From the Corner of His Eye

bassinet. She gave it to the nun.
        Cradling the baby, the nun turned with it to Celestina, folding back a thin blanket to present her with a good look at the tiny girl.
        Breath held, Celestina confirmed what she had suspected about the child since the quick glimpse she'd had in the surgery. Its skin was cafe au lait with a warming touch of caramel.
        Over many proud generations and at least to the extent of second cousins, no one on either side of Celestina's family had skin of this light color. They were without exception medium to dark mahogany, many shades darker than this infant.
        Phimie's rapist must have been a white man.
        Someone she had known. Someone Celestina, too, might know. He lived in or around Spruce Hills, because Phimie had considered him still to be a threat.
        Celestina had no illusions about playing detective. She would never be able to track down the bastard, and she had no stomach for confronting him.
        Anyway, the thing that scared her was not the monstrous father of this child. The fearsome thing was the decision that she had made a few minutes ago, in the unused hospital room on the seventh floor.
        Her entire future was at stake if she acted as she had decided to act.
        Here, in the presence of the baby, within the next minute or two, she must either change her mind or commit herself to a more difficult and challenging life than any she had envisioned only this morning.
        "May l?" she asked, holding out her arms.
        Without hesitation, the nun transferred the infant to Celestina.
        The baby felt too light to be real. She weighed five pounds fourteen ounces, but she seemed lighter than air, as though she might float up and out of her aunt's arms.
        Celestina stared at the small, brown face, opening herself to the anger and hatred with which she had regarded this child in the operating room.
        If the nun and the nurse could know the loathing that Celestina had felt earlier, they would never allow her here in the creche, never trust her with this newborn.
        This spawn of violence. This killer of her sister.
        She searched the child's unfocused eyes for some sign of the hateful father's wickedness.
        The little hands, so weak now but someday strong: Would they eventually be capable of savagery, as were the father's hands? Misbegotten offspring. This seed of a demonic man whom Phimie herself had called sick and evil. However innocent-looking now, what pain might she eventually in- on others? What outrages might she commit in years to come? Although Celestina searched intently, she could not glimpse the father's evil in the child.
        Instead, she saw Phimie reborn. She saw, as well, a child endangered. Somewhere out there was a rapist capable of extreme cruelty and violence, a man who would-if Phimie was correct-react unpredictably if ever he learned of his daughter's existence. Angel, if that's what she were eventually to be named, lived under a threat as surely as had all the children of Bethlehem, who'd been slain according to the decree of King Herod. The baby curled one small hand around her aunt's index finger. So tiny, fragile, she nonetheless gripped with surprising tenacity.
        Do what must he done.
        Returning the newborn to the nun, Celestina asked for the use of a phone, and for privacy.
        The social worker's office once more. Rain tapping lightly at the window where Dr. Lipscomb had stared intently into the fog as he tried to avoid confronting the life-changing revelation that Phimie, speaking with the special knowledge of the once-dead, had shown him.
        Sitting at the desk, Celestina phoned her parents again. She shook uncontrollably, but her voice was steady.
        Her mother and father used different extensions, both on the line with her.
        "I want you to adopt the baby." Before they could react, she hurried on: "I won't be twenty-one for four months yet, and even then they might give me trouble about adopting, even though I'm her aunt, because I'm single. But if you adopt her, I'll raise her. I promise I will. I'll take full responsibility. You don't have to worry that I'll regret it or that I'll ever want to drop her in your laps and escape the responsibility. She'll have to be the center of my life from here on. I understand that. I accept it. I embrace it."
        She worried that they would argue with her, and