Pretty Baby Read online

  “Willow,” I say over the sound of Ruby’s hysterics.

  She takes a drink of the coffee and flinches from the heat. “Huh?”

  “Maybe I could wash out the bottle? Start again with fresh formula?”

  Formula is horribly expensive. I remember. I used to cringe each and every time Zoe didn’t suck her baby bottles dry. When Zoe was born, I was a staunch believer in breastfeeding. The first seven months of her life, I relied on nothing but breast milk. I planned to do so for a year. But then things changed. Initially the doctor and I discounted the pain as an effect of childbirth. We went on as if all was normal.

  But all was far from normal.

  By then, I was pregnant again, pregnant with Juliet, though of course, there was no way to know at that point if she was a girl.

  It had been less than six weeks since Juliet was conceived when the bleeding first began. By this time in her life, her heart was pumping blood and her facial features were taking form; arms and legs were about to emerge as tiny buds from her tiny body. I didn’t have a miscarriage; no, that, of course would have been too easy, too simple, for her to just die.

  Instead, I made the decision to end my Juliet’s life.

  Willow gives me a look that is hard to read. Wary and dubious, but also too tired to care. A handful of girls—college aged, in sweatshirts and flannel pants—pass by, huddled close together, arm in arm, under golf umbrellas and hoods, giggling, recalling hazy, drunken memories of last night. I overhear words: jungle, juice, pink, panty, droppers. I look down at my own attire and recall the purple robe.

  “Whatever,” she says again, her eyes following the coeds until they round the corner, their laughter still audible in the slumberous city.

  And so I hand the quivering child back to Willow and, releasing my umbrella, scurry to the nearest Walgreens where I pick up a bottle of water from the shelf and acetaminophen drops. Something to bring that temperature down.

  When I return to our little alcove, I dump the used formula on the street, watching as it races into the nearest storm drain, then rinse out the bottle and start anew. Willow hands me the coveted formula powder and I mix up a bottle, and she returns Ruby to my arms. I plunge the bottle into the baby’s expectant mouth—full of hope that this will quiet the hysterical child—but she thrusts it out with a horrified look, as if I’d slipped formula laced with arsenic into her mouth.

  And then she begins to scream.

  “Shh...shh,” I beg, bouncing her up and down and I remind myself—already tired, already frustrated—that Willow did this all night. All night long. Alone. Cold. Hungry. And I wonder: Scared? Lightning flashes in the not-so-far distance, and I count in my head: One. Two. Three. Thunder crashes, loud and angry, full of wrath. Willow staggers, searching the heavens for the source of the jarring noise and I see in the way her eyes dilate that she’s scared. Scared of thunder, like a child. “It’s okay,” I hear myself say aloud to Willow, and instantly I’m transported back in time to Zoe’s preschool bedroom, cradling her body in my arms while she nuzzled her head into me. “It’s okay,” I say to her, “it’s only thunder. It won’t hurt you one bit. Not one bit at all,” and I see Willow staring at me, though the look in her blue eyes is impossible to read.

  I’m absolutely soaking wet, as are Willow and Ruby, and the woman in the shop has the audacity to knock curtly on the glass door and tell us to go away. No loitering, her lips say.

  “What now?” I ask myself aloud, and Willow responds in a hushed voice, more to herself than me: “Tomorrow is a new day,” she says, “with no mistakes in it yet.”

  “Anne of Green Gables?” I ask and she says, “Yes.”

  “Your favorite?” I ask, and she says that it is.

  I’m slow to move, to draw Willow and her leather suitcase from the safety of the indigo awning and into the rain. “I bought a copy of Anne of Green Gables,” I confess. “On the way home last night. I’ve never read it before. I always wanted to read it. With my daughter, with Zoe. But she grew up too fast for it,” I say. It was as if I merely blinked, and the baby girl I once read board books to was suddenly too old to share a book with me, with her mother, because then, what would her friends at school think? It would be embarrassing if they knew, or so Zoe assumes.

