A Day Unlike Any Other
12:00 AM
It rarely happens when a child is born exactly at the stroke of midnight. My daughter was born at the precise instant when the second hand on the large white clock in the delivery room struck twelve. A tiny, beautiful ten-fingered, ten-toed, bald child that captured my heart the instant I first heard her cry out for my wife and I.
It was less than fifteen minutes before we knew there was a problem with her. The nurses no more than took her from the delivery room to bathe her and they came back in shock, carrying a much larger, older baby with a mess of black hair. Before half-an-hour was up, she looked like a 6-month old. By one o'clock, she was a happy one year old toddler that was standing up in her bassinette.
"I'm sure you've heard of Morphons," the genetics expert Krystal Fae told us after she was called in, as if that one word could explain everything.
"Of course we have. Capes are all over the place, but she's just a baby," I said to her as I slapped my palms against the desk she sat at in her temporary office. "There has to be some way we can make her normal. For heaven's sake, she was born an hour-and-a-half ago and she look like she is ready for pre-school. Not that she needs it. She's already talking, walking, and everything else a BABY isn't supposed to be able to do."
Krystal Fae took her glasses from her face and polished them with a cloth. "I understand your frustration. Believe me, the thought of bearing a... remarkable child concerns me as well."
She said remarkable, but I knew she meant unnatural. What could be more unnatural than this? "What are we supposed to do? At this rate, she's going to be ready for high school before we can take her home."
"I've made arrangement with the hospital for you, your wife, and her to have a set of adjoining rooms to use for now." She lowered her head as she returned her glasses to her face. "I have no choice but to be brutally honest with you. There simply isn't the time for any other course. At her current rate of growth and development, she will only have the day to live before her body can no longer continue to grow. I'm looking at all the options available to her, and they are vast, but the human body can only support cellular regrowth for so long before..."
"Before! BEFORE!!!" I lost all other words from my vocabulary. Mrs. Fae's meaning was clear as glass and my mind wouldn't allow me to process it.
"Again, I'm sorry. If I'm going to help your daughter, and I fully intend on doing so, I must start now, and you-," she stood up from her leather seat and opened her door for me, "-you need to take advantage of the time you have should I fail."
I wished in that moment I had super-powers of my own from these Morphons. Only with them could I find a way to express how violently angry I was. I felt as if I could flex my muscles and bring the entire building down upon us all. Fortunately, that wasn't an option for normal old me, so I had to make due with slamming the door to her office behind me as I left to find my wife and child.
2AM
"Is this bed mine, Daddy?" she asked as I walked beside my wife as a nurse rolled her into our new room.
"It is if you want it to be," I said. I still barely understood how it was that she could talk. Psychic ambient consciosmosis. Somehow she could learn from whatever discussions were being held in her presence. If someone came into the room speaking French, she would learn French. As the nurse performed basic arithmetic to calculate the times for my wife's pills, she learned math.
Where was this super-power when I was in school? There were dozens of classes I would loved to have only sat in for a few minutes to understand the entire subject rather than weeks or months.
She climbed up onto it and began to jump up and down. "Wheeeeeee."
I looked at her in horror. "Don't do that!" I snapped.
Her crestfallen face broke my heart as she stopped jumping and stood there with tears welling in her eyes. "I'm...I'm...I'm sorry, Daddy."
Due to complications during childbirth, my wife was still heavily sedated and barely was awake yet. The nurse who helped her into bed tutted at me quietly as she shook her head. Without any mental powers at all, I could here her in my mind. What kind of parent yells at his kid like that for just being a kid?
I glared at the nurse for an instant. A parent who's only been a parent for 2 hours but somehow has an eight-year old. Give me a break. My daughter's quiet sobs pulled me over to her bed, where I sat down next to her and patted the mattress. "I'm sorry. You scared me. Sit down next to me. Please."
She plopped down and bounced on the cushiony bedding one last time before sidling up next to me. I quickly recognized my wife's fierce sense of rebellion in this little girl beside me, as if I couldn't love her more already. Her head softly pressed into my arm as she leaned against me. "I'm sorry I'm not what you wanted."
They say kids say the darnedest things. It isn't a joke. She was both completely right and so completely wrong at the same time. Yes, I didn't want a daughter who would live for only one day, but I completely and unforgivingly wanted HER. Even with only a few short, hectic hours in this world, I cherished her beyond anything else I ever knew. She and her mother were my world.
"Don't say that. Don't ever think that, sprout." I said as I wrapped my arm around her slight frame. Eerily, as I touched her I could almost feel her growing as I touched her. I pushed that thought out of my mind as fast as it crept in. "We, your mother and I, have wanted you for a very long time."
"Then why don't I have a name like everyone else? You're daddy, she's mommy, that's Nadine. Why don't I have a name?" She swiveled her head up to look at me, her curious eyes, one blue and one green, peered up at me with eager expectation.
With everything else going on, talking to doctors and Krystal Fae, the topic of her name never came up. Her mother and I had one picked out ahead of time, but I couldn't utter it. It didn't seem right somehow. I didn't want to waste it if, god forgive, there wasn't a way to help her. "Of course you have a name. You're our Blossom."
<to be continued>
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