by Mary Kubica
When the door closes, I ransack the cabinets for Lysol spray.
WILLOW
My memories of Momma are slim to none these days. There are no photos left to remember her long black hair, her swarthy skin, her pretty blue eyes. Joseph made sure of that. He said I couldn’t keep living in the past as he stood there, in that bedroom that was mine, the one with the patchwork quilt, the drafty windows so that in the winter it was never warm—and in the summer it was always hot—the flowery golden wallpaper that peeled from every seam, from every corner of the room. But there are glimpses of her that rattle in my mind from time to time. Glimpses of Momma. Her profile in the bathroom mirror while she cut Mrs. Dahl’s hair. The sound of her giggling at something on TV. Watching her lie on a beaten-up plastic lounge chair in the parched lawn sunbathing, and me, in the grass beside her, digging dirty fingers down in the earth for worms. Baking in the kitchen from the worn Julia Child cookbooks we got at the public library, and Momma, standing there with a half bottle of Dijon mustard spilled down the front of a white shirt. Laughing.
I watched as Joseph tore what pictures I had of Momma right in two before my very eyes. And then into a million tiny slivers so that even if I tried to piece them back together, it would never be just right. He made me pick up the scraps from the floor. Made me march them down the steps and into the overflowing trash while the boys watched on and then he sent me to my room. As if the mess had been my doing. “I don’t want to hear a word from you. You hear?” Joseph ordered, all six-foot-six of him, with that full pumpkin colored beard of his, with his serious, hawkish eyes. And he added, “Beg God for His forgiveness.”
As if loving Momma was a sin.
After that the memories I had of Momma were scattered, so that I never knew if those visions were true or not, and I’d find myself second-guessing it all—the sound of her laugh, for instance, or the way her fingers felt when they ran through my mucous-colored hair. I’d lie in that bed of mine, covered up with the quilt, and rack my brain to come up with some tiny crumb of Momma to get me through the night. The shape of her nose, whether or not she had freckles, what it sounded like when she said my name.
“How did your parents die?” she asks me. Louise Flores. She slips a navy suit jacket from her haggard body and folds it precisely in two, like a greeting card, then sets it on the table beside the recorder and stopwatch.
“I’m sure you know, ma’am,” I say. There’s an officer in the corner, a sentry keeping watch, though he tries hard to pretend he’s not here. She said I didn’t have to answer her questions, not yet anyway. I could wait for Ms. Amber Adler, she said, or my attorney. But I pictured Ms. Adler’s disappointed eyes when she came in the room and knew it was best to fess up soon. Before she arrived.
“How about you tell me,” the silver-haired lady says, though I know that somewhere in that pad of paper it says. About Momma’s old Datsun Bluebird. About the accident, a rollover accident, as someone said, out on I-80, just outside of Ogallala, about how eyewitnesses claimed they saw the car zigzag and swerve. About how Daddy lost control of the car, then likely overcorrected, sending the car in circles on the road. I imagine it, Momma’s old Bluebird doing summersaults down the interstate while Momma and Daddy hung on for dear life.
Lily and I were home at the time. Alone. We never had a sitter. Momma trusted me to take care of Lily, even when I was eight years old. I got pretty good at it: changing her diaper, putting her to bed. I cut her apples and carrots into teensy bites so that she wouldn’t choke—like Momma said—and always made sure the dead bolt was secure, that I didn’t answer the door for no one, not even Mrs. Grass from next door, who was forever trying to embezzle our milk and eggs. Lily and I would lie in front of the TV anytime Momma and Daddy were gone, watching Sesame Street because Sesame Street was her favorite show of all. She liked Snuffleupagus the best, Snuffy, the big old mammoth who always made her laugh. She’d lie on the living room floor beside me, on the shaggy green carpeting that reminded me a bit of Snuffy’s fur, pointing at that mammoth on the TV and laughing.
It wasn’t as if Momma left Lily and me home alone that much. But there were times, she said, that an adult’s got to do what an adult’s got to do. That’s what she said to me the morning she and Daddy climbed into the Bluebird and she stuck her head out the window as they pulled from the gravel drive, her long black hair getting caught up in the wind so that I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her voice anyway: Take good care of Lily, and something or other about love and you. I love you like a bee loves honey. I love you like peanut butter loves jelly. I love you like a fish loves water.
