by Mary Kubica
I want to scream, and yet, instead, with astounding control, I say, “You took my father’s wedding ring. You took the ring,” and I want to grab her by the neck and shake the living daylights out of her because she took the one thing in the world that meant the most to me.
But I remain on the edge of the bathtub, running my hand along the fleece robe, along the straight edge of the Swiss Army knife tucked safely inside, considering its many tools, or weapons if you may: a corkscrew, scissors, a gimlet, and of course, a blade.
“What?” she asks feebly, hurt, as if she’s the one who’s been laid to waste. Pillaged. Plundered. Her voice is light, barely audible, as she shakes her head desperately, frantically, and whispers, “No.”
But her eyes don’t look at mine, and she’s begun to fidget with her hands. She blinks rapidly, her fair skin turning red. Telltale signs of deceit. I rise to my feet and, as I do, she retreats backward, quickly, and out of the room, prattling in an undertone something or other about Jesus and forgiveness and mercy.
A confession.
“Where is it?” I ask, following her into the living room, my footsteps delicate but fast, a half step faster than her own, so that I quickly narrow the gap. I drift across the room in my sheepskin slippers and turn her by the arm so that she’s forced to look at me, forced to maintain eye contact as only the best perjurer can. She steps away quickly; I’ve intruded upon her space. She sets her arms behind herself so I cannot touch them again.
“Where is my father’s wedding band?” I demand this time, aware of the way the baby watches us from the floor, gnawing on a polka dot sock she’s pulled from a foot, her pale pink piggies hovering midair, completely insouciant to the tension surrounding her, filling the room, making it hard to breathe.
“I don’t have it,” Willow lies, her voice as spineless as an earthworm or a leech. “I promise, ma’am, I don’t have the ring,” she says, but her eyes remain shifty, scheming, and in place of an impressionable, naive young woman, as I had once perceived her to be, I see someone, instead, who’s wily and astute. Artful and sly.
She evades my stare, twitches uncomfortably in her own skin as if it’s suddenly the skin of a porcupine, riddled with quills.
An act.
Her words come out staccato-like, abrupt and clipped, an outpouring of denials: I didn’t do it, and I swear, her hands overgesticulating, her face turning red.
A charade.
She mocks me with her lies and her tomfoolery, with the naive eyes that are anything but naive. She knew exactly what she was doing, from that very first day I spotted her at the Fullerton Station, waiting in the rain.
Waiting for someone like me to take the bait.
“What did you do with it?” I ask frantically. “What did you do with the ring?”
“I don’t have it,” she says again, “I don’t have the ring,” shaking her head briskly from side to side, the bob of a pendulum.
But I insist, “You do. You took it. From the bathroom hook. You took my father’s ring.”
“Ma’am,” she pleads, and it’s pathetic almost, the tone of her voice, heartbreaking, really, if it wasn’t such a sham. She retreats a step and I follow, quickly, the abruptness of the movement, of my movement, a single step but no more, making her flinch, a wince escaping from somewhere deep within.
My hand gropes for the Swiss Army knife in the pocket of the purple robe, clutching tightly as I utter the simple word, “Go.”
I feel it tremble in my hand, that knife. And I think to myself, Don’t make me...
She’s shaking her head, swiftly from side to side, the sepia hair falling into her bulging eyes, her lips parting to mouth a single word: No. And then she’s begging me to let her stay, begging me not to make her go. Outside it’s begun to rain, again, raindrops tap, tap, tapping at the bay window, though it’s a drizzle and not quite a storm, not yet at least.
Though there’s no telling what the night will bring.
“Go,” I say again. “Go now. Before I call the police,” and I take a step for the phone sitting on the kitchen countertop.
“Please, don’t,” she begs, and then, “Please don’t make me go,” and she’s staring out the window, at the rain.
“You took the ring,” I insist. “Give me the ring.”
