Pretty Baby

by Mary Kubica

  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.

  I was going through menopause. I wasn’t yet thirty years old.

  I noticed that my metabolism, too, had slowed, inches accumulating on my once-slim waist. Chris claimed not to notice, but I most certainly did. I noticed when pants went from a size four to a size eight, when I began to eye women like Cassidy Knudsen—young, slim and fertile—like some green-eyed monster. Green with envy. They were bountiful, fruitful, productive.

  And I was barren. Dry and desolate, unable to support growth.

  Growing older all the time, much too fast for a woman my age.

  “Think of it this way,” Chris had said, in an effort to appease me. “You’ll never have to worry about getting your period again,” uttering that word—period—in a squeamish way, and yet I imagined it longingly. What I wouldn’t give to go to the drugstore and buy a box of tampons. To experience that monthly flow, a reminder of the life inside me. The anticipation of a life inside me.

  But that life was gone.

  “Cancer,” I whisper, forcing that ugly word out. “Cervical cancer. They had to remove my uterus.” I wonder if Willow understands what any of this means.

  She sits on the sofa, staring at that TV. Bert and Ernie pass through, with their beloved rubber ducky. Ernie begins to sing.

  Her voice is subdued, like a pale shade of pink. Pastel. Subtle. “But you wanted more babies?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, feeling vanquished by that hole in my heart. The one where Juliet used to reside. “Very much so.”

  Chris said we’d adopt more children. All the orphans in the world, he said. Every last one of them. But after giving birth to my own flesh and blood, I didn’t want those children. I wanted my own. Adoption was no longer a viable option; I couldn’t imagine raising a child who was not my own. I felt cheated, swindled. My heart was closed for business.

  “You make a good momma,” Willow says, and then her eyes drift to the lightning outside, the rumble of thunder that encroaches into the city, like a cancerous growth, and she says, more to herself than to me, “My momma was good.”

  “Tell me about your momma,” I breathe.

  And she does. Waveringly.

  She tells me about her dark hair.

  She tells me about her blue eyes.

  She tells me her name. Holly.

  She tells me that she did hair. In the bathroom. Cuts and perms and updos. She tells me she liked to cook, but she wasn’t too good at it. She’d burn things, or else they’d be undercooked, the inside of her chicken still pink when she bit into it. She liked to listen to music. Country music. Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn. Patsy Cline.

  She isn’t looking at me when she speaks, but rather at the Muppets on the TV screen, Big Bird and Elmo, Cookie Monster. She stares at their bright colors, their eccentricities.

  “Where is your mother?” I ask, but she ignores this.

  I tell her about my father, and as I do so, a hand instinctively goes to his wedding band dangling from the gold chain around my neck. At the mention of Patsy Cline, her voice returns to me, running like a soundtrack through my mind. Patsy Cline’s death left such an impression on my own mother during her teenage years that songs like “Crazy” and “Walkin’ After Midnight” became part of my childhood, as did the images of my mother and father twirling around the copper brown living room carpeting, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, dancing.

  “That ring,” Willow asks, pointing at it. “That’s his?” and I say that yes, it is.

  And then for whatever reason I tell her about the wild-goose chase Chris and I went on to find a gold chain that matched. It had to be a perfect match. Close wasn’t good enough for me, wasn’t good enough for my father. Chris special ordered the chain, a purchase that cost him over a thousand dollars.

  “We could buy a TV for that kind of money. A new computer,” he said. “Put it toward a vacation.”

  But I said no. I had to have the chain.

  “This ring,” I had said to Chris that day, standing on Wabash in the midst of Jewelers Row, tears dousing my tired, insomniac eyes, eyes which hadn’t slept since before my father died, “is all that remains of my father. The rest is gone.”

  I don’t tell Willow how I fell into a state of deep depression after my father died, a quiet, placid death following an altercation with lung cancer, small cell lung cancer, that is, the kind that had metastasized to the brain, the liver and the bone before he ever knew it was there. I don’t tell her how he refused treatment. He continued to smoke. Marlboro Reds. Half a pack a day. I don’t tell her how my mother buried him with a carton of Marlboro Reds and a neon green lighter, for use in the afterlife.

