Pretty Baby: A Gripping Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Mary Kubica

  Heidi asks, “Raining again?” as I hang my saturated coat on a hook by the door and slip out of my shoes, her voice elevated over the thumping sound of the rain. I say that it is.

  “Just started up,” I say. “Getting colder, too,” as a clap of thunder rattles through the sky, shaking the building and everyone inside.

  “Going to be a doozy,” says Heidi, about the storm, her eyes set on Willow across the room, stroking the cat with the palm of her hand, staring vacantly out the blackened windows. Lightning brightens the sky and she jumps, withdrawing into the sofa cushions as if she’s trying to hide.

  I kiss Heidi and Zoe on the cheek, and take my leftover dinner, the plate on the countertop, tucked beneath a paper towel, to the microwave to reheat it. I peek under the paper towel and see pork chops.

  Maybe this girl isn’t so bad after all.

  The cold air disseminates through our home, through the breaches in the drafty windows. Outside, the wind howls and the trees sway. Heidi rises from her chair, crosses the room and flips on the gas fireplace to warm the space.

  It’s then that I see, out of the corner of my eye, a look of dread that overtakes Willow, as she springs to her feet, the black cat plummeting to the ground. Her eyes are fastened to that fireplace. The fire glowing orange among the artificial embers. The flames, how they dance dramatically behind the mesh screen, coaxing the cats, enticing them, the both of them, to the warmth of the fire. They sprawl out beside it, oblivious to Willow’s distress.

  “Fire,” she says, her voice shaky and subdued. She’s pointing. At the black fireplace with its black louvers on the white wall, surrounded by built-in nooks and crannies that house Heidi’s knickknacks: her snow globes and vases, a collection of vintage jars. “Fire,” she says again, and I’m reminded of cavemen discovering fire for the very first time. Her eyes are glassy, like marbles; her face has gone white.

  It’s a knee-jerk reflex when Heidi flips the fireplace off.

  The flames disappear. The gas logs return to their hand painted, blackened state.

  “Willow,” she says, her voice as wobbly as Willow’s when she said fire. But there’s a calmness in Heidi’s voice that the girl doesn’t possess. A hint of reason. The rest of us in the room, we’re silent. The cats stare at the fireplace, growing cold.

  “It’s okay, Willow,” Heidi declares, “it’s just a fireplace. It’s safe. Perfectly safe,” and her eyes stray to mine, begging to know what in the hell just happened. My shoulders rise and fall as Willow settles back down on the sofa, shaking the image of that fire from her mind.

  I eat my dinner and excuse myself, into the bedroom to make a call. A work call, I say so that I won’t be interrupted.

  But it isn’t a work call at all.

  I’ve been doing my own research on Willow Greer, hitting one dead end after the next. I’ve widened my search to more than a Google search. In every spare second of downtime, I’m on my laptop, searching for the girl.

  I’ve moved on to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and to searching active AMBER alerts. I even signed up to receive AMBER alerts via email, and am now being notified every time some alienated spouse tries to run off with his or her own kid. But so far, nothing. Nada.

  After discovering the Twitter account @LostWithoutU linked to a W. Greer, I spent more time than I’d ever admit reading the girl’s bleak tweets, the threats of self-destruction, staring at photos she’s posted online, her arms scratched to smithereens, or so she claimed, by the sharp edge of a razor blade. Cutting. There were responses from all sorts of other hooligans, their photos of self-inflicted wounds trying to one up each other, jagged, red words chiseled into the skin: fat and pain and whore. There were challenges made in response to @LostWithoutU’s suicidal threats: Do it, and I double dog dare you.

  There were more photos, too, of her various tattoos: assorted occult symbols on a shoulder and leg, some sort of butterfly with black-and-yellow wings, spread across the palm of a hand. A close up of her face and there, hidden behind gangly red hair, a pair of cross earrings much like the ones our Willow wore. A pair of angel’s wings.

  Could it be a coincidence? I stare long and hard at those earrings and think: probably not.

