Pretty Baby

by Mary Kubica

  I no longer know what’s fact and what’s fiction. Fantasy or reality. I tell her that no, I don’t know where Willow is. I bark the words, suddenly furious and longing for my father, for my father to stroke my head and tell me that everything will be okay.

  It’s all coming at me quickly now, images of Willow, of Ruby, of Zoe, of Juliet. Images of blood and bodies and babies, unborn fetuses being removed from my womb.

  But that kind woman who’s name I don’t know, who’s name I can’t remember, it’s then that she does stroke a hand over my head as my father would do; she says that everything will be all right, and I want to ask, “Daddy?”

  But I know what she would say, how she would look at me if I called her by my father’s name.

  “We’ll figure it all out,” she promises, and I find myself leaning into the mollifying words, finding the words themselves, the conciliatory tone of voice to be exhausting, as I close my eyes and let them lull me back to sleep.

  * * *

  By the time Chris arrives, it’s dark outside, the world on the other side of the single window now black.

  “You called them,” I say, my quivering voice holding Chris responsible for this entire mess. For the fact that they’ve taken Juliet, my Juliet. “You called the police,” I scream at him and I begin to curse, attempting in vain to rise from the bed and lunge at him, but finding instead that I’m tethered to it, my hands still bound to the bed in cuffs.

  “Is that necessary?” Chris asks of a nurse who passes through the room attending to the various tubing and needles that are injected into the veins of my arms. Injected by aliens in face masks and bouffant caps. “Is that really necessary,” but the nurse says drily, “It’s for her own protection,” and I know what she says to him then, what she whispers to Chris then, about how she heard I ran headlong across a room and into the brick wall, as evidenced by a purple bruise now forming on the top of my head.

  “She’s agitated,” the nurse says to Chris then, as if I can’t hear, as if I’m not in the very same room. “She’s due for more medication soon.”

  And I wonder what kind of medication, and whether or not they will hold me down, on the bed, and administer the medication with a syringe, once again. Or whether I’ll be allowed to take pills, oblong pills in the palm of a hand, and I think again of the Ambien.

  No, I tell myself. Antihistamines. Pain relievers. Not Ambien.

  I would never give Zoe sleeping pills.

  But I find that I don’t know.

  “You did this to me,” I cry quietly, but Chris holds his hands up in the air, a look of innocence glued to his weary face. He’s disheveled, the tidy appearance that usually describes his trim brown hair, his bright brown eyes and winsome smile now clouded over with fatigue, concern and something more, something I can’t put my finger on.

  He could incriminate me, my Chris, who likes to point fingers and dodge blame. He could say that I was the one to lock myself in the bedroom with Juliet, but he does not.

  He could say he was worried I would hurt the baby, our baby, and I would laugh, wouldn’t I? I would laugh. A cynical, mocking laugh, though he knows as well as I that I was standing there, on the edge of a fire escape, about to lose my balance when Chris forced himself into the bedroom.

  But he didn’t tell the police about this when they arrived; no he did not.

  He sits on the edge of my bed and reaches for my hand. And there I am, drowning, sinking farther and farther beneath the ocean’s current, the waves washing over me while I scream silently, involuntarily drawing breaths, my throat in spasms, choking on mouthfuls of salt water that fill my lungs.

  “We’re going to figure this out, Heidi,” he says to me, then as he runs his fingers along my hand and up an arm, unaware of the way I gag and retch there on the bed, suffocating. I become submerged beneath the water while Chris and Zoe, the both of them, stand on the shore and watch.

  The nurse steps from the room, saying to Chris, “Just five minutes, and then she needs to rest,” before allowing the door to drift closed until it is just Chris and me. I hear her words, muffled, from afar, and then the water again, a large breaking wave that pulls me under the sea.

  And I see Chris, then, I see that he has spotted me from a distance and he dives into the water making his way ever so slowly to me.

