Pretty Baby Page 10

  “I’m hungry,” I say. I can’t quite remember the last time I ate, but I remember sifting through a garbage Dumpster sometime before the cops caught me, finding a half-eaten hot dog, cold and covered in pickles and relish and mustard, the mustard thick and gluey, lipstick marks on the bun. But of course, that’s not where the police found me. They found me smack-dab on Michigan Avenue, staring through the window of the Gucci store.

  “We’ll eat when we’re through,” she says. She’s got old-lady hands, wrinkled and veiny. A tight gold wedding band that cuts into the skin. Surplus skin that hangs from the bottom of her arms, her chin.

  I pull my head from the table and look at her, into those gray eyes behind the rectangular glasses and say again, “I’m hungry.” And then I put my head back on the table and close my eyes.

  There’s a hesitation. Then she tells the man in the corner to get me something to eat. She drops some coins on the steel table. I wait until he’s gone and then I say, “I’m thirsty, too.”

  I won’t lift my head until the food arrives, I decide. But already she’s asking questions, questions which I readily ignore. “How did you end up with Joseph and Miriam?” and “Tell me about Joseph. He is a professor, is he not?”

  Joseph is a professor. Was a professor. It’s the reason that when he and Miriam showed up, claiming to be the second cousin twice removed (or something to that effect) on my daddy’s side, my caseworker thought it was a lucky break. Joseph and Miriam lived with their two boys, Matthew and Isaac, in a home in Elkhorn, Nebraska, which sat right outside of Omaha, the largest city in all of Nebraska, so that the two were practically holding hands. Their home was nice, much nicer than our prefab home back in Ogallala, with two floors and three bedrooms and big old windows that stared out at the hills that surrounded that home. We lived in a neighborhood with a park and a baseball field, though I didn’t ever see any of those things, but I heard about them, heard about them from the neighborhood kids I watched out those big old windows, riding their bikes up and down the street and calling for someone or other to grab their bat ’cause they were going to play ball.

  But Joseph said I wasn’t allowed to play with those kids. I wasn’t allowed to play at all.

  I spent my days doing chores, taking care of Miriam, missing Momma and Daddy. The rest of the time I stared out that window, at the kids, coming up with as many “I love you likes” as I possibly could.

  I love you like cinnamon loves sugar.

  I love you like kids love toys.

  But by the time Joseph and Miriam arrived, Lily was already gone.

  Lily only lasted about three weeks in the home. After Momma and Daddy died, we were sent to some group home for orphaned kids like us. Orphans. That was a word I’d never heard before. There were eight of us living in that house with a whole bunch of grown-ups who’d come and go. There was a couple, a woman and man, who lived there with us all the time, Tom and Anne, but others passed through: everyone’s caseworker, who all seemed to be different; a tutor; some man who was always trying to mess with my head. Tell me why you’re upset, Claire. Tell me how you felt when your mother and father died.

  It wasn’t a bad place, in hindsight. Later on, after living with Joseph and Miriam, the group home seemed like a palace. But for an eight-year-old girl who’d just become an orphan, it was about the worst thing in the world. No one wanted to be there, but especially not me. Some of the kids were mean. Others just cried all the time. Those other kids at the group home were taken away, given away or just flat out rejected by their folks. The fact that Momma and Daddy died was somehow or other a good thing; it showed that someone actually loved us, actually wanted us in their lives.

  Lily was adopted, which was the be all and end all of life for an orphan.

  Orphan. One day I’m just a little girl from Ogallala, and the next, I’m an orphan. There was a whole lot crammed in that small word: the way folks would look at me with pity in their eyes, would stare at my cheap, undersized clothes, which some charity dropped off for us, donations from kids who’d outgrown them though they sure as heck didn’t fit me, and say oh as if to say that explains it.

  That explains the sad look in my eye, the quick temper, the tendency to sulk in a corner and cry.

