Pretty Baby: A Gripping Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Mary Kubica

  The male guard from the day before is gone. Out of sight. In his place is a middle-aged woman, her gray hair wrapped in a bun. She perches herself where two walls meet, and crosses her arms against herself, the handle of a gun peeking out of a holster.

  “I brought you some juice,” says Ms. Flores, “and a doughnut,” she adds as she sets a paper bag on the table.

  Bribery.

  Like when Joseph, from time to time, came home with a chocolate chip cookie from the community college’s cafeteria, wrapped in cellophane. So that later that night I wouldn’t think twice about pulling that big, old T-shirt I wore to bed up over my hips and letting Joseph draw the undies down my thighs.

  She sets her glasses on the bridge of her nose and looks back into the notes from the day before. Leaving the Omaha home with Matthew. Riding the buses all the way out to the zoo.

  “What happened when you got home that afternoon? From the zoo?” she asks.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” I say as I reach into the bag and remove a doughnut, double chocolate with sprinkles, and stuff it into my mouth. “I was back home well before Joseph,” I mumble. “Well before Isaac. Miriam was in her room, with no sense of time or nothing. I made her lunch and started the laundry, so that later, when I told Joseph I’d done laundry all day, there’d be proof of it—laundry on the line. He’d never know it was a lie.”

  She hands me a napkin, motioning to my cheek. I wipe at the chocolate residue, then lick my fingers clean. I guzzle the juice.

  I tell her how riding the buses with Matthew became more or less a regular thing. We didn’t go to the zoo more than the one time because the zoo cost money and money was one thing Matthew didn’t have. We went places we could go without money. We went to parks, and Matthew showed me how to pump the swings, something I’d forgotten since my days back in Ogallala. Sometimes we just walked up and down the streets of Omaha, past the big buildings and all of those people.

  And then one day Matthew took me to the library. I remembered how I loved going to the library with Momma. I loved the smell, and the sight of all those books. Thousands of books. Millions of books! Matthew asked me what I wanted to learn about—anything in the whole wide world—and I thought about it long and hard, and then I told Matthew that I wanted to know more about the planets. He nodded his head and said, “Okay. Astronomy it is,” and I followed Matthew as he waltzed through the library like he owned the place, and took me to a bunch of books on astronomy, as he called it, the sun, the moon, the stars. The library was quiet, and in that aisle with the astronomy books, Matthew and I were all alone, tucked between the tall bookcases like we were the only people in the whole entire world. We sat on the floor and leaned against the big bookshelves, and one by one I started pulling the books from the shelf and admiring their covers: the black nighttime sky all cluttered up with stars.

  Growing up without a mother there were things I wanted to know but had no one to ask. Like why, every now and again, my body started bleeding, and I was made to stuff my underwear with wads of toilet tissue to keep it from ruining my pants. Like why I was growing hair where no hair used to be, and why parts of my body were getting bigger for no apparent reason at all. There wasn’t one lady in my life I could ask. The caseworker was the only one, but of course, I couldn’t talk to her about those things because she’d want to know why I wasn’t just talking to Miriam, ’cause every time Ms. Amber Adler came around, Miriam was taking the little white pills and acting almost normal. Almost. But Miriam was far from normal.

  All those questions were about the outside, but I had questions about the inside, too. Especially about Matthew, and this whole strange slew of emotions I felt whenever he was around. I felt an urge to be close to him, and lonely when he wasn’t there. I waited each and every day of my life for him to appear at the door once Joseph and Isaac had gone, feeling sad on the days he didn’t come.

  I was seeing things I’d never seen before when Matthew came and got me out of that house: beautiful women with rippling hair, the color of straw or cinnamon or macaroni and cheese, their faces fancy, dressed in wonderfully complicated clothes: tall leather boots with heels, skintight jeans, pants made of leather, teal pumps, dozens of bangle bracelets flanking an arm, shirts with scoop necks, sweaters with holes where bras showed through the burgundy or jade or navy fabric. Women and men holding hands, and kissing. Smoking cigarettes, talking on phones.