  Could our Willow Greer be the same girl, with a profile photo that is not her own? Maybe. I browse others’ profile photos: a dog, a cat, Marilyn Monroe. There’s no law that says your photo has to be your photo. On a whim I set up my own Twitter account. @MoneyMan3. I upload a photo I find online, some male model with blue eyes and bushy blond hair, shirtless, flaunting six-pack abs.

  A man can dream.

  I send a tweet to @LostWithoutU.

  Does it hurt? I ask, about the parallel red lines lacerated into the skin.

  And then I make my phone call.

  I have an old college friend who does some PI work around town, mostly in the realm of cheating spouses. Martin Miller. He’s got the best stories to tell, stories of high-class women winding up in seedy hotels. His website claims to find lost loves, college sweethearts, teenage runaways. Maybe he can help.

  When Martin answers I tell him about our little situation. He vows to be utterly discreet.

  The last thing I need is Heidi to know I’ve hired a PI. Or for this information to wind up in the wrong hands. If he turns the information over to authorities... No, I think. I scan the website again. Utmost discretion, it says. And besides, I know this guy.

  How is it, then, that I know about the high-class women and the seedy hotels? No, I think, pushing that thought from my mind. I hear him laugh about it at some dive bar out in Logan Square. It was about five years ago, maybe more. We were drunk.

  I know this guy.

  Later that night, as I lie in the magenta sleeping bag on the floor, I think of that girl, the look on her face when she saw the fire. How does a teenage girl come to be terrified of lightning? Of fire?

  Zoe hasn’t been scared of those things since she was eight.

  I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

  But then again, being solicitous isn’t really my thing. It’s Heidi’s.

  HEIDI

  Willow settles into our home slowly, like the natural weathering of rocks over time, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. Pebbles. She reveals little about herself, nearly nothing, and yet that alone becomes commonplace. I stop asking questions, stop trying to solicit information about her, her family, her past, knowing the responses will be sparse and incomplete.

  There is a brother. A brother named Matthew. That much I know.

  In what little time she’s been with us, each of us takes to her in our own way, Chris in a synthetic way, his empathy manufactured and strained. He tolerates her, though each day I’m barraged with questions about how many more days she will stay.

  “One night?” he asks. “Two?” though I tell him I don’t know. He shakes his head at me and says, “Heidi. This is really getting out of hand,” and I make him see that for all the days she’s been with us, she hasn’t done a single harmful thing: our lives are still intact, electronics have yet to be swiped from the home while we sleep.

  She’s harmless, I tell him. But he is not so sure.

  And yet, from time to time my mind retreats to the blood on the undershirt, hurled down the garbage shoot and now taking up residence in some landfill in Dolton. I wonder whether or not it truly belonged to Willow as she said it did, an effect of the cold spring air, or if perhaps... But I stop myself, refusing to consider other options. I see those blood splatters at the oddest of times: when taking a shower, when making dinner. Quiet moments when my thoughts wander away from me, away from the everyday busyness to blood.

  I find myself thinking about the baby, about Ruby, all the time, when I’m not thinking about the blood. Holding Ruby and listening to her wail, it reminds me of all the imaginary children I once longed to have. The ones I was supposed to have. I find myself dreaming night after night about babies: living babies, dead babies, cherubic babies, c
herubs, with their angelic wings. I dream of Juliet. I dream of embryos and fetuses, and baby bottles and baby shoes. I dream of giving birth to babies all night long, and I dream of blood, blood on the undershirt, blood oozing from between my legs, red and thick, coagulating inside my panties. Panties that were once a brilliant white, like the undershirt.

  I wake in a panic, sweating, while Chris and Zoe never stir.

  Zoe takes to Willow as she does most everything in life: with hostility. There are days she eyeballs the girl from across the room with something akin to loathing in her eyes. She grumbles about sharing her clothing with the girl, or not being allowed to watch some kitschy show on the TV. She refuses to hold Ruby for a split second when Willow is in the restroom, and I’m otherwise occupied. She refuses to give the baby a bottle, and when she cries, as she often does, pathetic, persistent crying, Zoe rolls her eyes and walks out of the room.

