Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11 by Dell Magazines

Author:Dell Magazines [Magazines, Dell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2011-03-01T08:00:00+00:00

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SHORT STORIES

Julie Is Three

by Craig DeLancey

There’s more than one way...

“Will you let her go?”

That was the question I had to answer before the next morning. Kristine Louvrier asked it of me, standing with her hands on her hips, her mouth compressed into an angry line. I was glad that my desk stood between us.

“She’s my niece,” she added. “I’m next of kin. You have to give her to me.”

“I have to do what’s best for the child,” I said.

“You know what’s best for the child. It’s to let her come home with me.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “It’s not... not so obvious.”

Ms. Louvrier’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ve told you too much. And you wondered why we keep it a secret. You’re actually considering locking a seven-year-old girl in a mental ward—imagine the trauma!—because I told you the truth.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“You exploited me and you’re going to destroy her. Or worse: Does this mean you’re going to tell other people about us?” She was a head shorter than me, but I was sitting and she seemed to tower over me. She gazed at me so fearlessly, with such anger, that I was starting to wither. Or maybe, just maybe, I suspected she was right to be angry.

“Please. Sit.”

She didn’t. “I’m getting a lawyer. I’ll be back. I’m going to sue you, your hospital. You send her to a mental ward, and I’m going to make it my mission to destroy you in court. I’m gonna sue your dog.” She turned and yanked on the door to my dim little hospital office, and the heavy steel swung open so hard it slammed into my bookcase, bounced off, and slowly swung closed in her wake.

I stared at the calendar page on the back of my door. It was seven months behind.

Would I let the girl go? Would I tell others? Those were the important questions, I knew. But the question that haunted me, the question that was going to follow me later as I crawled along in traffic on my commute home, was a different question she had asked me: Aren’t you lonely? “We have a girl,” Thomas, the head nurse, told me just three days before. He waved me down as I tried to hurry past the front desk in the morning. I was in a rush because I had to oversee the transfer of a criminally insane schizophrenic who landed in our emergency room. There was just enough time to squeeze in my rounds before seeing to the transfer.

And, truth be told, I just wanted to get everything done as quickly as possible, so I could sit in my office and drink some tea and zone out for a while. Maybe surf the web.

“I, uh...” I pointed at the open corridor behind him, to indicate I had to get moving. Thomas was a big man, and just by politely standing before me he pretty much blocked the whole hallway.

He continued in his long drawl, “Parents got killed in a car crash.

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