  I owned one bra, slipped to me by Joseph with the last parcel of clothing: one that contained brown jumpers and cardigans that bored me to tears, when what I wanted were heels and bangle bracelets. I wanted to slip some see-through shirt over my one bra and let Matthew see.

  When Matthew and I lay down, side by side on my bed to read from the pages of whatever book he’d brought me, we lay close, our bodies fused together, our heads sharing the same lumpy pillow. Matthew would slant himself into the bed’s headboard, his legs and torso curving their way around my own, his head angled toward mine so we could both see the same microscopic words in the books. One of my favorites was Anne of Green Gables, a book I must’ve asked Matthew a million times to check out, and though I knew he must be getting sick of it, he didn’t ever complain. He even said he liked it, too.

  But no matter how much I liked that book, still, I’d find it hard to do anything but think about Matthew’s hand grazing mine while turning the pages, his jeans brushing against my bare leg beneath the blanket, an elbow accidentally swiping my breast as he redistributed himself on the bed. While Matthew was reading aloud about Anne Shirley and the Cuthberts, I lost myself on the tone of his voice, the smell of him—a hodgepodge of moss and cigarette smoke—the shape of his fingernails, what it would feel like if he slipped those toasty hands up under my sweatshirt and touched my breast.

  It would be different from Joseph, that I knew for sure, different from Joseph whose teeth marks were singed into my sallow skin like the branding of cattle.

  Matthew and I would lie that way for a real long time, together on the bed, and then sometimes Matthew would sit up quickly, rearrange himself on the other end of the bed.

  As if we were doing something wrong.

  Ms. Amber Adler continued to come every six months or so. In the days leading up to her arrival, Joseph, with my help, would give Miriam those pills. Like clockwork, Miriam would start to feel better and get out of bed, and we’d air the Miriam stench right out of the house. I’d get to cleaning, and Joseph would appear with a brand-new dress, and he’d sit me down at the kitchen table and give my hair a trim, and by the time the caseworker appeared in her junker car with her too-big Nike bag, the house would smell lemon fresh, Miriam would be acting more or less normal and hanging on the refrigerator door would be some fabricated book report Joseph typed up, my name printed at the top.

  “Did you write this?” Ms. Amber Adler asked, clutching the paper in her pretty little hand, and I lied, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Of course I never wrote any book report. I never went to school. But Joseph looked at her as if it were the God’s honest truth and said how my reading and writing were coming along okay, but there was still the issue of my disorderly behavior, and Amber Adler would pull me aside and remind me how I was oh so fortunate to have a family like Joseph and Miriam, and that I needed to put more effort into my conduct and show a little respect.

  The caseworker continued to bring letters from Paul and Lily Zeeger, and from my Little Lily. Big Lily told me how Rose (Lily) was growing up so big. How she wanted to grow her dark hair longer and longer, how she’d recently cut bangs. How she had so many friends: Peyton and Morgan and Faith. How she loved school, and what a brilliant child she was, and how her favorite subject was music. She asked: did I play any musical instruments? Did I like to sing? She’d tell me that Rose (Lily) was a natural musician. She wondered: is it a family trait? As Lily got to reading and writing herself, she would send me notes, too, scribbled on stationery with a simple tree branch and a red bird on front. The stationery had her very own n
ame printed across the front: Rose Zeeger, and every fall, tucked inside, was a brand-new school photo. My Lily was always happy, always smiling, and in those photos I saw how she was growing older, looking more and more like our Momma every day. When I looked in the mirror myself, I didn’t see any traces of Momma, but I saw them on Little Lily, in those photos that Joseph forced me to tear to shreds once the caseworker had driven away.

  “I started to feel relieved for Lily,” I tell Ms. Flores.

  “Why is that?” she asks.

  “Because Lily was happy with the Zeegers. She was happy in a way that she never would’ve been if she’d have stayed with me.”

  I thought of Joseph doing with Lily what he did with me, and just the idea of it made me want to bash his head in with the frying pan, the kind of thoughts that more or less started filling my mind as I grew from an eight-year-old child to a fifteen-year-old girl, one who knew with absolute certainty that Joseph had no business coming into my room.

