Pretty Baby: A Gripping Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Mary Kubica

  “Heidi,” I asked again, my voice losing patience. “Was it a guy?”

  “No, no,” she responded immediately, without hesitation. She laughed, nervously, and I couldn’t tell if she was lying, or if my suggestion put her dirty little secret into perspective. Some covert affair or...

  “Then who was it?” I demanded to know. “Who was on the phone?” I asked again.

  She was quiet, initially. Debating whether or not to tell me. I was about to get really pissed off, but then she grudgingly told me about the girl. The girl with the baby.

  “You talked to her?” I ask, feeling my heart decelerate, my blood pressure decline.

  “She just called,” Heidi replies. Her cheeks are flushed, either a symptom of caffeine overdose or she’s embarrassed.

  My chin drops. “She knows your phone number?”

  Heidi is stymied by guilt. Unease. She doesn’t answer right away. And then, sheepishly: “I gave her my card. At dinner. Last night.”

  This, I think, is getting weird. I stare at the woman before me in dismay—at the bedhead of auburn hair, the manic, caffeinated eyes—and wonder what she’s done with my wife. Heidi is a dreamer, yes. A visionary, an optimist. But there’s always a dose of reality mixed in.

  Except that this time, it appears, there’s not.

  “Dinner?” I start, but then shake my head and start again, getting down to the more pertinent details: “Why did she call?”

  I find myself staring into Heidi’s demented eyes and wishing it was another guy.

  Heidi marches to the coffeemaker as if she has any business drinking more caffeine. She tops up a personalized mug Zoe and I gave her for Mother’s Day a few years back, a black ceramic mug garnished with photos of Zoe that the dishwasher has begun to wear away. She dribbles in the hazelnut creamer and I think: Sugar, too. Perfect. Just what Heidi needs.

  “Ruby was crying all night, she said. All night long. Willow was really in a tizzy. She sounded exhausted. It’s colic. I’m sure of it. Remember when Zoe was a baby and had colic? The crying all night long. I’m really worried about her, Chris. About both of them. That persistent crying. That’s the kind of thing that leads to postpartum depression. To shaken baby syndrome.”

  And really, I can think of only one thing to say: “Willow? That’s her name? And Ruby?”

  Heidi says that it is.

  “People are not named Willow, Heidi. Trees are named Willow. And Ruby...” I let the rest of that sentence fall by the wayside, for Heidi is looking at me as though I might just be the devil incarnate, standing in the middle of our living room in checkered boxer shorts and nothing more. I bypass Heidi, and head into the kitchen for my own cup of coffee. Maybe then this will make more sense. Maybe after a cup of coffee, I’ll come to realize this has all been a misunderstanding, the translation lost somewhere in my tired, sluggish brain. I take my time, fill the mug and hover before the granite countertops, ingesting the coffee, waiting for the stimulant to arouse the neurons in my brain.

  But when I return from the kitchen, Heidi is standing before the front door, slipping a long, orange anorak over her robe.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, bewildered by the coat, the robe, the messy hair. She kicks the slippers from her feet and submerges her feet into a pair of rubber boots lounging before the door.

  “I told her I’d come. Meet her.”

  “Meet her where?”

  “By the Fullerton Station.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if she’s okay.”

  “Heidi,” I say in my most rational, objective tone. “You’re in your pajamas.” And she looks down at the lilac fleece robe, the gaudy, cotton floral pants.

  “Fine,” she says and races into the bedroom and replaces the floral pants with a pair of jeans. She doesn’t take the time to remove the robe.

  This is absolutely absurd, I think. I could tell her, make a bullet point list or maybe a bar graph for her to see it, visually, how this is absolutely insane. On one axis, I’d list all the anomalies of the situation: Heidi’s fetish for homeless people, the lack of discretion when handing out her business card, the hideousness of the lilac robe and the orange anorak, the rain; the other axis would show the values of these anomalies, the outfit far outranking the business card, for example.

  But all that would do is land me in hot water.

  And so I watch from the leather recliner out of the corner of my eye as she grabs her purse and an umbrella from the front closet and disappears through the door, chanting, “See you later.” My lethargic reply: “Bye.”

  The cats jump to the sill of the bay window, as they always do, to watch her leave through the building’s main entrance and down the street.