  I take to making three-course meals, grateful that someone is there to lick her plate clean. I make salads and soups, lasagna, and chicken tetrazzini, watching as Willow devours the meals one by one, always grateful for seconds, while Zoe stares desolately at the food, asking questions like, “What even is this?” and, “I thought we were vegetarians,” in that way only a preteen can, the falsetto of her voice, whiny and shrill. I watch Zoe pick at the lettuce leaves of her salad like a rabbit, thankful that Willow, across the table, is completely ravenous, and will not let good food go to waste.

  In the afternoon, when Zoe is at school, and I am home from work, I find myself staring at Willow. At Ruby. At the way Willow handles Ruby, heavy-handed and inept, until I lift the baby from her arms and say, “Here, let me,” sure to tack on, “You could use a break,” so as not to insult her. I don’t know what she makes of it, of the way I remove the baby from her arms. I’m not entirely sure I care. I press my lips to the baby’s forehead and whisper, “There now, sweet girl,” as I bobble her up and down ever so gently, trying hard to make her smile.

  I settle into the new rocking chair, purchased online and delivered this morning via FedEx, a delivery which Chris has yet to see. I paid extra, nearly a hundred dollars, for expedited delivery, though this detail I won’t mention to Chris. I press my back into the lumbar support and the baby and I begin to sway. I hum Patsy Cline lullabies under my breath, songs that my mother one day hummed to me, which seems to get Willow’s attention, though she tries hard to pretend she doesn’t care.

  I watch the girl out of the corner of my eye, wondering ominously if or when she will want the baby returned to her custody, when she will tire of staring at Muppets on the TV screen, and wish to retreat to the office with Anne of Green Gables and the baby. My arms tighten around the baby automatically, like a seat belt in an auto collision.

  Willow has been with me for over forty-eight hours now, and all I know is her first name, if, as Chris points out, that is her real name.

  And that she has a brother. Matthew.

  She doesn’t offer a thing about herself, and I don’t ask, certain that any interrogation will scare her away, and she will leave, taking with her the baby. My mind makes up for the lack of information, inventing all sorts of narratives that brought her and her baby into our lives, tales of spring tornadoes sweeping through the Midwest and carrying her from her home, tales of her running away to escape the huntsman who’s to return to the castle with her heart. From time to time she starts to say something, only ever a single word, or sometimes just a syllable or two that sneak between her lips, but then she stops herself suddenly and claims oblivion.

  She’s grave. She doesn’t smile. She might as well be an elderly lady, what with all the baggage she carries in her eyes and meek demeanor. She’s quiet, virtually silent, sitting on that sofa, staring blindly at the TV. She watches cartoons mostly, almost always Sesame Street, staring at the TV longingly, until Chris or Zoe or I break her reverie.

  She eats quickly, passionately, as if she’s been deprived of a home-cooked meal for the greater part of her life, and at night, as I hover in the hallway after we’ve parted ways and she’s drifted into her room, I wait for the door to lock, as it does every night, for that latch to assure her that no one will be slinking into her room, prowling in the shadows while she sleeps.

  I hear her, sometimes, in the middle of the night. I hear her subconscious murmur a single phrase while she sleeps: Come with me. Over and over again, Come with me, her voice escalating at times until the words verge on desolate, a do-or-die attempt at persuasion.

  Come with me. Come with me.

  But who is she talking to, I wonder, and where does she want them to go?

  She cleans up after herself, bringing her dishes to the sink, where she washes and dries them by hand though I beg her not to. “Please,” I say. “Leave them. I’m just going to load the dishwasher,” but she does anyway as if she feels she has to, double-and triple-checking sometimes for remnants of food encrusted to the plates or left behind in the tines of the forks, as if such a simple oversight would elicit admonishment, and I picture her, picture Willow, bent over a kitchen chair, receiving the prescribed number of lashings for leaving food behind on a plate, and then a knock on the head to deliver the ochre bruise.