  “Why didn’t you tell the caseworker about Joseph?” asks Ms. Flores, adding, “If what you say is true,” implying that it was not.

  I look away, refuse to answer. I’ve answered this question before.

  “Claire,” Ms. Flores snaps, her tone dry. And then, when I don’t answer, she goes on, looking at her notes instead of me, “As far as I can tell, Claire, you didn’t do a thing to remedy your situation. You could have told Ms. Adler what you claim Joseph was doing to you. You could have informed—” she peeks back at her notes to make sure she’s got it right “—Matthew. But you didn’t. You chose to take matters into your own hands.”

  I refuse to answer. I lay my head on the table and close my eyes.

  She slaps a blunt hand against the table and I jump; the guard jumps. “Claire,” she barks. I will not raise my head. Will not open my eyes. I imagine Momma holding my hand. Hold still and it won’t hurt so much. “Young lady,” she says, “you had better cooperate. Ignoring me will not help a thing. You’re in a lot of trouble here. More trouble than you can possibly imagine. You’re facing two murder charges, in addition to—”

  It’s then that I lift my head up from that table and stare at her, into Ms. Louise Flores’s gray eyes and at her long silver hair, the scratchy cardigan, the wrinkles of her skin, the big teeth like a horse’s. The gray brick walls of the small room come closing in around me, the sunlight through the one window suddenly in my eyes. A headache arrives, without warning. I imagine a body, blood, bowels unintentionally let loose on the floor. The front door, open. My legs wobbly, like Jell-O. A voice telling me to go. Go!

  And I think: two?

  CHRIS

  That baby is whimpering in the background when I finally get a chance to talk to Heidi. I ask Heidi what’s wrong, but all she says is, “Waiting for the Tylenol to kick in,” and there’s a vibration in her voice, a jostling effect as if she’s bouncing that baby up and down, up and down, to try to amend the situation. To get that baby to shut up.

  “Fever?” I ask, typing away on my laptop. The securities offered hereby are highly speculative... I’m barely listening as Heidi tells me that the fever isn’t so bad—she rattles off some number I couldn’t recount if my life depended on it—and then goes on to tell me about their doctor appointment at the clinic in Lakeview.

  “DCFS,” I remind her.

  One quick, easy phone call that could make this all go away.

  But all she says is, “Not now, Chris,” and then she’s quiet. She doesn’t want to hear my nagging about the girl and how I think it’s utterly insane that she’s still cohabitating with us, in a space too small for three, much less five. Or that this whole fiasco might land us both in jail.

  The shares are being offered without...

  She tells me about bringing the baby to the family practitioner at the clinic in Lakeview. How they said the baby belonged to Heidi, in an effort to avoid any suspicious inquiry, and I thought of that, imagining Heidi, at her age, with an infant child. It wasn’t so much that Heidi was too old to have a baby, but that we’d moved so far past that, past diapers and baby bottles and all that crap.

  Apparently it didn’t matter so much who the baby belonged to anyway because all the doctor was concerned with was the baby’s angry fever as they stood in the office, desperate for some elixir, for some potion to remedy the baby.

  I can hear in her voice that she’s tired. An image fills my mind: Heidi’s hair is a mess; she probably hasn’t showered all day. It’s likely stringy, like spaghetti noodles, as happens to Heidi when she hasn’t given it a good shampoo. There are bags under her haggard brown eyes, big, fat ones to boot, swollen and sore. She’s clumsy, I can tell, as in the midst of our conversation a can of pop misses the edge of the countertop and drops to the ground.

  There’s a crash as I envision sticky brown liquid seeping into the hardwood floors.

  “Shit,” she snaps, Heidi who never swears. I picture her dropping to all fours to wipe up the mess with a paper towel. Her hair falls in her face and she blows it away. She’s a damn mess, desperately in need of a shower and a good night’s sleep. Her eyes are erratic, a million thoughts running amok in her mind.

  The situation has taken its toll on my wife.

  Heidi says that she had lathered enough cream onto the baby’s bottom over the past few days that the doctor hardly mentioned the healing red rash. After ruling out all other causes of fever, the doctor used a catheter to get a urine sample and diagnosed the baby with a urinary tract infection.