  I do tell Willow about the glorious fall day that we buried my father in the cemetery beside the church, beneath a sugar maple that had turned tangerine overnight. I tell her how the pallbearers carried that casket out of the church, up a spongy hill and to the cemetery. It had rained the night before and the ground was wet. I tell her how my mother and I followed behind. How I held on to my mother so she wouldn’t slip, but more so, because I couldn’t let go, because I was already burying one parent and I couldn’t bear to lose another. I tell her how we watched them lower him in, and then we laid roses on top of the casket. Lavender roses. Because it’s what my mother carried when they were wed.

  It’s then that she looks at me with those tired cornflower eyes and says—in that way one says they hate terrorists or Nazis, as if they are truly an abomination to all mankind, and not just how people say they hate the smell of burnt popcorn or hate the sight of overweight women in midriffs—“I hate roses,” and I try hard not to take offense, reminding myself: to each his own, and yet it seems a terribly odd response to my confession.

  And then she says, after a period of silence so long that I’m all but certain our revelations are through, “My momma is dead.”

  And that word—dead—sneaks out noncommittally, as though she isn’t quite sure whether or not she’s dead, or what that word really means to her. Like someone told her that her mother was dead, like one says A drop in the bucket, or, a piece of cake. An idiom. The kind of word or phrase that makes no logical sense.

  My momma is dead.

  “How?” I ask, but she won’t say. Instead, she curls into a ball, hiding inside her armadillo shell. Her eyes remain locked on the TV, though they’ve grown glassy and inexpressive, as if she’s made a hard-line decision not to cry. I ask again, “Willow?” but she ignores this completely, as if unaware of my voice, unaware of the way my eyes are cemented to her, cemented to the wayward hair and the lips caked in ChapStick, desperate for an answer to my question.

  An answer that doesn’t come.

  And then, in time—when she tires of my staring perhaps—she lifts the baby from my arms and leaves the room.

  CHRIS

  I’m taking the steps, two at a time, down to the “L” platform when the call comes in on my cell. Henry. I stop midstride and retreat to street level, leaning against the fence that encloses the steps leading underground. The street is full of cars and pedestrians heading home from work. It’s not quite dark outside, one of those rare workdays I leave the office on time. A bus is holding up traffic on the street; some suburbanite or out-of-towner tries to bypass it, nearly killing a half-dozen pedestrians at the same time. Brakes squeal. A horn blares. Someone yells, “Asshole!” and shoots the driver the finger.

  I shield the setting sun from my eyes with the back of a hand, and say, “I don’t even want to hear it,” into the phone. It’s hard to hear Henry
over the commotion of the city, but I make out the sound of his laugh, loud and obnoxious, like nails on a chalkboard.

  “Hello to you, too, Wood,” Henry says, and I have visions of him on the commode making this call. His pants are down around his knees. There’s a magazine spread across his lap. Playboy. “Kiss that pretty wife of yours goodbye. We head out in the morning.”

  “What now?” I ask and he says, “Road show. Denver by way of New York.”

  “Damn,” I say. It’s not that this comes as a complete surprise. We’ve been preparing for this dog and pony show for weeks. But still. Heidi is going to be pissed.

  The train ride home is quiet. I depart the “L” at the Fullerton Station and walk down the steps onto the street. There is a homeless man leaning against the cast-iron fence beside the newspaper stands, eyes closed as if he’s fast asleep. Beside him sits a black garbage bag, stuffed full with all of his earthly possessions. He shivers in his sleep in the biting fifty-degree day.

  My first thought: those big legs of his, long and gangly, lost in a pair of light blue hospital scrubs, are in my way. Like the other people moving down the street, I step over him with exaggerated strides. But then something makes me stop and turn, to see the redness of his cheeks and ears, the way he’s got one hand on that garbage bag in case someone tries to steal it in his sleep. I pull my wallet from a back pocket and search inside, forcing the sound of Heidi’s voice from my mind. I drop a ten-dollar bill beside the man, hoping the wind doesn’t carry it away before he opens his eyes.