  The baby and I sway in the rocking chair, Willow sitting on the sofa in silence. Ruby wiggles in my arms, her mouth plugged with a pacifier, unable to cry, though she wants nothing less than to belt out a bloodcurdling scream. I see the agitation in her eyes, eyes that are shellacked thanks to yet another fever.

  I moisten a washcloth and press it to her head, and continue to hum lullabies in the hopes of pacification.

  It’s then that Willow turns to me—her voice, in that moment of near-silence startling me—wanting to know in her generally timid, generally submissive tone, “How come you didn’t have any more babies? If you like them so much?” and I feel the air in the room become too thin to breathe.

  I could lie. I could evade the question altogether. No one has ever asked me such a question. Not even Zoe. I think back some eleven years. The beginning of the end, or so it felt at the time. Zoe was less than a year old, a cuddlesome creature when she wasn’t in the midst of a colicky rage, the kind that brought neighbors to our door to see what they could do to silence the child so they could sleep. She was just five, maybe six months old when I discovered I was carrying another child, that I was carrying Juliet. We weren’t trying to conceive, Chris and I, but we weren’t taking precautions not to, either. I was absolutely elated when I found out I was pregnant, certain that this was just the beginning of that vast family I longed to have.

  How Chris felt about it, I wasn’t entirely sure. It’s soon, he said the day I told him, standing before the bathroom door with a positive pregnancy test in my hand. We already have a baby.

  But then he smiled. And there was a hug. And there were conversations over those fleeting few weeks: what we would name the baby and whether or not the baby and Zoe could share a room.

  What I noticed first was blood, a watery discharge that turned crimson with time. And then there was the pain. I was certain I was having a miscarriage when I caught sight of the blood there, in my panties, but the doctor assured me the baby was just fine.

  A biopsy confirmed stage 1B cervical cancer.

  The doctor recommended a radical hysterectomy, which meant first ridding my womb of Juliet. “It’s a simple procedure,” the doctor assured Chris and me, and I read online how they would dilate my cervix, and then scrape the contents of my uterus clean, and I imagined Juliet as the pulp of a pumpkin, being scooped out with a spoon.

  No, I said, and Absolutely not, but somehow or other Chris convinced me that an abortion was something we needed to do. If it was later in the pregnancy, he’d said, mimicking the doctor’s words, and If the cancer wasn’t so advanced. And then: I can’t raise Zoe alone, he’d said, if something happens to you. And I thought of Chris and Zoe all alone, and myself, dead, in a tomb. Had the cancer not been so advanced we could have delayed treatment unt
il after the delivery. But such was not the case. As it was, it was the baby or me, and I chose me, a decision that would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  The doctor and Chris corrected me every time I said baby. They called her a fetus instead. There’s no way to know, the doctor had said before they discarded my Juliet as medical waste, whether or not she’s a girl. Reproductive organs don’t develop until the third month of pregnancy.

  And yet, I knew.

  I stared at the pamphlets the doctor handed me in the office, angry that I had gotten so busy with work and Zoe that I’d fallen behind on regular Pap tests, that I’d missed my own six-week postpartum checkup because I couldn’t be bothered. Cervical cancer, the pamphlets said, could be detected early with routine Pap smears, something I’d failed to have. I was angry that I fit none of the risk factors: I didn’t smoke, I wasn’t immunosuppressed and, as far as I knew, I hadn’t come in contact with HPV.

  I was the exception. The rarity. The one in a million.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

  The doctor chopped out my uterus. And while he was down there he thought, what the heck, and cut out my fallopian tubes and ovaries, as well. The cervix, part of the vagina, the lymph nodes, too.

  It took nearly six weeks to recover. Physically. Emotionally I never would.

  What I hadn’t expected were the hot flashes that flared up out of the blue. The sudden, intense heat waves that washed over my body. The rosacea that took over my skin. My heart, beating out of control, the need to drop into a chair and catch my breath as I saw older women—older women—often do. The night sweats that kept me up when I wasn’t being kept awake by my young child. The insomnia that gave way to moodiness and irritability. The ember flashes that lingered for years after the hot flashes were through.