Chapter 2: The Inheritance of Ghost Children
For a moment, I truly believed I was having a psychotic break. I looked at the babies, then at my son, then back at the babies. Their tiny fists were curled tight, as if they were already bracing for the impact of their own existence.
“Leave them? Josh, talk to me. Did you… did you take these from the hospital?” The word kidnapping flashed in neon letters in my brain.
“They’re twins, Mom. A boy and a girl.”
“I don’t care about the logistics!” I cried, my hands beginning to shake. “You are sixteen years old! You cannot just bring humans home in your arms! Where are their parents?”
Josh took a ragged breath. He looked down at the bundles, and a shadow of pure, unadulterated grief crossed his features. “I went to the hospital to check on Marcus. He wiped out on his bike today, and I went to the ER to wait with him. While I was sitting there… I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“Dad.”
The name hit me like a physical blow. Derek.
“He was storming out of the maternity ward,” Josh continued, his jaw tightening. “He looked the way he used to look when the bills came due—furious, trapped. Like he wanted to hit something. He didn’t see me. I hid behind a pillar because I didn’t want to deal with him, but I got curious. I went up to the fourth floor.”
He paused, looking at the tiny girl in his left arm. “I ran into Mrs. Chen. You know, your friend from the neighborhood who works Labor and Delivery?”
I nodded, my throat too tight to speak.
“She told me everything. Sylvia went into labor last night. Complications. It was a mess. These are Dad’s babies, Mom. These are his kids.”
The world tilted on its axis. I sat down on the edge of Josh’s bed before my legs could give out. My ex-husband, the man who couldn’t handle the “burden” of one teenage son, had produced two more lives.
“Mrs. Chen said Dad lost it when he realized Sylvia was going to be in the ICU for a while. He told the nurses he wasn’t ‘equipped’ for this. He said he didn’t sign up for a sick woman and two screaming mouths. Then he just… he walked out. He signed a paper saying he was ‘relinquishing immediate care’ and left.”
“And Sylvia?” I asked, horrified.
“She’s dying, Mom. Or at least, she thinks she is. She has some kind of massive infection—sepsis, maybe. She was alone in that room, hooked to a dozen machines, crying so hard she was choking. She saw me in the hallway. She recognized me from the pictures Dad kept in his wallet—the old ones of me when I was a kid.”
Josh’s eyes filled with tears. “She begged me, Mom. She said she had no family. Her parents are gone, her friends disappeared when she got pregnant. She held my hand and begged me not to let them go to the state. She signed a temporary release to me. Mrs. Chen helped—she knew the situation was desperate and she knew who I was. They let me walk out with them because they didn’t know what else to do with two babies whose father had abandoned them and whose mother was fading out.”
“Josh, we can’t,” I whispered, looking at the cramped walls of our apartment. “We are struggling to buy groceries. We are barely hanging on. This isn’t our responsibility. It’s Derek’s. It’s the state’s.”
“They’re my siblings!” Josh’s voice broke, a raw, primal sound. “They’re my brother and sister! If I leave them there, they go into a system where they might never see each other again. They’ll be ‘ghost children,’ Mom. Like I felt like after Dad left us.”
He stepped closer, holding the infants out toward me. “Look at them. They have his nose. They have my chin. How can we say they aren’t ours?”