  A thought crosses my mind, as it often does in moments like this: if I had to do it all over, what would I do differently? If Zoe could be a baby again, a toddler, how would I be different? How would Zoe be different? Would things have been different with Juliet?

  But of course, the question is entirely null and void, seeing as how there would be no more children for Chris and me.

  “Did you and your mother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, wondering if she will humor me with this tidbit of personal information.

  Hesitantly, she answers, “Matthew.”

  “Matthew?” I repeat, worried that her confession will end there, with that one word.

  But to my surprise she continues, the dark bangs shrouding her eyes as she watches a robin hunt for worms on the street. The first sign of spring. There are tiny buds on the trees that line the city streets, crocus shoots poking through holes in the sodden ground. “Matthew, my...” And she hesitates—there’s a distinct hesitation before she says, “my brother,” and outwardly I nod, but inwardly my heart leaps. One piece of the puzzle. Willow has a brother named Matthew. Willow has a brother, at all. A brother who read Anne of Green Gables.

  “Your brother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, trying to ignore the peculiarity of it, of Willow reading a book such as Anne of Green Gables with her brother, a book that a mother and daughter should share. I want to ask her about her mother. About why she didn’t read the book with her mother. But instead, I say nothing.

  “Yes.”

  I see a wistfulness come over her when she mentions her brother. Matthew. A tinge of sadness, a mournful sigh.

  I wonder about this Matthew and where he may be.

  And then Ruby’s bloodcurdling scream makes me remember the acetaminophen. I tread lightly. “I think Ruby is running a fever,” I say. “I bought some Tylenol at the store. It might help.” I hand Willow the box so that she can see it is, in fact, Tylenol, that I’m not trying to drug her baby.

  Willow looks at me with concern in her eyes and her voice becomes that of a child. “She’s sick?” she asks, her own naïveté showing through.

  “I don’t know.”

  But I see that the baby is a drooling, boogery mess. Willow concedes to the Tylenol and I read the directions for the dosage. Willow holds Ruby while I squeeze the berry flavor medicine into her mouth, and we watch as Ruby goes silent, and then smacks her lips together. It’s yummy, the Tylenol. And then we wait for the medicine to kick in, for Ruby to stop crying. We wait and think. Think and wait. Wait and think. Think and wait.

  What will I do when Ruby does, if ever, stop crying? Say goodbye and return home? Leave Ruby and Willow here, in the rain?

  With the diarrhea soaked diaper, a red, swollen, boiled and blistered diaper rash on her genitalia and buttocks (as I imagine there to be, hiding beneath the diaper). That, alone, would make me scream.

  “When’s the last time she saw a doctor?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” says Willow.

  “You don’t know?” I ask, taken by surprise.

  “I don’t remember,” she corrects.

  “We could take her to the doctor.”

  “No.”

  “I could pay. For the bill. Medicine.”

  “No.”

  “Then a shelter. Protection from the elements. A good night’s sleep.”

  “I don’t do shelters,” she says again—a replay of last night in the diner—the tone of her voice hammering the message home. I. Do. Not. Do. Shelters. I can’t blame her. I, myself, would think long and hard before checking into a homeless shelter. Shelters themselves can be dangerous places, brimming with desperate men and women, turned by circumstance into violent predators. There are communica
ble diseases in shelters: tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV, and, sometimes, the homeless are not allowed to bring their personal possessions inside. Which means, abandoning Willow’s vintage suitcase and whatever treasures it may hold. There are drugs in shelters, drug addicts, drug dealers, there are infestations of lice and bed bugs, there are people who will steal the shoes from your feet while you sleep. In the coldest months, people wait in line for hours to be assured a bed in a shelter. And even then, there may or may not be space.

  “Willow,” I say. There’s so much I want to say. The “L” comes soaring in on the tracks above us, drowning out the sound of my voice. I hesitate, wait for it to pass and then say, “You can’t stay out here forever. There are things Ruby needs. Things you need.”