Momma told me to take good care of Lily. They were the last words she said to me, the last vision I have of her: her with her head stuck out the busted window of the junky old Datsun, the wind blurring her face with a mass of black hair. Take good care of Lily. And that’s what I intended to do.
But then, just like that, Lily was gone, too.
HEIDI
We bathe Ruby first. I draw the water so that it is tepid: warm enough, but not too warm for the baby’s frail skin. I’m about to leave the room, to give Willow privacy, when she turns to me and asks, with those tuckered-out eyes, her body enervated, ready to drop, the tone of her voice fraught with fatigue, “Will you help me? Please?” And I say of course, elated to feel the slippery child in my hands as Willow scoops handfuls of water over her body. With the baby in my hands, I find myself thinking of Juliet, knowing that the loss of Juliet wasn’t only about the loss of one baby; it was about the loss of all the babies. All the babies I was meant to have. There was a time I found myself thinking of little Juliet for hours on end, dreaming about her and what she may have looked like had I carried her full term. Would her hair be light and sparse like Zoe’s when she crawled out of my womb, or would it be dark and plentiful as Chris’s own mother said his was, hampering her with months of heartburn as the old wives’ tales claimed they do?
It had been quite some time since I allowed myself to think of little Juliet¸ to let her image creep into my head. But there she was, once again, taking up residence in my mind’s eye, reminding me of all the babies I would never have. Juliet, I nearly uttered allowed. Juliet Wood. She would have been eleven years old now, if life had gone according to plan. Eleven years old, with a parade of little ones following her out, every two years like clockwork. Sophia and Alexis, and baby Zach.
And then Ruby squeals and I return to the present, to the here and now. I watch as the bathwater seeps up the green sleeves of Willow’s coat, transforming the army green to black. I offered to take the coat from her before she sunk her arms into the water, but she said no. Her callow hands shake as she lathers the vanilla body wash onto her hands, and caresses the baby’s scalp and underarms, her rear end. Ruby’s bottom is encrusted with a scarlet diaper rash, as I knew it would be, a rash that is not limited to just the genital area, but under her arms and in the folds of skin elsewhere along her tiny body. Her bottom is besieged by a yeast infection, a white crust at the periphery of the red rash. I devise a grocery list in my mind: diaper rash cream, clotrimazole cream and, as the vanilla body wash seeps into the corners of the baby’s eyes and she lets out a shriek: No More Tears baby wash. Willow has no spare diapers and so, when the bath is through, I swathe Ruby in an organic harbor blue towel, and seal it shut with safety pins. Add to the checklist: diapers and wipes.
I am about to take Ruby from the room, to give Willow privacy for her own bath, when she stops me. I can see that she does not want the baby to leave. She doesn’t trust me. Not yet. And why should she, I think, when I am a complete stranger. Wasn’t I the one to stop the neonatal nurse from removing Zoe from my birthing room, on doctor’s orders that I rest?
Though I want nothing less than to make Ruby a fresh bottle, to sit with her in the living room until she falls to sleep, I lay a second towel on the porcelain floor and the baby on top of that, sucking like the dickens on her own adorable toes. I linger for a half a
second or more, staring as she unearths the appendages from that harbor-blue towel, and like an agile gymnast, thrusts them into her mouth.
Willow locks the door behind me. I stand there, in the hall, hand on the wall, all the breath suctioned right out of me with a vacuum’s upholstery attachment thrust deep into my lungs.
From the kitchen, I see Chris sitting at the table, typing furiously on his laptop. The printer is plugged into the wall, an ugly black cord that stretches across the room.
A safety hazard.