  “Zoe needs you,” he says, and then, after a pause, “I need you,” offering a life belt, something for me to hold on to as I flounder in rapid waters, trying desperately to swim.

  WILLOW

  It wasn’t long before the police found me, over on Michigan Avenue, staring through the windows of the Prada store. I was mesmerized; I couldn’t move. Staring through the big ol’ window of that shop, I couldn’t think of anything else but seeing Momma in those fancy-schmancy dresses, the ones that hung in the sparkly store window, from headless mannequins. How Momma would have loved those dresses!

  The police hung on to me for a little while, but they didn’t keep me for long. Turned out that, once again, I was a kid no one wanted.

  I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a group home settled right in between Omaha and Lincoln, so that sometimes we’d drive on over to the Platte River and hike, through the woodlands that overlooked that broad river that was usually filled up with mud. There were twelve of us girls in that group home, living with a husband and wife we called Nan and Joe. We all had chores that varied from week to week, like cleaning the kitchen or doing the wash. Nan cooked dinner for us each night, and each night we sat down around the table to eat, all of us at one big table like some kind of mismatching family.

  It was a lot like that home I found myself living in after Momma and Daddy died except that this time, I wanted to be there.

  There were other folks who came and went, like Ms. Adler, and some nice lady named Kathy who wanted to talk again and again about the things that Joseph did to me. She made me say over and over again that this was not my fault, until one day, she said, I’d actually start believing those very words, believing that what Joseph did to me, it was wrong. Believing that what happened to my Lily, her getting adopted by the Zeeger family and all, that was not my fault. Momma was not mad at me.

  In fact, she told me once, looking at me with a pair of emerald-green eyes, “Your Momma would be proud.”

  But still, there were nights when I lay down in bed, and I heard him—heard Joseph—sneaking into my room. I heard the squeal of the door, the grumble of floorboards beneath his feet, the sound of his huffing and puffing right on into my ear; I felt his damp, calloused hands yank the clothing from my body, heard his words crippling me, paralyzing me so that I couldn’t scream. An eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures, he said, hissing the words right on into my ear until I’d wake up, in a sweat, searching everywhere in that room for Joseph, in the closet and under the beds, sure that he was somewhere.

  Every single squeak and creak, every time someone or other got up to use the restroom, I was sure it was Joseph, coming for me, coming to slide his hot beastly body in bed beside me, and it would take nearly forever for me to remember: Joseph was dead.

  I must’ve made myself say it a hundred times a day—Joseph is dead—until one day maybe I’d start believing those words, too.

  There were cupcakes for my birthday, chocolate ones with chocolate icing, just like Momma used to make. In the days leading up to my birthday, Paul and Lily Zeeger drove from their home in Fort Collins with Rose and Calla in tow. I wasn’t allowed to see Calla anymore, wasn’t allowed to touch her, and so she and Paul, they stood outside, on the front lawn of that group home, waiting for Big Lily and Little Lily, waiting for Rose. But I could see her through the window, how Calla had grown so big. How she was walking. From time to time Paul tried to scoop her up into his arms, but she pushed him away because by then, Calla was over a year old and didn’t want to be held. I watched as she wobbled around the lawn and once or twice or three
times, fell to her hands and knees on the dirt and then popped right on up again like an old game of Whac-A-Mole. But there Paul was every time, ready to wipe the dirt off her knees and see if she was okay. I could see it now, though I couldn’t see it before: Paul was a good daddy.

  Big Lily gazed at me from across the living room and said, “If only I’d have known...” and just like that, her voice drifted off and tears settled in her pretty eyes. “Your letters...” she said, and then, “I thought you were happy.”

  Mrs. Wood longed for babies. She deserved her more than me. And she’d care for her, for Calla, for Ruby, better than I ever could. I knew that for sure. I knew that my being there, in that home with them, was problematic for Mr. and Mrs. Wood. I heard them talking about it all the time, Mr. Wood talking about police and jail and getting arrested. And I didn’t want to cause any trouble, not for them, for Mrs. Wood, who had been so kind.

