Pineapple Turtles

of her, smothering her.
Kim slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the card with her next baby doctor appointment scribbled on it. At the next visit the doctors would run tests to discover the cause of Junior’s blindness, but the chances it was anything reversible were next to zero.
She had the time from today until that appointment, the time during which some hope remained that Josh Jr. could be a normal baby, to enjoy her husband.
Then it would all be over.
Josh would be brokenhearted. The fights would start again. The marriage would be over and she’d be alone, raising a blind boy.
She still loved the baby, of course, but Josh—all he ever did was talk about someday playing catch with his son. The boy’s room had so much baseball-themed décor it looked like Cooperstown.
And what if there were more issues? Who knew what else might be wrong with Junior? How much could she take? There might be something wrong with his brain. They didn’t have the money to pay for expensive treatments. They barely had health insurance as it was. If Josh freaked out, lost his job—
She couldn’t breathe. Something cried out. Color burst back into the world around her but it wouldn’t be still. It was spinning. She was spinning—
The cry again.
She clutched a clothing rack and steadied herself, listening.
A baby.
She looked into her stroller.
Not Junior. He rarely cried. He was a dream baby.
Emphasis on the was.
Kim blinked at the store around her. Some obscure power had pulled the cowl of dread from her eyes, like a magician yanking away a silk scarf to reveal his greatest trick.
Ta da!
Everything became clear.
Kim’s gaze settled on the baby in front of her. Another baby, one who could be Josh’s twin, wrapped in blue blankets, sitting in a car seat, slung over his mother’s arm.
A boy.
The baby’s mother put the car seat on the ground and stepped in front of it to stand on her toes, helping her older daughter pull down a shirt with the Marine Rescue Center’s logo printed on the back.
Do it. Now. Fast.
Kim grabbed the baby car seat and moved.
She balanced the seat on top of her stroller and walked briskly out of the building to her car. She put the car seat and the stroller in the back of the mini-van Josh had insisted they buy. She didn’t secure them.
No time. They’ll be fine.
Move.
Kim ran around to the front of the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. She pulled out of the driveway on to US-1 and headed toward the bridge that would take her home. The lights turned sea-turtle green for her as she rolled through each.
This was supposed to happen.
She glanced at the clock. If she went a little faster she’d be sure to cross the Intracoastal Waterway before the bridge opened for boats on the hour.
Perfect.
A little trill of happiness made her shimmy in her seat and she stomped on the gas.

 
 
Chapter Two
Charlotte Morgan opened her eyes.
What was that?
She scanned her dark bedroom, the edges of furniture visible by the light of the moon filtering through her plantation shutters.
Beside her, her soft-coated Wheaten, Abby, breathed in the rapid, I’m-running-a-marathon-and-yet-sleeping way she often did, two of her paws pressed against Charlotte’s body to be sure she couldn’t sneak away. She didn’t know to where Abby thought she’d go in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t going to happen on her watch.
Other than her dog’s breathing, Charlotte couldn’t hear anything except the steady patter of light rain outside.
Hm.
Something had awoken her but she couldn’t put her finger on what. Maybe a dreaming Abby started tap dancing against her leg. Maybe she’d snorted herself awake. Both of those things happened with relative regularity.
She took a deep breath and released it, closing her eyes to start the falling-to-sleep process all over again.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in—
Something wet struck her forehead.
Freak out!
With a yip, Charlotte scrambled out of bed. The sheets tangled around her right foot and she threw out her hands to brace them against the wall to keep from plowing her head through the plaster. Her other foot found the ground in time and she jerked her right foot free from the sheets to have it join its mirror twin. She heard a thud, followed by the sound of scrabbling nails. Abby had fallen off the other side of the bed, half-asleep and as fully freaked out as her mother. She ran around the bed to find Charlotte, ears perked, eyes wide, searching for some clue as to why Mommy would destroy the whole comfy sleeping thing they had going.
Charlotte slapped one hand to her forehead. It felt wet.
Ew.
She turned on her bedside lamp.
Wet. Wet. Something wet on my forehead.
She looked at her fingers.
No color.
Not blood. Not smooshed bug. Not slug, salamander, snail, snake or any one of the other hundred things that might crawl across her Florida-based bed in the middle of the night.
She didn’t know how other people in the country dealt with middle-of-the-night phenomena like these, but in Florida, when something unexpected touched you in your sleep, you got the heck out of bed. If what touched you was wet, all the worse.
But what could be wet?
She scanned her sheets and pillow.
Nothing moving. Nothing crawling.
With the tip of her finger she flipped over the pillow and jumped back against the wall, just in case.
Nothing.
Abby released a little puffy boof noise to let Charlotte know she stood ready to help. At least that was one interpretation. The other was that Abby wanted Mommy to know she needed to cut the nonsense and get back in bed.
It was hard