But I don’t dare say this. His eyes meet mine and remind me, once again, of how he disagrees with my decision. He shakes his head, disgruntled, and his eyes revert to the LCD screen, to the microscopic numbers that fill the lines of the incomprehensible spreadsheets. Zoe’s pop music suffuses our home, making the walls shake, the framed photographs that line the hallway walls dance. I stare at the images of Zoe: smiling through gaping teeth, and then, years later, her nose ruddy with a cold. Crooked teeth, much bigger than the space that nature allowed for them, followed by braces. Zoe always adored picture day at her Catholic school, the one and only day of the year when uniforms were not required. When she was younger I had a say in what she wore for pictures, and so we relied on sateen dresses and woolen jumpers, with corsage headbands or tulle poufs in her hair. But as the years went by, and adolescence settled upon my once baby girl, a sudden change altered those photos, no longer awash with ruffles and bows, but now animal prints and graphic tops, hoodies and dark vests, each article of clothing as reclusive and moody as the individual inside them.
My knuckles come to rest on Zoe’s bedroom door.
“What?” she grunts from inside the room. When I let myself inside, she is sitting on the bed with her adored yellow notebook close at hand. The space heater is on, set to seventy-four degrees after a recent request that she not let her room feel like the fiery furnace of hell. And still, Zoe is wrapped in a blanket, sulking. On her arms: arm warmers, another recent fad that has me nonplussed. Zoe’s are black with sequins, given to her by a friend. Are your arms cold? I had asked blunderingly the day she arrived home from school with them secured to her hands.
Her eyes confirmed what she already knew to be true: her mother was an idiot.
Even I could hear the cowardice in my voice, fearful of rejection from my twelve-year-old daughter. “Do you have something Willow could wear? After she’s through with her bath?” I ask, hovering in the doorway like a scaredy-cat.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Zoe replies as she gropes for her phone and begins texting furtively with dexterous thumbs. I can only imagine what mean words she is sending to Taylor via cell phone towers.
“You can’t,” I say, springing across the canopy bed for the cell phone. I snatch it from my daughter’s hand, and see a series of text abbreviations of which I can’t make heads or tails. J2LYK.
Zoe cries out, “That’s mine,” as she lunges for the phone and tries to yank it from me, but I remind her that, “It’s not. Your father and I still pay the bill.” I stand firmly before the bed, holding the phone behind me. That was our agreement after all. Zoe could have a cell phone so long as Chris and I were allowed to peruse her text messages for any red flags.
But the look on her face is reminiscent of a child being slapped.
“Give it to me,” she orders, staring at me with those big brown anime eyes of hers, the disproportional eyes that always look sad. She holds her hand out expectantly, blue ink doodled across a forearm. Oh, how I want to give her the phone, to not have her be mad! I see the piping hot indignation leaching from my child and know her mind is bursting with hatred. Hatred toward me.
Whoever said motherhood was easy...
I long for those days when Zoe and I would rock before an open window, on the long forgotten sleigh glider, the one with the deep tufted seat I had to roll myself out of and the antique scrolled arms. I’d rock her until she fell asleep, and then I would cradle her for hours, swaying back and forth until the lullaby music petered out and the white hot sun fell below the horizon.
Out Zoe’s bedroom window, I stare at the city’s skyline, lost in the fleecy clouds. Being on the fifth floor of our own building, our view skirts right over the top of smaller neighboring buildings and south, to the Loop. It was the reason Chris and I were smitten with the condo some fourteen years ago when we decided to buy it. The view. The Loop out our south-facing windows, a nibble of Lake Michigan to the east. We didn’t bother making a low-ball offer; we paid asking price, too terrified someone would snatch it from our hungry hands.
“We can’t tell anyone about Willow,” I say calmly. “Not yet anyway.”
“So I’m just supposed to lie to my best friend?” she asks exasperatedly. What I think is: yes.
But what I say is a cop-out, a carbon copy of my first response. “We just can’t tell anyone, Zoe. Not yet.”
“Why not? Is she in witness protection or something?” she asks like only a twelve-year-old can.
But I disregard this query and ask again, “Do you have something she can wear after her shower?” Zoe arises from her bed melodramatically and moves to the closet with resentment. I see from behind that her pants hang too loose on her, her rear end all but lost in the fabric. “She won’t be here for long,” I hear myself say, and then, “We should take you shopping for some new clothes soon,” a poor attempt at entente.