  It’d be just my luck if my good deed went unnoticed.

  * * *

  When I come into the condo, the TV is on. Sesame Street. Heidi’s got that baby laid out on its stomach in front of the TV, and she’s educating Willow about the fine art of tummy time, hoping the big furry monsters distract the baby long enough that she forgets how much she hates being on her stomach, floundering around like a fish out of water.

  Zoe stands in the kitchen, eyeing her cell phone on the counter. She jumps when I come bumbling through the door, as if caught red-handed doing something wrong. She ebbs slowly away, one step at a time, before Heidi can see her proximity to the phone.

  Heidi greets me with, “I thought you were going to be home sooner.” She barely raises her eyes from the baby, who she inundates with all sorts of shrill baby talk and overblown facial expressions, but for me, nothing.

  It’s nearly seven o’clock.

  “Can I speak to you, Heidi?” I ask as I hang a jacket on the hook by the door. Her eyes graze mine as she lifts that baby from the floor and hands her to the girl who handles her so maladroitly that for a split second I think the baby may fall. And then that stupid woolly mammoth is on the TV, Aloysius Snuffleupagus, and the girl stares, dumbstruck, and it occurs to me that Zoe hasn’t watched Sesame Street since she was about two years old.

  Heidi follows me into the bedroom, her feet light as air on the hardwood floors. Mine, in contrast, are heavy, clobbering the floor as if I have something to prove. The cats scamper away, so I won’t step on their tails, and hide under the bed. While I change out of my work shirt and into a white and maroon sweatshirt—my old alma mater, of course, Go, Phoenix, go!—I tell her about the road show. About how I’ll be in New York for a day or two, followed by Denver for a few days. How I’m leaving in the morning.

  I’m expecting a lashing—fingers wagging and eyes rolling—some dismissive comment about Cassidy Knudsen, a grilling about whether or not that floozy will accompany me on this trip...and yet, none of it comes.

  She’s quiet for a split second, and then Heidi simply shrugs her shoulders and says, “Okay,” and goes so far as to heave the laundry basket downstairs to make sure I have plenty of clean undies for my trip.

  I should be concerned. I know that. But not being reprimanded like a ten-year-old boy is pure bliss.

  I pack. I warm up leftover pizza for dinner while Heidi gathers quarters and excuses herself to throw the laundry in the dryer. Zoe is in her bedroom, working on earth science, or so she claims. But I see her instead, on her bed, with that yellow notebook across her lap. The one where she keeps her intimate thoughts about how her father’s a doofus, her mother loony. Or maybe in that notebook she writes about Austin, or maybe Willow. How would I know? Maybe, just maybe, she’s a closet poet, filling the pages with limericks and odes.

  In the room with Willow and me, there’s nothing but dead air.

  And baby noises: coos and squeals and grunts and such.

  I find myself staring at the palms of her hands for evidence of a tattoo, the butterfly with its black and yellow wings. I wonder: if she’d had it removed, would there be a scar? Bleached out skin? Leftover remnants of the tattoo?

  But on her hands there is nothing, nada. And yet there are those earrings, the very same earrings as in the Twitter profile. How could that be?

  I peek to make sure Willow isn’t paying attention, and then I check my Twitter account stealthily to see if @LostWithoutU ever responded to my Tweet. No such luck. But I have eight new followers, a fact that I let go to my head.

  How would Willow ever reply, I wonder, if she doesn’t have access to a computer? Does she have access to a computer? I think about that nasty old suitcase she lugged into our home, the one perched in the corner of my office, the leather cracked and brittle, losing shape. Is there a laptop inside, some smartphone with Wi-Fi where she could respond to tweets? I’ve never seen her on it, never heard it ring.

  The girl has enough trouble handling a remote control. I find it hard to believe she’s got a smartphone or a computer. But I don’t know. Mine and Heidi’s are both password protected; there’s no way she’s getting on them at night.