  Paul and Lily (yup, that’s right, Lily) Zeeger were the ones who adopted Lily, my Lily, little Lily. Sweet little Lily with her ringlets of black hair, black like Momma’s, the pudgy little hand that clasped my finger, the chubby cheeks and unselfish smile. The one I was meant to take good care of before Momma died. I eavesdropped on their conversations with the caseworker, Paul and Lily’s conversation with her: the irony of that name, Lily, whether or not it was destiny. “But of course,” said Big Lily, a beautiful blonde woman with turquoise jewelry, as if she was talking about a dog, “we’ll need to change her name. Can’t hardly both be called Lily,” and the caseworker agreed, “Of course.”

  I threw a fit. Screaming. About how Momma gave Lily that name and they had no right to change it. I grabbed Lily and ran, through the house and out the back door, desperate for a place to hide. I ran into the woods, but with Lily in my arms, they caught me easily. The woman who ran the house, Anne, stole Lily right from my arms, saying, “This is just the way it’s got to be.” And Tom scolded me: “You don’t want to upset her, now do you?”

  I saw that Lily was crying, her chubby arms reaching past Anne for me, but the woman kept walking, away, away, away, and Tom was holding me though I squirmed and kicked and chances are I bit him. I remember him screaming, and that’s when he finally let me go.

  I tore into the house, searching every nook and cranny for my baby sister. “Lily! Lily!” I was screaming, crying, calling out her name so many times the word no longer sounded right in my head. I pushed my way into the other kids’ bedrooms, into bathrooms that were in use.

  And then I saw it, out the window: the silver minivan pulling away down the drive.

  It was the third to last time I would ever see my sister.

  They renamed her Rose.

  They weren’t bad people. That I’d come to realize later. But when you’re eight years old and you’ve just lost your folks, and now your sister’s been taken from you, too, you hate everyone. And that’s just what I did. I hated everyone. I hated the world.

  “Tell me about Joseph,” says Louise Flores.

  “I don’t want to talk about Joseph,” I say. I lay my head on the table sideways, where I can’t see her eyes, and ask, “How’d you find us anyway?” picking at the dry skin of my hands, watching the way they bleed.

  “How’d we find you?” the woman repeats, and I catch sight of a curl of her lip out of the corner of my eye. She doesn’t like me. She doesn’t like me one bit. “That was dumb luck,” she says, the dumb, I’d bet, being me. “But if you’re asking how we found the baby, well, that was a tip.”

  “A tip?” I ask, lifting my head to see her, the satisfaction that fills her eyes. You really are dumb, aren’t you? those eyes say to me.

  “Yes, Claire, a tip. Short for tip-off. A phone call from an individual—” she starts, and I interrupt with, “Who?”

  “—an individual,” she continues, “who wishes to remain anonymous.”

  “But why?” I wonder out loud, though I don’t really have to think too long or hard to come up with an answer. My mind settles on one man. He never did like me anyway, that’s for sure. I heard them, right there, in that very next room. Fighting about me when they thought I couldn’t hear.

  “Tell me about Joseph,” she says again.

  “I told you already. I don’t want to talk about Joseph.”

  “Then how about Miriam. Tell me about Miriam.”

  “Miriam is a troll,” I say, letting my chip bag dance to the floor.

  The woman is straight-faced. “What does that mean?” she asks. “A troll?”

  “An imp,” I say. That’s just it. Miriam in a nutshell. I didn’t like Miriam, that’s for sure. But I did feel kind of sorry for h
er. She was small, maybe four feet tall, with mousy gray hair, her skin knobby like a streusel topping. She sat in her bedroom all day and night. She hardly said more than two words to me. She only ever talked to Joseph.

  But that’s not the way she looked when she and Joseph, Matthew and Isaac showed up at the home to fetch me. No, that day Joseph made her up in a pretty gingham dress, short-sleeved with a V-neck and a big bow that wrapped around her like a hug; he made Matthew and Isaac put on nice shirts and pressed pants. Even Joseph was handsome in a striped shirt and a tie, a kindness to his eye that I never saw after that day. He made sure Miriam was taking her pills, that she put her lipstick on and that she smiled every time he so much as nudged her side. At least he must have because I don’t remember seeing Miriam smile a day in her life. But something or other impressed the caseworker who was convinced that living with Joseph and Miriam would be a wonderful thing for me. Blessed and fortuitous were the words she used. Cursed and damned were more like it. My caseworker swore that Joseph and Miriam had gone through a screening process and foster care training; they had children of their own. They were now licensed foster parents and were, for me, or so she claimed, a perfect fit.

