, as he pulled down the quilt and climbed into bed.
    “Ah, so she wants to move out now?”
    “Actually, she wants Daphne and Regina to move in.”
    He froze, clutching the hand-embroidered edge of the bedsheet. “She wants them to move in?” he echoed. “To the guesthouse? Our guesthouse?”
    “Yes. I just don’t know how I feel about it.”
    Above our expansive garage was a finished apartment, a three-bedroom, two-bath living space that took a beating every five years when John hosted a reunion of his college baseball buddies; other than that, the place rarely saw any action. I pictured the guest suite now, with its spacious rooms and charming eaves, and knew that Bay’s idea had much to recommend it. It would mean that Daphne would be with us, safe, a mere twenty feet away on the opposite side of the driveway. Inviting the Vasquezes to live in the guesthouse would allow me to have daily contact with Daphne. Of course it also meant that Regina would have equally convenient access to Bay.
    And I just wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
    John, however, seemed totally on board. “It’s not a bad idea,” he said reasonably. “It’s just sitting there, empty. Well, except for the squirrel overflow.”
    I rolled my eyes at his reference to my beloved collection of anything squirrel-related—knickknacks, cookie jars, bookends …
    “I don’t know....” I leaned back against the pillows and tried to imagine it. “I mean, it sure sounds great on paper, but how would it work in practice?”
    “Well, let’s see.” John pretended to puzzle it out. “You can parent the girls on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Regina can parent them on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”
    “Right. And on Sunday, we can all go straight to psychotherapy!” I laughed. “I bet we could get a group rate.”
    He reached up to turn off the bedside lamp; the room became silvery with the moonlight that spilled in through the windows. I thought about Daphne in East Riverside; the same moon was shining in her window. A window which,