  “How’d she get that?” I ask Heidi, grimacing at the thought of that burning sensation every time the baby peed, of the catheter shooting up the urethra and into her tiny bladder.

  “Poor hygiene,” she says simply, and I’m reminded of the baby sitting in that shitty diaper for God knows how long. The bacteria in the feces climbing back up into the bladder and kidneys. Festering.

  The baby’s on antibiotics now, her mother under doctor’s orders to wipe from front to back. The very thing Heidi badgered me about when Zoe was still in diapers. I imagine Willow sitting on the sofa now, staring at the TV in a daze, as she’s prone to do. She’s not eighteen, I remind myself, picturing some kid that still needs to be reminded to wash her hands. To eat her vegetables. To make her bed. To wipe her baby’s rump from front to back.

  I’m still waiting to hear back from Martin Miller, PI. I’m thinking long and hard of ways to hurry this along, some kind of information I can give him, though my own internet searches have hit a dead end. I considered a picture, but highly doubt Willow Greer would let me snap a photo of her, or that Heidi would give me the A-okay. I consider that old suitcase, brown and worn, the one she tucks beneath the sofa bed when she isn’t in the room, as if we might forget it’s there. I thought about snooping inside to see if I could find something, some kind of clue, a driver’s license or state ID, a cell phone with a contact number.

  And then Martin suggested fingerprints, suggested snagging some glass or the remote control, something she touched that would validate an identity she couldn’t fake. He walked me through it, how to preserve Willow Greer’s fingerprints so he could send them to his lab.

  But all that will have to wait until after my trip.

  I have yet to receive a tweet from W. Greer, which leads me to believe she’s dead. That she did it, like she said she would, that she ended her life.

  Or maybe she’s lying low in some Chicago condo, wanting the world to believe she’s dead. How the hell would I know? But still, I check every day, just in case.

  “She was interested in her birthmark,” Heidi tells me then, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Who was?”

  “The doctor.”

  “The baby’s birthmark?” I ask, remembering the one that stared at me from the back of the baby’s leg when Heidi removed our blue towel from her buttocks and wiped her clean.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Says it’s called a port-wine stain,” and I imagine a glass of merlot spilled across the back of
that leg. Heidi says something about vascular birthmarks and capillaries expanding and the dilated blood vessels beneath the baby’s skin. And that’s when she says to me that, according to the doctor, we might want to have them removed. With laser treatment. She says it as if this is something we really might want to consider having done. We. She and me. As if it’s our baby we’re discussing.

  I imagine my wife, talking into the phone with her spaghetti hair and haggard eyes, stating with this blank expression on her face, “The doctor said they can be embarrassing for kids as they get older. That they’re easier to treat in infancy because the blood vessels are smaller.”

  I’m speechless. I can’t respond. I open my mouth and close it again. And then, for lack of anything better to say, I ask, “How’s Zoe?” and Heidi says, “Fine.”

  I never say a thing about the birthmark.

  As the conversation drifts from birthmarks to the weather, I realize how exhausted Heidi sounds, pulled to the limit, like a stretchy toy that’s been yanked too far and won’t go back to its original shape. I almost feel sorry. Almost.

  But then my mind drifts back to Heidi and me in our prebaby days—before Zoe, before the abortion that rattled Heidi’s world much more than she cared to admit—when we would take the steps, two at a time, to the rooftop deck of the apartment where we lived at the time, to watch the fireworks erupt from Navy Pier every Saturday night. I think of the way we sat together, on the same lounge chair, drinking from the same bottle of beer, staring at the city’s skyline: the John Hancock Building, the Sears Tower long before it’d been renamed. We had so many aspirations back then: to travel the world and see things—the Great Wall of China, the Blue Caves of Greece—to compete in a triathlon together. Plans that fell by the wayside as soon as we had a kid. I never wanted to be one of those couples, one of those couples so consumed with their individual ambitions and their kids, that the marriage got kicked to the curb, ignored and neglected by seemingly more important aspects of life.