  No one asked if I wanted to live with Joseph and Miriam. By then I was nine years old. No one gave a hoot what I wanted. I was supposed to feel lucky that I was moving onto a foster home, that I didn’t have to stay in the group home forever. Joseph and Miriam were an extended sort of family, which was also a good thing. Supposedly. Though my relationship to Joseph and Miriam was so spotty I had a hard time connecting the dots. But there was paperwork, the caseworker said. Proof. And then she sat me down and looked me in the eye and said, “You’ve got to understand, Claire. You’re getting older all the time. This might be your one and only chance at a family.”

  But I had a family: Momma and Daddy and Lily. I didn’t want another one.

  Lily got swept up in an instant because she was two years old. Infertile couples, like Paul and Lily Zeeger, were looking for just that. A baby, if possible, but a toddler if a baby was hard to find. Little Lily barely remembered Momma and Daddy. In time, she wouldn’t remember them at all. She’d come to believe that Paul and Lily were her parents.

  But no one wanted a nine-year-old, and sure as heck, no one would want a ten-year-old or an eleven-year-old, either. Time was ticking away, or so my caseworker, Ms. Amber Adler, said.

  I packed what few belongings I’d been allowed to bring with me: some clothes and books, the photos of Momma that Joseph would later tear to shreds.

  “And Joseph. Is he a troll, too?”

  I pictured Joseph in my mind. The towering man, the sinister eagle eyes and aquiline nose, his short, military-style pumpkin-colored hair and the bristly beard that kept me awake at night, as I lay on my bed, listening in fear for the sound of unwelcome footsteps on the creaky wooden floor outside my door.

  The bristly beard scraping across my face when he lay down beside me in bed.

  “No,” I said, looking the silver-haired lady straight in the eye. “No, ma’am. Joseph’s the devil.”

  HEIDI

  I can’t stop thinking about it, about the blood.

  As I pass my neighbor, Graham, on the way up from the laundry room, I’m unsettled, incognizant of the way he says to me in that always jovial, always dependable tone of his, “You just get more and more beautiful every time I lay eyes on you,” and I have to ask him to repeat himself.

  “What’s that?” I ask and he laughs.

  I’m reminded of my robe and messy hair, the fact that I have yet to shower. I can feel the hallway spinning and I wonder when the last time was that I ate. I lay an unsteady hand on the wall and study Graham coming at me, completely unaffected by personal space. He is impeccable as always, in a pullover sweater with a half zip, a pair of dark wash jeans, leather loafers.

  But somehow or other, I believe Graham, though I know I look an atrocious mess, I believe him when his eyes come to a standstill on mine and he tells me that I look beautiful. His eyes look me up and down as if proving it to be true. He grabs me playfully, by the hand, and begs me to go out with him tonight, to keep him company at some god-awful engagement party at Cafe Spiaggia. I can’t imagine Graham without a date in tow, some stunning blonde in a little black dress and four-inch heels.

  My hands are shaking out of control, and seeing this, Graham asks if I’m feeling all right. There’s this sudden urge to fold into Graham’s sweater, to bury my face into the heather gray and tell him about the girl. The baby. The blood.

  His eyes show concern, the space between his eyebrows all puckered up so that a crease runs vertically between them. He holds my gaze, trying hard to read what I won’t say, until I’m forced to look away.

  He can see that something isn’t quite right, can sense that Heidi Wood, who always has everything under control, is coming undone.

  “Fine,” I lie. “I feel fine.”

  Physically, the truth, but emotionally, a lie. I cannot get the blood out of my mind, the sight of the yeast infection devouring the baby’s bottom, Chris’s eyes suggesting that what I’m doing—helping this poor girl who desperately needs help—is wrong. The image of baby Juliet that has returned to me after all these years in exile.

  Graham doesn’t cave so easily. He doesn’t move on as others would do, taking my words at face value. He continues to stare until I repeat, with an obligatory smile this time, that I am fine. And after some time he concedes.

  “Then come with me,” he says, as he pulls on my hand and I feel my feet drag down the carpeted hall. I laugh. Graham can always make me laugh.

  “I want to,” I say. “You know I want to.”