“Please, ma’am,” she says, and then, “Heidi,” as if trying to reach me on a more personal level, and yet it strikes me as inappropriate, presumptuous even. The audacity of it reminds me of her impudence, her overconfidence; the rest is just a pretense, a work of fiction. A pathetic display used to slink into my home and steal from me. I wonder what else she took: the Polish pottery, my grandmother’s pearls, Chris’s class ring.
“Mrs. Wood,” I state.
“I don’t have the ring, Mrs. Wood. I swear to you. I don’t have the ring.”
“Then you sold it,” I maintain. “Where did you sell it, Willow? The pawnshop?”
There’s one in Lincoln Park, I picture it clear as day, a storefront on Clark with the sign: We Buy Gold. I think of myself, that afternoon, lying down for a brief nap. Did she pawn the ring while I was asleep? But no, I hung the chain on the hook tonight, before I kissed Zoe good-night and dimmed the lights, cleaned the kitchen and settled down with my laptop to work. Or not work. To pretend to work.
Or maybe that was last night, I think, feeling suddenly lost and confused, not knowing which day it is, or which way is up.
But knowing with certainty that she took the ring.
“How much did you get for it?” I ask then, all of a sudden, and when she doesn’t respond, I ask it again, “How much did you get for my father’s wedding ring?” wondering—five hundred, a thousand?—all the while stroking the smooth edge of the Swiss Army knife with my hand, running my thumb along the blade until it most certainly bleeds. I don’t feel it, the blood, but I visualize it, a drop, maybe two, that seeps onto the purple robe.
And then she’s gathering her things from around the home—baby bottles and formula; she’s collecting the torn jeans and leather lace-up boots, the army-green coat, the vintage suitcase from the office down the hall—and dragging them to the front door, where she drops them in a heap, turning to me sullenly, the phony despair replaced with a stoic expression in her eyes.
But when she moves to lift the baby from the floor, I intercede.
Over my dead body, is what I’m thinking, but what I say is, “You can’t take care of her. You know that as well as I do. She would have died from that infection if it wasn’t for me.”
An untreated urinary tract infection could lead to sepsis.
Without treatment, a person could die.
But those weren’t my words; those came from the doctor at the clinic, didn’t they? It was the doctor who told us that, wanting to know how long this had been going on, the baby’s persistent irritability and that untamed fever.
“A week, maybe two,” Willow had said regretfully, but I’d mocked her candor and said, “Just a few days, dear, not a week,” knowing what the doctor would think of us if we had let the infection go on for weeks, had allowed the fever to carry on that long. I’d rolled my eyes at the doctor then, there in the tawdry office and said of Willow, “She has such a poor sense of time. Teenagers, you know? One day, one week, it makes no difference to them,” and the doctor, perhaps the mother of a teen or a preteen herself, had nodded her head and agreed.
The lying, these days, it’s just so easy a thing to do. It comes naturally, automatically, until I can no longer tell what’s fact, what’s fiction.
“You take that baby,” I say, “and I’ll be forced to call the police. Child endangerment, in addition to theft. She’s safer here, with me.”
She needs to understand that the baby is better off with me. “When I met you,” I remind her, “she had a fever. Blisters on her rear end, patches of eczema across her skin. She hadn’t been bathed in weeks, and you were all but out of food. It’s a wonder she wasn’t hypothermic, emaciated or dead.
“Besides,” I tack on, inching closer to the baby, knowing good and well I will fight for her if I need to, that I will draw the knife from the robe and argue self-defense.
But I can see already, by the resignation in her eyes, that I will not need to fight. The baby, for her, is a burden, a weight. The visceral feelings—that undeniable need to hold the baby, the sense of floating purposelessly adrift when she’s not in my embrace—those are mine. All mine. That longing that stems from the tips of my toes, all the way to my entrails. Mine.
“You hardly need a baby slowing you down,” knowing as well as she does that she likely has someone in hot pursuit. Whom, I hardly know, but I register she does, the man or woman who delivered that ochre bruise, I assume.
“You’ll take care of her,” she states. Not so much as a question, but a need. I need you to take care of her.
I say that I will. My face softens, for the baby’s sake, and the words cascade from my mouth like a waterfall. “Oh, I will,” I promise, “I will take such good care of her,” like a child who’s been blessed with a new kitten.
