What? Lisa thought as a tall, light brown-skinned woman appeared on the TV screen. She was sitting at a rectangular table with a white cloth on it. She wore a slightly off-the-shoulder black dress, and her long, curly black hair was styled in a bun at the side of her head.

Four other people were also sitting at the table with her, and Lisa judged that the older man on the woman’s right was her father and the older woman on her left was her mother. The guy next to her mom and the woman next to her dad, Lisa thought, could be her siblings, but they could also be her cousins.

No, Lisa thought, they are siblings.

Lisa’s assumptions were shortly proven correct when the woman introduced herself as Paula James, her parents, and her siblings.

Then her story unfolded.

Her husband was Theo James, but most people called him by his last name, James. He was forty years old, and she was thirty when they got married. They knew they were pushing it close, but they still wanted a baby, maybe two, the Lord willing. Therefore, they started to work on getting pregnant immediately; however, three years into their marriage, they were still unable to conceive. 

“Well,” James told her one day, “the Lord knows. Maybe we can look into adoption?”

However, neither of them made a move to do the research into the adoption process, even though they were starting to give up on the hope of getting pregnant. Then, miracle of miracles, she became pregnant, and their family and friends were ecstatic for them. 

The time flew by, and before they knew it, she was in the hospital delivering a healthy and handsome baby boy. The delivery took more out of her than she had expected, but she was ready to be discharged two days later. However, on the leaving day, a nurse found the baby unresponsive in the crib that was in the room with Paula. The baby’s death was later ruled as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

They were devastated. However, for three months after the death, James made sure they were eating, getting enough rest, going to church, and doing other things, but he stopped doing those things for himself.

For a little while, Paula let it go, thinking she needed to allow him to grieve his way. However, when he started to become secretive, one evening when he returned home from work later than usual and refused to eat, she asked, “What’s going on, Theo? What’s going on?”

He looked at her for a long time, then, sighing, he took her hand and led her to their bedroom, where they sat on the edge of the brown and white blanketed bed.

“Don’t say I’m going mad because I’m grieving, okay? I’m not going mad.”

He then went on to explain that he believed their son was still alive. He believed a nurse switched him with the dead baby boy they buried.

Paula was stunned!

Still, she bit down on her lower lip and did not utter the words he asked her not to say, and he went on to explain his thoughts. He said that the night before she and the baby were to return home, he came to visit them in the hospital. However, Lisa was asleep, and so was the baby in the crib next to the bed. He was extremely tired too, and so he decided to close his eyes for a few minutes in the long chair in the room.

James said he was in and out of sleep, and at some point, he saw a nurse entering their room. The nurse called for them, but when Paula and he did not reply, she went over to the crib.  Her back was to him, so he could not see what she was doing, but in less than five minutes, she was gone.

By the time he awoke, the memory of this was gone.

Then, the day they buried their son, he was in the section of the room they’d prepared for the baby, standing by the crib, and this memory suddenly flooded his mind. Now, he was certain that the nurse, or someone pretending to be a nurse, had entered their room with the dead baby boy hidden at the front of her clothes. The person then took their son and replaced him with the other baby.

At this point, Paula was beside herself, scared that losing their baby had really driven him mad. She needed to get him help right away.

James asked her if she’d noticed their baby had a birthmark between his little finger and the one next to it. She said yes. Then he asked her if she noticed it on the day he was buried, and no matter how much she fought with her mind to produce an image of the birthmark from the moment she found him dead in the crib, she could not. Theo said that that was because the baby was not theirs.

“But we were grieving,” Paula said. “We were not thinking about those things.”

“Yes, not consciously. Unconsciously.”

“Then how would we know for certain? Are you thinking of exhuming his body for a test? We can’t afford that right now.”

“I know, I know, and that’s why I’ve been tracking down the nurse from the hospital, and I have found her.”

“What?” Paula exclaimed.

“She’s a nurse, but not at the hospital you were at, and I know where she lives and where our baby boy now lives.”

At that point, he explained the steps he took to find her, steps she was not going to explain at the news conference, but she had already explained them to the police department.

Nevertheless, Paula wanted both of them to go to the police at that point, and he said he would, but he needed to see the baby’s fingers first. He wanted to see the birthmark, and he had a plan on how he would get it done.

Then the next thing she knew, her husband was in the hospital and was now dead.

“All the man was trying to do was to get back his son, but now he’s dead,” Lisa said to Mom, “and if I had gotten the chance, I would have hit him too.”

“I know, Honey. I know.”

“I should have just listened to you and stayed inside,” Lisa said, sighing.

Mom squeezed her hand.

“I know his death is not my fault, Mom, but still.”

Several weeks later, the police announced that the nurse had been arrested and charged with kidnapping and that more charges may be added later. Paula and her baby boy were reunited.

The police department at a news conference explained that the nurse has a twin sister, who was in the same hospital as Paula and delivered her baby a few hours before Paula. However, the sister has had two miscarriages, and the day that the nurse kidnapped the baby, she went into her sister’s room and found her sitting in the bed, feeding the dead child. Her sister believed the baby was alive and was simply sleeping, although at this point, the baby’s lips were turning blue.

The nurse said she did not know what happened, but the next thing she knew, she was switching someone’s baby.

Lisa and her mom sat in the living room as the evening news shared this information.

Lisa shook her head before resting it on Mom’s shoulder.

The End