  “Then come. Please. You know I hate small talk,” he claims but nothing could be further from the truth.

  “I’m in my robe, Graham.”

  “We’ll stop off at Tribeca. Find you something sumptuous to wear.”

  “I haven’t done sumptuous in years.”

  “Then something pretty and practical,” he concedes, but I’m drawn to the suggestion of sumptuous, the idea of masquerading around town as Graham’s date. I find myself wondering, often, why it is that Graham’s still single, and whether or not he, as Chris insists, is gay. Are all the gorgeous women simply a cover, a security blanket of some sort?

  “You know I can’t,” I say, and his eyes take on a crestfallen look before he bids me adieu and saunters off down the hall alone.

  I pause beside my own door, dwelling on it all, letting the fairy tale exist for just a split second longer before reality throws a monkey wrench to it: Graham and sumptuous attire from Tribeca, dinner at Cafe Spiaggia. Me on Graham’s arm, posing as his date.

  Back inside, Willow is sitting on the edge of the pull-out sofa, holding the baby. She’s dressed in Zoe’s garb, the wet towel returned to a bathroom hook. “My clothes,” she says, in a panic. “What did you do with my clothes? They’re not...” her voice is shaking. Her eyes unsteady. That rickety way she rocks the baby, more spasmodic than calming.

  “I’m washing them,” I interrupt, seeing panic rise up inside her swollen blue eyes. “There were some stains,” I admit, quietly, quickly, so Chris, down the hall at the kitchen table, will not hear. I stare at her, willing her to explain so that I will not have to ask her outright about the blood. I don’t want her and her baby to leave, but if Willow’s being here is dangerous for Zoe, for my family, then I cannot allow her to stay. Were it up to Chris, she would already be halfway out the door.

  But instead, I stare at her, solicitously, begging her to explain. Explain the blood. Something innocent, I pray for something...

  “A bloody nose,” she interjects then, disrupting my thoughts. “I get bloody noses,” and she peers toward the ground, as people do when they are nervous or perhaps, when they are lying. “I had nothing to wipe it on,” she says, “just the shirt,” and I consider the cold spring air, aggravating the nasal tissues, making them bleed.

  “A bloody nose?
” I ask, and she nods her head meekly.

  “A bloody nose, then,” I say, “that explains it,” and with that I walk out of the room.

  WILLOW

  Matthew told me once that what his father intended to do, long before he married Miriam, was go into the seminary and become a Catholic priest. But then he got Miriam knocked up, and all hopes of the priesthood vanished in the air. Just like that.

  “Knocked up?” I asked Matthew. I was young, like maybe ten or eleven years old. I knew what sex was; that Joseph taught me though he didn’t go as far as to give it a name, what it was he was doing when he came into my room at night. What I didn’t know was that what Joseph did when he lay on top of me, crushing me to the bed, a rubbery, wet hand pressed against my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, was the same thing that led to babies.

  “Yeah,” he shrugged. Matthew was six years older than me and knew things that I didn’t. Lots of things. “You know. Pregnant.”

  “Oh,” I said, still not sure how knocked up and pregnant had a darn thing to do with Joseph not becoming a priest.

  Matthew rolled his eyes. “Duh.”

  But that all came later, much later.

  At first Matthew and Isaac, the both of them, wouldn’t have a thing to do with me. Joseph forbade it. Forbade them from talking to me. Forbade them from looking at me. Just like me, Isaac and Matthew weren’t allowed to do much of anything. There was no TV, no playing ball or riding bikes with the neighborhood kids, no listening to music, no books—none other than the Bible, of course—and when Matthew and Isaac came home from school with something or other to read, Joseph would hold it up disapprovingly and call it blasphemous.

  Momma and Daddy hadn’t been religious at all. The only times they talked about God were what I later came to know as in vain. We didn’t go to church. There was only a drawing of Jesus in the old prefab house, which Momma said used to belong to her own mom and dad, and we kept it in the kitchen, and more than anything else, it covered up a hole in the wall where I accidentally threw a ball when Daddy and I were playing catch in the house. The man in the picture might as well have been the president of the United States for all I knew. He might have been my grandpa. We never spoke of the picture. It was just there.