“But I can’t have you in my home,” I say then, my voice tightening, as I walk a fine line between caring for that baby and needing Willow out of my house, “not when you’ve been stealing from me,” and she protests, “I didn’t—” and I interrupt with, “Just go.”
I don’t want to hear it, the lies and denials, any excuses about needing money for this or that, when it’s clear I’m not buying her opening story. She took my father’s wedding ring, plain and simple, and sold it at the pawnshop.
And now she must go.
She doesn’t say goodbye to me. She asks again, “You will take care of her. Of Ruby?” but the words come out halfhearted and not genuine, for it’s proper etiquette, she must assume, to make sure the baby is in good hands before she goes. But there’s a hesitation, nonetheless, a brief hesitation as she eyes the baby and quite possibly her blue eyes fill with tears. Fake tears, I tell myself, nothing more.
And then she steps toward the baby and runs a hand across her head; she whispers a goodbye before she goes, wiping those artificial tears on the back of a sleeve.
“I’ll treat her as if she were my very own,” I avow, closing and locking the door as she leaves. I watch from the bay window to make sure she’s gone, moping down the city street in the cold April rain. And then I turn to the baby girl, completely enraptured by her doughy cheeks, her snow-white hair, her toothless mouth that unfolds into a radiant smile, and think: Mine. All mine.
WILLOW
At some point when I wasn’t paying attention, I turned sixteen.
And that was when it happened, all of it in about three weeks.
It was the end of winter, and I was feeling antsy for spring, but for whatever reason, the snow kept falling from the ominous, gray sky. I was freezing cold each time Matthew and I took the buses around town, and the sweatshirt and gym shoes never seemed to do. The cold winter air blew into each and every bus stop, and since most of my clothes were dresses and jumpers from Joseph, my legs were completely bare.
At night, as I slept on that bed with the thin patchwork quilt, with only an oversize T-shirt to keep me warm, I trembled, my body covered in goose pimples, which quadrupled each time Joseph pulled that T-shirt up over my head.
I thought of all the ways I’d kill him if I could. Thinking of Momma and “I love you likes” got replaced with thinking of Joseph and all the ways I’d do him in if I could. Pushing him down the stairs. Hitting him over the head with a frying pan. Setting the whole Omaha home on fire while he was asleep.
But then what would I do?
I hate you like arachnophobes hate spiders. I hate you like cats hate dogs.
One lifeless winter day, Matthew and I caught the bus and headed to the library. I remember that I was excited ’cause that day, Matthew was going to show me how to use the computers. I’d never used a computer before.
We hadn’t gone more than a block down the street when Matthew asked if I was cold and when I told him I was, he sneaked an arm around my back and pulled me close to him. In an instant, it was as if there wasn’t another soul on that bus but Matthew and me. Like the whole rest of the world had disappeared. Matthew’s arm felt warm, strong, secure.
I turned my head and peeked up at him, wondering if those chocolate eyes might explain it to me what just happened. How my insides got all gooey, how my hands turned to slime. Matthew didn’t say anything, nor did his eyes. He was looking out the window like he didn’t even notice what happened, but inside I wondered if he felt that change like me after all.
We went to the library, and pulling up two chairs to one computer, Matthew showed me a world I’d never known before. He showed me something called the internet, where I could look up anything I’d ever wanted to know about the planets or jungle animals or spiders; he showed me how I could play games.
There was music on there, too, on the computer. We slipped on the library’s headphones, and Matthew put some music on, kind of loud, but I liked it. I liked the sound of the bass right there in my ear. I thought of Momma. Of spinning around the room to Patsy Cline.