  The girl is staring lifelessly at the TV. I’ve changed the channel to the news. A roundup of the day’s baseball games. It’s opening day. I’m guessing she doesn’t give a hoot about baseball, but she stares at the TV so she doesn’t have to talk to me. She sits far away, as far as she can get, hugging the far end of the sofa though I’m at the kitchen table, a good ten feet away or more. She sips from a glass of water and I watch the way her hand, the water, how they shake, ripples forming on the surface of the glass.

  “Where are you from anyway?” I ask. I hate the silence. But more than that, I’m reminded that I’m the only one in this house intent on figuring this girl out. And this—two minutes or so alone with Willow, my interrogation uninterrupted by Heidi’s watchful eye and regulations—may be my only chance at doing just that.

  She stares at me. It’s not a nervy kind of stare. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Meek. Timid.

  But she says nothing.

  “You don’t want to tell me?” I ask.

  She’s slow to respond. But then she shakes her head, a movement so subtle, if I blinked, I would’ve missed it.

  “No, sir,” she whispers. I like that she calls me sir.

  “And why’s that?” I ask. I listen to her response, try to decipher a dialect but come up empty. She sounds like a standard Midwesterner. Like me. Standard American English.

  Willow says cautiously, her voice so quiet I have to lean in to hear her over the baby’s babble, “You might make me go home.”

  And I ask, treading lightly, “Is there a reason you don’t want to go home?”

  The news blares from the TV, opening day games giving way to the day’s top stories. A brutal home invasion and stabbing on South Ashland that instantly catches the girl’s attention. I grope for the remote control and change the channel just as body bags are ushered out of the home on stretchers. I land on home shopping.

  “Willow,” I say again, hoping the accuracy of her name will earn me bonus points. “Is there a reason you don’t want to go home, Willow?”

  “Yes, sir,” she admits, picking at the fringe on the edge of a throw pillow. She isn’t looking at me.

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s just—” She stutters. “It’s just—that...”

  I think she’
ll never finish that thought, and then she says, “I don’t like it very much, is all.”

  An inadequate response if there ever was one.

  “Why not?” I prod. There’s no response and so I ask again, “Willow?” this time with a jagged edge to my voice. I’m losing my patience.

  Heidi will be back soon.

  An invisible wall goes up around the girl. She doesn’t do well with impatience. She needs to be prepped first. Like flower seeds needing to be soaked in water overnight for faster germination. She isn’t going to open up until we penetrate that outer hull.

  I lower my voice, and turn on the charm. I smile and try again. “Was somebody mean to you?” I ask instead, my voice as comforting as it can be. I’m not known for my compassion. But I try.

  Her eyes rise to mine. Blue eyes that carry much too much baggage for someone her age, the blood vessels swollen, sagging tissue around the eyes, blood pooling under the skin, causing dark circles to form. I’m on the edge of my seat. Waiting. Desperate to hear what she has to say. She opens her mouth to speak. To tell me. “It’s okay,” I say. “You can tell me.”

  But then I hear the sound of Heidi’s keys jiggling in the lock and I silently will her back downstairs to the laundry room, in vain. Willow jumps at the sound, scared to death by the harmless tinny sound of keys. I see the fear take over her eyes, as the water glass slips from her hand, tumbling to the ground below. The glass doesn’t break against the shag rug, and yet, water spills. Everywhere. She drops frantically to her knees and begins to clean up the mess, to spot the water with the edge of her shirt, her eyes darting between Heidi and me as if she thinks she might be punished for this little blunder.

  Beneath her breath she mutters an incomprehensible jumble about forgiveness and sins.

  Keys. Keys in a lock. Being locked in?

  I make a mental note of this.

  I’m not one to feel sympathetic, but for a split second I feel the slightest bit sorry for the girl floundering around on the floor, praying to the gods for mercy.

  “Honey, please,” Heidi begs as she retrieves a towel from the kitchen drawer and hurries to Willow’s side, “please don’t worry about it.”