  But I never stole any ring.

  Those detectives, they found fingerprints on the knife, on the bedroom doorknob there in that Omaha home, fingerprints that were not mine. Didn’t matter what I said or didn’t say; they knew the truth.

  I wondered if Matthew knew about fingerprints. I wondered if he left them there on purpose so I couldn’t take the blame.

  And the Zeegers, well, they refused to press charges about the kidnapping, though I wanted them to. I wanted someone to take the blame for what had happened. But they didn’t. They decided, what with Momma dying, and me getting stuck with Joseph for all those years, I’d been through enough. But they said I wasn’t allowed to see Calla, not then, not ever again, only through that living room window when they brought Lily to see me. I got to see Lily twice a year, just two out of every 365 days, and only ever supervised visits, which was why Big Lily was always there, in the room with Lily and me, and sometimes Ms. Adler and sometimes Nan and Joe—in case I tried to grab Lily and run. Seeing that lady, Kathy, that was supposed to be my penance, too, but as it was, I liked talking to Kathy a lot. It wasn’t punishment at all.

  One day, out of the clear blue, Ms. Flores had shown up in that jail and told me I was free to go. But not free to go anywhere I chose. No, she said, I was still a minor. And being a minor meant I was still a ward of the state. And she smiled with those big horse-like teeth of hers, a smug look like the very fact that I was still a prisoner made her as happy as pie.

  It was then that Ms. Amber Adler picked me up in her junker car with the too-big Nike bag and drove me to the group home, and there, helped me settle into a big blue bedroom that I would share with three girls. She said, “If only you would have told me, Claire,” and just like Big Lily, her voice drifted off and her eyes got sad. But then she told me she was sorry for what happened, like it was her fault or something, what Joseph was doing to me. She said she should’ve made unannounced visits, or talked to my school teachers herself. Then she would’ve known, she told me, she would’ve known I wasn’t going to school. “But Joseph...” she said, letting her sad voice wander off for a minute or two. “I thought...” and she didn’t have to finish that sentence ’cause I knew what she was gonna say anyway. Joseph, she thought, was kind.

  “A perfect fit,” she’d said that day I went to live with Joseph and Miriam. Blessed and fortuitous.

  Cursed and damned.

  But they never found Matthew. They had the fingerprints from the knife, the door handle, but nothing to compare them with. They asked me questions, lots of questions. About Matthew. About Matthew and me.

  But I didn’t know where he had gone. Not that I would have told them anyway if I did.

  I saw that Paul and Lily loved my Lily very much. And Lily, she loved Calla, too. They were a real family. My Lily, she barely knew me anymore. The times they came to call, there in that home between Omaha and Lincoln, she hugged me because Mrs. Zeeger told her to hug me, but otherwise she held back, eyeing me like the stranger I was. I could tell by her eyes that she had some vague recollection of me, a hazy memory from a dream, all but obliterated in the morning light. The last time she saw me I was eight years old. The last time she saw me, I was happy, carefree, smiling.

  It was Louise Flores who told me what happened to the Wood family. About how things weren’t quite right in Mrs. Wood’s head. “The funny thing about delusions,” she said more to herself than to me, as she packed up her files and paperwork, considering her job done, just like Ms. Adler and her list of things to do, “is that a person can act relatively normal while they’re having them. Their delusions aren’t entirely out of the realm of possibility.” She tried to explain it to me, a post-traumatic something or other kind of thing, about how Mrs. Wood was probably never okay after her father died, she said, and then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she got sick with cancer and had to abort her baby.

  She couldn’t have any more kids. And Mrs. Wood, well, she wanted kids. And that thought made me feel sad ’cause Mrs. Wood was the nicest anyone had been to me in a long time, and never for a minute did I think she was a bad person. I thought she was just a little bit confused.

  From time to time I received a note in the mail there in that group home with no name, no return address. Just random facts scribbled on scraps of paper.

  Did you know you can’t sneeze with your eyes open?

