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showed her support at 58 percent and rising. Only one problem—no donor yet. Very few people were completing the donor cards. Seemed people weren’t prepared to signs parts of themselves over after all, even if they were never going to use them again. Human heart or no, her doctor was determined to operate within the next few days. “I don’t care what you tell the media we put into your chest, Premier, but by next week, I’m going to have a healthy heart beating in there.”
    Uttley tapped at the remote in her hand to raise the head of the bed a little higher. Yes, that was better: she could breathe a little more easily now. Slowly she slid over to the side of the bed, got her palmbook from the bedside drawer. She lay back again, gasping as though she’d just run a marathon. When she could find the energy, she punched in the number. “Constantine? Found a donor yet?”

CHAPTER THREE

    Bluebird, bluebird, through my window,
Oh, Mummy! I’m tired.
    —Ring game
    T i-Jeanne was having the usual nightmare. This night, as every night, it startled her awake. She opened her eyes into the dark of the tiny bedroom. Nothing there. The weeping echoing in her ears was only Baby, crying for his four A . M . feed.
    “Lord, keep quiet, nuh? I coming!” Ti-Jeanne stumbled over to the narrow crib, changed the fussing child, then brought him back to her bed to feed him. Sitting up against the headboard, Baby in her arms, she drowsed, lulled by his rhythmic sucking. She started to think about Tony again.
    It hadn’t been Ti-Jeanne’s decision to leave Tony; it was Baby’s. Three months into her pregnancy, the bolom inside her had begun to move. It would kick, making Ti-Jeanne think of the shoes those kicking feet would soon need. And clothes, too. And food for its growing body. Those things had to be bartered or paid for. When she was with Mami, she could at least earn her keep by preparing poultices and wrapping bandages. Grateful customers would give her goods and sometimes money. Mami said anything she got was her own, so she lived well by helping her grandmother.
    When she’d gone to live with Tony, though, they survived mostly on what he could bring in by running errands for the posse. Roopsingh kept asking her if she didn’t want to work in his nightclub. The back of Roopsingh’s restaurant was actually a club that opened late in the evening hours and went until cockcrow. Roopsingh hand-picked the attractive waiters and waitresses who danced in the floor shows and hooked on the side. They made good money, but it wasn’t for her. In any case, Tony wouldn’t have let her do it. So even though she hated his involvement with the posse, hated him selling drugs, she put up with it, believing he would find honest work soon.
    When she became pregnant, she had known it almost immediately. She’d worked too long for Mami not to know the signs. As she fought down the nausea every morning, she began to worry about how she’d look after the baby. Tony wouldn’t be much help. He was too flighty to make a good father.
    Ti-Jeanne had tried to ignore the thoughts fighting in her head; she wanted to think only of Tony. Tony’s hands on her body, making her skin tingle. Tony’s lips, whispering honey, following where his hands had been. She resented being forced to think about the future, about anything but Tony. Resentment battled with the urge to care for the baby growing inside her. The two feelings fought and grew, swelling as her belly swelled. Love and resentment scrabbled, punched, kicked inside her till she had thought she was carrying triplets and her belly would burst with the weight. Finally she went back to her grandmother, who had simply made a kiss-teeth noise of disgust, then brought her fresh sheets for the bed in her old room.
    • • • •
    Ti-Jeanne opened her eyes. Baby had drunk his fill and gone back to sleep, one tiny fist still clutching absently at her breast. She sighed; went and settled him in the crib;