  She looks at me with those cornflower eyes, her skin drab, remnants of eye makeup intensifying the baggage beneath her eyes. “You think I want to live on the streets?” she asks. And then says to me, “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  CHRIS

  The front door opens and there they stand like two drowned rats. There’s a baby in Heidi’s arms, a scent far worse than cumin wafting from the girl. I rub at my eyes, certain I’m hallucinating, certain my Heidi would never bring a homeless girl into our home, into the home where her own daughter lives and breathes. The girl is a ragamuffin, a street urchin. She’s barely older than Zoe. She won’t make eye contact with me, not when Heidi tells me her name is Willow or when I say lackadaisically (I don’t want to appear too stupid when the cameramen appear to inform me that I’m on the next installment of Candid Camera) that mine is Chris.

  Heidi announces, “She’s going to stay with us tonight,” just like that. Like those damn kittens, and I’m too stupefied to say yes or no, not that anyone bothered to ask my opinion. Heidi shepherds the girl into our home, and suggests she remove the soused boots from her feet, and as she does so, about a gallon of water pours from their insides and onto the floor. Beneath those boots, her feet are bare. No socks, her feet macerated and covered in blisters. I wince, and Heidi and the girl’s eyes follow mine down to the bare feet. I know Heidi’s thinking about how to remedy the girl’s ailing feet, but I’m just hoping whatever she’s got isn’t contagious.

  Zoe appears from her bedroom, the words “what the...” dropping from a gaping mouth. I’m guessing our daughter isn’t overly familiar with the f word that follows that statement, so I nearly say it aloud for her. What the fuck are you thinking, Heidi? But already Heidi is showing the girl into our home, introducing her to our daughter, who stares dumbly at this waif and then looks to me for an explanation. I can only shrug.

  The girl’s eyes get lost on the TV, on some basketball game: Chicago Bulls versus the Pistons, and I hear myself ask—for lack of anything better to say—“You like basketball?” and she flatly answers, “No,” and yet she’s staring at that TV as though she’s never seen an electrical appliance before in her life. When she talks, I catch a scent of bacteria fermenting in her mouth: halitosis. I wonder when she last brushed her teeth. They’ve probably got that “fuzzy sweater” thing going on. There’s an ungodly smell coming from her and when I move to the window and open it a crack, Heidi shoots me an evil eye, to which I reply, “What? It’s stuffy in here,” and hope the rain stays at bay long enough to air out the stench.

  The girl is nervous, like a trapped tomcat, eyes darting around the room, searching for a bed under which she can hide.

  I can’t figure out what is the weirdest of all: this strange girl in our home, or the way Heidi cradles that baby as if it is hers, the way she supports its head with the palm of her hand and rocks it back in forth intuitively. Her eyes gaze at that baby in a covetous way, an almost silent hum sneaking from her when the TV breaks for commercial and the room is filled with a split second of silence.

  “I’m going to my room,” Zoe declares, and walks down the hall and slams the door.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Heidi apologizes to this girl—Willow—and says, “She’s just...she’s twelve.”

  “She doesn’t like me,” Willow guesses. Nope, I think, she doesn’t.

  But Heidi says, “No. She just...” She fights for an appropriate answer and comes up near empty. “She hates everything,” she says instead, as if somehow everything does not encompass this strange new addition to our home.

  “You can stay in here,” Heidi says as she leads the girl down the hall and into my office where we keep a classy leather sofa bed for when guests come to stay. Except that this is not a guest. I watch from the doorway as Heidi hands the baby back to the girl, then removes stacks of my work from the sofa and sets them on the desk with a thump.

  “Heidi,” I say, but she ignores me, too busy removing the cushions from the sofa and tossing them to the floor.

  “What you need,” she’s saying to the girl, who stands, grappling with the infant and a sopping suitcase in her hands, standing as uncomfortably in the room as I feel, “is a good night’s sleep. A square meal. Do you like chicken?” she asks, the girl’s wavering nod barely visible before Heidi says, “We’ll have chicken tetrazzini. Or better yet, chicken potpie. Comfort food. Do you like chicken potpie?”

  And there’s only one thought running through my mind: I thought we were vegetarians. Where has Heidi been hiding the chicken all this time?