  Did you know camels have three eyelids?

  Did you know a snail has 25,000 teeth?

  Did you know sea otters hold hands when sleeping so they never, ever drift apart?

  * * * * *

  Read on for an extract from THE GOOD GIRL by Mary Kubica

  EVE

  BEFORE

  I’m sitting at the breakfast nook sipping from a mug of cocoa when the phone rings. I’m lost in thought, staring out the back window at the lawn that now, in the throes of an early fall, abounds with leaves. They’re dead mostly, some still clinging lifelessly to the trees. It’s late afternoon. The sky is overcast, the temperatures doing a nosedive into the forties and fifties. I’m not ready for this, I think, wondering where in the world the time has gone. Seems like just yesterday we were welcoming spring and then, moments later, summer.

  The phone startles me and I’m certain it’s a telemarketer, so I don’t initially bother to rise from my perch. I relish the last few hours of silence I have before James comes thundering through the front doors and intrudes upon my world, and the last thing I want to do is waste precious minutes on some telemarketer’s sales pitch that I’m certain to refuse.

  The irritating noise of the phone stops and then starts again. I answer it for no other reason than to make it stop.

  “Hello?” I ask in a vexed tone, standing now in the center of the kitchen, one hip pressed against the island.

  “Mrs. Dennett?” the woman asks. I consider for a moment telling her that she’s got the wrong number, or ending her pitch right there with a simple not interested.

  “This is she.”

  “Mrs. Dennett, this is Ayanna Jackson.” I’ve heard the name before. I’ve never met her, but she’s been a constant in Mia’s life for over a year now. How many times have I heard Mia say her name: Ayanna and I did this... Ayanna and I did that... She is explaining how she knows Mia, how the two of them teach together at the alternative high school in the city. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she says.

  I catch my breath. “Oh, no, Ayanna, I just walked in the door,” I lie.

  Mia will be twenty-five in just a month: October 31st. She was born on Halloween and so I assume Ayanna has called about this. She wants to plan a party—a surprise party?—for my daughter.

  “Mrs. Dennett, Mia didn’t show up for work today,” she says.

  This isn’t what I expect to hear. It takes a moment to regroup. “Well, she must be sick,” I respond. My first thought is to cover for my daughter; she must have a viable explanation why she didn’t go to work or call in her absence. My daughter is a free spirit, yes, but also reliable.

  “You haven’t heard from her?”

  “No,”
I say, but this isn’t unusual. We go days, sometimes weeks, without speaking. Since the invention of email, our best form of communication has become passing along trivial forwards.

  “I tried calling her at home but there’s no answer.”

  “Did you leave a message?”

  “Several.”

  “And she hasn’t called back?”

  “No.”

  I’m listening only halfheartedly to the woman on the other end of the line. I stare out the window, watching the neighbors’ children shake a flimsy tree so that the remaining leaves fall down upon them. The children are my clock; when they appear in the backyard I know that it’s late afternoon, school is through. When they disappear inside again it’s time to start dinner.

  “Her cell phone?”

  “It goes straight to voice mail.”

  “Did you—”

  “I left a message.”

  “You’re certain she didn’t call in today?”

  “Administration never heard from her.”

  I’m worried that Mia will get in trouble. I’m worried that she will be fired. The fact that she might already be in trouble has yet to cross my mind.

  “I hope this hasn’t caused too much of a problem.”

  Ayanna explains that Mia’s first-period students didn’t inform anyone of the teacher’s absence and it wasn’t until second period that word finally leaked out: Ms. Dennett wasn’t here today and there wasn’t a sub. The principal went down to keep order until a substitute could be called in; he found gang graffiti scribbled across the walls with Mia’s overpriced art supplies, the ones she bought herself when the administration said no.

  “Mrs. Dennett, don’t you think it’s odd?” she asks. “This isn’t like Mia.”

  “Oh, Ayanna, I’m certain she has a good excuse.”

  “Such as?” she asks.