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SHE SHOWED VERY LITTLE, but a client guessed Tana’s secret and told. When Kali found out, she smiled that scary way that never reached her eyes. She paid a man to load Tana and another blond pregnant girl into the back of a camper. In the hours-long bumpy ride strangers became allies in shared misery. She and Rosalee whispered gruesome recaps of their lives and dire predictions of their fate to come. Each feared for her baby’s safety.
When the camper stopped, the girls clung together until the door creaked open. The driver, a tall balding man in his early twenties, ordered them out. They blinked and squinted against the morning sun, shivering in the cold winter air. Neither had been allowed to bring extras with them, although Tana had managed to secrete her small stash of funds inside her bra.
A dumpling-soft woman appeared on the front porch of a rambling farmhouse, grinning and waving them near. The girls moved together, arms linked as if joined in some weird choreography. Tana stumbled, but the driver caught her other arm and kept her from falling. The kindness, so unexpected, brought her to tears. She managed the last several yards through blurred vision. Inside the house Tana discovered a commune-like atmosphere in which half a dozen pregnant women lived and worked.
In the weeks that followed, the dumpling-woman made sure they had plenty to eat and clean beds—with no visitors!—in which to sleep. Tana wondered how she’d ever taken such luxuries for granted. But she never let down her guard the way Rosalee and the other women did. She didn’t trust this hell-to-heaven transformation. Kali had something more than altruism in mind.
Expectant mothers—some even younger than Tana—came, had their babies, and disappeared so quickly they became interchangeable. Even so, the nursery rarely had more than one or two infants at a time, and never for more than a week. The exception were tow-headed twins, about a year old, who didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Had their mother abandoned them? What would become of the babies? In her motherly voice, the dumpling-woman sweetly suggested Tana keep questions to herself, or find another place to stay. So Tana bit her lip, but spent every spare moment with the twins, playing with them, feeding them, even changing their diapers.
She wondered about her own situation, but was afraid to ask. So she took every opportunity to eavesdrop conversations between the dumpling-woman and the nameless driver. The woman’s tongue loosened after her nightly bottle of wine—a whole bottle!—and Tana finally learned what Kali expected in return for her generosity.
They’d already sold Rosalee and Tana’s newborns, betting on the babies being as blond and blue-eyed as their mothers. Blond newborns brought the most money, older kids not so much.
Aghast, Tana confided in Rosalee, who confessed she’d been offered money and had no choice but to cooperate. She sounded guilty, but also relieved. Rosalee had no family or resources to help. Her baby would come any day now.
Tana wondered what would happen if she refused? Had that happened to the twins’ mother? Would Tana disappear, too? Tana crossed her arms protectively over her stomach, and her baby kicked as if also rejecting the notion.
She couldn’t risk staying here. She had to get away. She’d leave, change her name and appearance, start somewhere else. Somewhere far away, where nobody knew what she’d become, what she’d had to do to survive. She still had the funds gifted to her from former clients. Her baby could never know. Their future together would make up for all the pain and horror of Tana’s past.
The driver controlled the ramshackle camper’s keys. But it couldn’t be too different than the delivery truck her father had taught her to drive for her parents’ restaurant. She’d steal the keys while the pair slept off their nightly wine. Tana stole a knife from the kitchen and added that to her stash. And she’d wait for the perfect opportunity. Tana had time; her baby wasn’t due for three weeks.
But her baby didn’t know about Tana’s plan. Two days later, Tana’s water broke. The dumpling-woman hustled her into the birthing room in time to see the driver pull a sheet over Rosalee’s gray face, her deflated belly testament to a recent birth.
Tana screamed. She struggled to leave. They explained that Rosalee only slept deeply, an after-effect of the anesthesia. But Tana redoubled her screams when approached with a syringe filled with light yellow fluid.
The shot made the room go black. When Tana awoke many hours later, nauseated and groggy, her baby was gone.