  In her haste, Heidi knocks a dozen or more Excel spreadsheets and my fancy financial calculator to the floor. I push my way inside, losing patience, and collect the spreadsheets one by one. The girl reaches over and picks the calculator up off the floor, running her fingers over the numbers and buttons before returning it nervously to me. “Thanks,” I mutter, and then, “Heidi,” I say again, but this time she pushes past me—leaving the girl and me alone in the room for all of twenty seconds—in search of a set of chambray sheets from the linen closet. I snatch my laptop as the girl watches me, unplug the printer from the wall and carry the both of them, with great difficulty, from the room, tripping over the printer’s electrical cord as I do. I bypass Heidi in the doorway and snap this time, “Heidi,” and when her brown eyes pay me the time of day, I growl, “I need to speak with you. Now,” and she sets the sheets on the pull-out bed and follows me—piqued, as if I’m the one being bullheaded and impetuous—from the room.

  “What the hell are you thinking?” I seeth at her as we drift down the narrow hall. “Bringing that girl into our home.” The printer is heavy; I lose balance and stumble into the wall. Heidi doesn’t offer to help.

  “She had nowhere to go, Chris,” she insists, standing before me in that heinous lilac robe, her hair flattened by the rain. Her eyes are aroused, bizarrely similar to the night I came home from work, some twelve years ago, and there she was in the midst of our dining room, candles everywhere, perched in the nude. A bottle of wine open on the table: Château Saint-Pierre, and her impeccable body sitting cross-legged beside it, sipping from a handcrafted wineglass. The ten-dollar ones that we saved for special occasions.

  “How long is she staying?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “A day, a week? What Heidi?” I ask, my voice escalating. “Which is it?”

  “The baby has a fever.”

  “So take it to the doctor,” I insist.

  But Heidi is shaking her head no. “She doesn’t want to,” she says.

  I trudge through the hall, set my now-traveling office on the kitchen table. I throw my hands up in the air, miffed. “Who the hell cares what she wants, Heidi? She is a little girl. A runaway, probably. We’re harboring a runaway. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble we could get into for harboring a runaway?” I ask as I find the phone book in a kitchen drawer and start flipping through the thin pages for the nonemergency police number. Or is this an emergency? Strange girl in my home. Sounds like trespassing to me.

  “She’s eighteen,” Heidi insists.

  “How do you know she’s eighteen?”

  “She told me,” she replies foolishly.

&nb
sp; “She’s not eighteen,” I assure my wife. “You need to report her to the authorities,” I demand.

  “We can’t do that, Chris,” she says, stealing the heavy book from my hands. She snaps it shut, pages getting crimped between the yellow covers. “How do you know she wasn’t abused? Molested? Even if she is a runaway, she must have a good reason for leaving home.”

  “Then call DCFS. Let them sort it out. This is not your concern.”

  But of course it is. Every neglected, mistreated, overlooked, ignored, abandoned, forgotten, emaciated, abused, derelict creature on God’s green earth is Heidi’s concern.

  This, I know without a shred of doubt, is an argument I cannot win.

  “How do you know she’s not going to kill us?” I ask instead. Good question, I think. I see us on the morning news: Family Slain in Lincoln Park Condo.

  And there she is, that girl, standing in the office door, watching us from down the hall. Her eyes, a capricious blue, though bloodshot and tired. Her hair slung across her face, her mouth refusing to smile. A bruise perched on her forehead as if implying what Heidi said is true. “I could ask the same about you,” she mutters, her eyes moving up the ecru wall and settling on the popcorn ceiling above before she says, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you,” and I’m 100 percent sure Peter Funt is about to come barreling through the front door with a cameraman in tow when I ask stupidly, “In me?” my mouth having plummeted halfway to the ground below.

  “In the Lord,” the girl says, and Heidi gives me this look like I’m some godless heathen.

  Heidi glowers at me, and then spins on her heels, and, heading down the hall, declares, “Why don’t I draw you a warm bath, Willow? You can soak awhile and I’ll hold Ruby. It will feel so good to get on some clean clothes. Some dry clothes. I bet you wear the same size as Zoe. I’m sure she’d be happy to share.”