Going to the library became Matthew’s and my regular thing. It was my favorite thing to do. The library was quiet and warm, even though right outside the big glass doors, the world was cold and loud. The building was big, four-stories or more, tucked right there in between all those huge buildings. Sometimes I just liked to ride the elevators, up, down, up, down, even if we didn’t go anywhere at all. We talked a lot there, Matthew and me, and if he told me once he told me a thousand times that he was gonna get me out of that house and away from Joseph. He just had to figure out how, is all. By then I’d started thinking a lot about the world outside of Omaha, and it made life there with Joseph and Miriam even worse. I wanted more than anything to leave, to run as far away as I could, but Matthew said to wait. He was going to figure it out for me; he said not to worry, and so I didn’t.
But what I really looked forward to there at the library was tucking ourselves into some vacant aisle—just us. We’d sit on the floor and sprawl our legs out before us, and lean up against the towering shelves. We’d skim through the books for random facts and take turns saying them aloud, like Did you know fresh eggs will sink but a rotten egg will float? Or Did you know 89 percent of the human brain is made up of water? just like we did when we were kids and Matthew would pass by my room at night. I read books about Audrey Hepburn and Patsy Cline. I looked up that place where Lily now lived, Colorado, and learned more about the flat plains of the thirty-eighth state and about the Continental Divide. I learned more about that Magnificent Mile Momma used to talk about, and I learned about Chicago, the Windy City, City of Broad Shoulders.
“Did you know Arthur Rubloff came up with the name Magnificent Mile in 1947?” I asked, but Matthew just said to me, “What’s the Magnificent Mile?”
And then one day we’re sitting there, in one of those vacant aisles, when all of a sudden Matthew found my hand tucked in the kangaroo pouch of that orange sweatshirt and pressed it between his. Matthew had held my hand before, on those buses, or when I was scared, but this time it was something different because this time I could tell Matthew was scared, too. His hand was all sweaty-like, and when he grabbed for it, I felt my heart grow three times inside of me, as if it was going to burst right there from my chest. I didn’t know what it was that I was feeling and I wanted so badly to ask someone, anyone.
But most of all I wanted to ask Momma.
We pretended for a long time that it wasn’t happening, that we weren’t holding hands. We just went on searching for random facts in the books with each of our free hands, while the hands that were joined, they were like their own independent beings or something. They were something different.
But it didn’t stop my heart from beating out of control, my brain unable to grasp any of the words inside the heavy library books.
And then all of a sudden Matthew was sitting closer and
I didn’t remember it happening. I didn’t remember it happening at all, but suddenly, his leg was pressed up against mine, and his hip was touching mine, and suddenly we were reading from the same book while the other had been set aside. A book on engineering, whatever in the world that is. I couldn’t have made heads or tails of it even if I tried, but I didn’t try because I couldn’t think of anything other than my hand pressed in between Matthew’s hands, or what it sounded like when he turned his head toward mine and softly said my name.
Claire.
Matthew said it like a whisper, my name. I could feel the breath emerge from his lips more than I could actually hear my name.
I turned to look at him and he was so close. He was right there. Breathing on me. Noses all but touching.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do: lean in or pull back, the other way. But I knew, in my heart, what I wanted to do, and so I leaned in to Matthew and settled my lips upon his lips, lips that were coarse and dry, but also tender and delicious, I thought, as a tongue slipped through those lips and into my mouth and I felt everything inside me turn to goo.
I knew then what was happening to me: I was in love with Matthew.
His tongue disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared, his lips withdrew from mine. He pulled away, though he didn’t let go of my hand, his eyes darting across the pages of that engineering book until he uttered some stupid facts, nervously, about kilometers and watts, though I had no idea what it meant. I had no idea what any of it meant. I could hardly hear his words. I could hardly stop thinking about his lips and his tongue and his hand.
The way he tasted.
The way he smelled.
After that, when Matthew and I went to the library, we weren’t so consumed with those books and finding meaningless facts in the pages to share with one another. We’d sneak down whatever vacant aisle we could find, and there, hidden from the world by those tall, tall bookcases, Matthew would press his lips to my lips, would slide his tongue into my mouth. His hands would hold my hands, sometimes, but sometimes they would stray, they would wander away from my hands and to my face, my arms, my chest, between my legs, slipping cold and unsure up under that bright orange sweatshirt and into the sole bra Joseph had given to me.