“Well, God,” my mother whispered, “he’s so small.”

Its head was overlarge, and the rest of its body thin and crumpled. Its skin was tinged an orangey color, and its face crinkled up, like an old man in a lot of pain, or like it didn’t know how to make a right face. I thought of laying it down under a copse of trees, of the knotted fairy hands that would take it back.

“Oh, baby Nicky,” My mother said. “Well, look at you.”

“Why does it look like that?” Almost soundlessly, Ruth had come to stand beside us, her face leaning so close to the glass that I saw her breath fog it up. The changeling moved its fist with an aching, jerky movement, pulling it down over its own needle ribs. “It doesn’t even look like a baby.”

* * *

The changeling stayed at the hospital for another two weeks, though we didn’t see it much during that time. It was not good for it to be out of its incubator very long, and when it could be, we were mostly told that Aunt Vera needed some time alone with Nicky, that we would see her and the new baby again soon.

When we saw the changeling with Aunt Vera, she held it to her breast with a tender awe that I had never seen her apply to anything. She pulled the collar of her blue dotted hospital gown low, and fitted the little body against her chest, arranging the small red limbs so that it was hugged up around her neck, and seemed to move even tighter to her when it squirmed. She cooed to it, rocking her whole body back and forth slowly. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.” She seemed as if swallowed.

Ruth and I used these weeks planning.

When the fourteen days were past, my father drove with Aunt Vera to bring the changeling home from the hospital. My mother waited with Ruth and me, helping package meals that she and my father had made the previous night into Tupperware. “It’s hard with a new baby,” she said, pressing her hand against her forehead as if to wipe away sweat. “I’m sure your mother will have plenty of help, Ruth, but it is hard.”

In her car, she reached into the backseat with a bottle of green Purell. “Scrub your hands well, both of you. It could really hurt Nicholas if he gets sick. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Ruth and I both said, and we both dropped the Purell into our hands in glops. I watched the lump of it shiver in my palm, like the body of an alien, and raised it to my nose for the dizzy smell before scrubbing my hands together, working it between my fingers, down my wrists.

We put together a party in Aunt Vera’s living room, just the five of us and the changeling. My father tied blue balloons to the chairs, in addition to foil ones with cartoon babies on them, and my mother set a fruit tart my father had made on the table and put a candle from the grocery store in the middle of it that said “Nick.” My aunt Vera sat on the couch, holding the changeling like they were alone.