And Zoe, chock-full of sarcasm and chagrin, says of Willow, “I know. She’s just one of your clients.”
“Not exactly,” I say, seeing how Zoe would make a quick connection between Willow and my clients, the stories I tote home from work of the homeless, illiterate people I attend to all day. “She needs our help, Zoe.” I am ever hopeful that I can appeal to her civic duty better than I can that of Chris. When Zoe was younger, we trudged through snow to deliver outgrown winter coats to the homeless at a women and children’s shelter; collected toys and books for the patients at the children’s hospital, those suffering from leukemia and lymphoma and other cancers I couldn’t bear to imagine a child having. I reminded Zoe of others who were far less fortunate and how it was our obligation to help.
Zoe yanks a pair of hot-pink drawstring pants from her closet and a striped shirt, plum and light gray. As she tosses them into my waiting hands, she mutters, “I don’t like these anyway,” and I’m left wondering if she forgot about the less fortunate, or if this—sarcasm and chagrin—is all she has to give. “They’re ugly,” she says.
“This is only temporary,” I murmur as I retreat from the room. In the hall, Chris’s eyes rise from the laptop and again he shakes his head.
I lay the clean clothing on the sofa bed and hover in my bedroom until Willow emerges from a steamy bathroom swathed in her own harbor-blue towel, Ruby clutched in her wet hands. She tiptoes into the office, and closes the door.
The lock clicks shut.
I let myself into the bathroom and collect a pile of clothing from the floor, heaping it into an empty hamper with the laundry detergent, dryer sheets and stain remover on top. In the kitchen, I remove a change purse of quarters from a drawer and tell Chris that I’ll be back, before descending six flights of stairs for the community laundry room tucked away in the basement. Before I go, Chris eyes me and asks, “And what do you expect me to do with her?”
“Five minutes,” I say, “that’s all,” an inadequate response to his question, and then I hurry from the room before he can say no.
I find the laundry room empty. It’s a small space with an outdated inlaid parquet floor, five washing machines and an equal number of dryers, each of which eats more quarters than they put to good use. I lay Ruby’s “Little Sister” jumpsuit atop the washing machine and saturate the stains with stain remover, followed by the pink fleece blanket that smells of sweat and sewer gas. I reach into the hamper and pull Willow’s clothing from the pile: the army-green jacket that I zip shut before snapping the buttons, a pair of jeans that I fear will turn the white jumpsuit blue. I se
t them aside to wash in their own machine. And then I yank a once-white undershirt from beneath a sweater.
And I freeze.
I check twice, half-certain that it’s the poor lighting in the laundry room that makes me think I see blood spatters across the undershirt. Something red, of that I’m certain, but I do my best to convince myself that the flecks are ketchup. Barbecue sauce. The juice of a maraschino cherry. I smell the shirt for whispers of tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, but I come up with nothing but body odor. Body odor and blood. My eyes scan the other articles of clothing for a second time: the frayed jeans, the raveling sweater, Ruby’s jumpsuit. They’re each caked in their own filth, but none other than the undershirt carry the distinct carmine color of dried blood. I fumble for the stain remover and begin squirting the life out of it, but then stop—suddenly—knowing that little can be done about dried blood. I wad the undershirt into a discreet ball and on the way upstairs to our fifth-floor condo I drop it in the garbage shoot.
I envision that undershirt with whatever secrets it may hold, tumbling down five flights and into the Dumpster perched beside the service entrance.
Of this, Chris can never know.
WILLOW
Momma used to say she had a sister, Annabeth, but if such a sister existed, she never came forward to claim Lily and me.
“How is it that you came to live with Joseph and Miriam?” asks Louise Flores, the ASA—assistant state’s attorney, she told me when I asked. The clock on the wall reads 2:37 p.m. I lay my head on the cold steel table of the interrogation room and close my eyes. “Claire,” the stark woman prods, laying a hand on my arm to shake me awake. Roughly. She’ll have nothing to do with this, nothing to do with my “shenanigans,” she says. I yank my arm away and hide them, both of them, under the table where she can’t reach.
“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.