Turtle Baby by Abigail Padgett Page B

varnish.
    Pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, she began stacking them individually in a crisscross pattern bordering her desk blotter. From the bulletin board above, fifteen faces looked down in sympathy. William Faulkner frowned. Ernest Hemingway scowled. "Monstrous," Mary Shelley mused into the air over Bo's head.
    "You're all crazy," Bo told the photographs as Estrella opened the door with a swoosh.
    "Oh, great. You're building cigarette fences and talking to those damn pictures again. Did you find out anything about this Indian baby, or have you been sitting here all day conversing with dead people?"
    Estrella's mood, Bo noted, had not measurably improved.
    "He's a Maya baby," Bo answered, "and I've got vast documentation for you, including a baby bottle and Mom's Tijuana address, but none of it points to infanticide, which is what the lab reports are indicating."
    The word hung in the little room, an anachronism.
    "Infanticide," Bo thought, had something to do with European kings. Or with Greek folklore. Oedipus Rex, maybe. Not with Indian babies from cities with dirt streets.
    Estrella's reaction to the word was less cerebral. "Oh, sheet!" she began crying, her fists knotted on Acito's case file Bo had tossed on her desk. "I can't. I just can't do it!"
    "Can't do what?" Bo asked, puzzled. "I'll run the petition over to court for you, if you'll just fill out the forms. No problem."
    Estrella's face seemed composed of fragments, like a mosaic. The friend Bo had known for years was visibly going to pieces.
    "I had decided," Estrella began in a whisper, "that I wasn't going to have this baby. I thought about it all day, sitting at home. No matter what Henry and my family and everybody would think, I decided. But I can't do it." She was sobbing. "I just can't have an abortion."
    Bo opened her mouth and then closed it when she realized that everything she could think to say was either inappropriate or idiotic. Instead she sat on her friend's desk and draped an arm over the heaving shoulders.
    "Walls for the wind," she crooned the first Irish blessing that came to mind into Estrella's upswept coif, and distractedly looked out the window. "And a roof for the rain." A black and white bird dropped from the bright, glassy air and paced in the shade of a peeling eucalyptus. "And tea beside the fire ..." Bo trailed off. The bird couldn't be a magpie, could it? Were there magpies in Southern California? Bridget Mairead O'Reilly had taught her granddaughters well the things the presence of magpies could mean.
    "Do you know," Estrella straightened her back and sobbed at the wall, "that my father's parents raised six kids in a truck, picking crops all over the West? And my mother is deaf in one ear because there was no money for a doctor when she was a child, and her eardrum burst from an infection?"
    "I didn't know," Bo murmured, watching the bird.
    "Do you know that I'm the first person in my entire family to go to college, to have a job like this? I like my job, Bo. It's important; it helps people sometimes. I like helping." Tears were leaving dark splotches on Estrella's wine-red silk blouse. "I don't want to have to quit working."
    The black and white bird cocked its smooth head at the sky.
    "One for sorrow," Bo whispered the first line of the magpie rhyme her grandmother had recited at every piebald bird summering at Cape Cod with Bo's family.
    "Can you believe I really don't want an excuse to quit this underpaid job?" Estrella giggled into a Kleenex, her eyes wild.
    A second magpie locked tiny feet over a low-hanging branch of the eucalyptus. "Two is for mirth."
    "And Henry will make the best father a kid could want ..."
    "Three is for marriage." Bo smiled as a third bird joined the first on the ground and began preening its feathers. If a fourth magpie showed up, this whole conversation would be moot.
    "I just wish ..." Estrella snuffled, toying with Acito's case file, "it wasn't so damned complicated."
    "And four for