  I make myself scrambled eggs. I forget to recycle the egg carton. I warm slices of limp bacon in the microwave (which feels entirely wrong to do in Heidi’s absence: eat meat in our pseudo-vegetarian home), and eat in front of the TV: ESPN pregame shows that will eventually turn into NBA games. During commercial breaks I flip to CNBC because I can never be too far away from Wall Street news. It’s the part of my brain that never sleeps. The one consumed with money. Money, money, money.

  Lightning flashes; thunder booms. The entire building shudders. I think of Heidi on the street in this weather and hope she does her business and hurries home soon.

  And then another pop of thunder, another lightning flare.

  I pray to God that the power doesn’t go out before the game.

  * * *

  It’s about an hour later that Zoe is escorted home by Taylor and her mother. I’m still in my boxers when Zoe lets herself inside, and there, hovering in the doorway, is the throng of them, mouths agape, dripping wet like a bunch of wet dogs, staring at me, in my boxer shorts, at the traces of dark hair on my chest. My hair is waxy, standing every which way, an old man smell stuck to me like glue.

  “Zoe,” I say, jumping from the recliner, nearly spilling my coffee as I do.

  “Dad.” Mortification fills Zoe’s eyes. Her father, half naked, in the same room with her best friend. I wrap a faux fur blanket around myself and try to laugh it off.

  “I didn’t know when you’d be home,” I say. But of course, that isn’t a good enough excuse. Not for Zoe anyway.

  This, I’m certain, is only the first of many times I will humiliate my daughter. I watch as Zoe grabs Taylor by the hand and they disappear down the hall. I hear the door to Zoe’s bedroom creep shut and imagine Zoe’s words: My dad is such a loser. “Heidi home, Chris?” Jennifer asks, her eyes looking everywhere but me.

  “Nope,” I say. I wonder if Jennifer knows about the girl. The girl with the baby. Probably. When it comes to Heidi’s life, Jennifer knows most everything. I grip the blanket tighter and wonder what Heidi tells Jennifer about me. I’m absolutely certain that when I’m being an asshole, Jennifer’s the first to know about it. About my smoking-hot coworker or the fact that I’m traveling again.

  “You know when she’ll be home?”

  “I don’t.”

  I watch as Jennifer fidgets with the strap of her purse. She could be a pretty woman, if she’d get out of her scrubs and put on some real clothes for a change. The woman works in a hospital, and I’m half-certain the only clothes hanging in her closet are scrubs in every color of the gosh darn rainbow and clogs. Medical clogs. They look comfortable, I’ll give her that, and yet whatever happened to jeans? A sweatshirt? Yoga pants?

  “Anything I can help with?” I ask, a polite but dumb offering. Jennifer, a bitter divorcée, hates me simply because I am a man. A half wit, no less, lounging around the house in my underwear in the middle of the day.

  She shakes her head. “Just girl stuff,” she says, and then, “Thanks anyway.”

  And then she retrieves Taylor, and when they leave, Zoe turns to me, glaring disapproval in her preteen eyes and says, “Really, Dad. Boxer shorts? It’s eleven o’clock,” and retreats to her bedroom and slams the door.

  Great, I think. Just perfe
ct. Heidi’s off chasing down homeless girls, but I’m the one who’s weird.

  HEIDI

  I don’t know if she drinks coffee or not, but I bring her a café mocha nonetheless, topped with extra whipped cream for good measure, the perfect pick-me-up for anyone who’s having a bad day. I get a scone to go with it, cinnamon chip, plus the “very berry” coffee cake, in case she doesn’t like cinnamon or scones. And then I scurry down the quiet, Saturday morning streets, elbows out, in a defensive position, ready to tackle anyone who gets in my way.

  It’s raining, the April sky dark and disgruntled. The streets are saturated with puddles, which passing taxis soar through, sending rainwater flying into the air. Car lights are on, and, though it’s after 10:00 a.m., automatic streetlights have yet to register that nighttime has turned to day. My umbrella is up, keeping my hair dry though my lower half becomes soaked by puddles, by the surges of water that splash from the tires of passing cars. The rain cascades from the sky, and I chant to myself: It’s raining cats and dogs. It’s raining pitchforks and hammer handles. When it rains it pours.

  She’s right where she said she’d be. Pacing up and down Fullerton, jouncing a desolate Ruby who screeches at the top of her lungs. Sopping wet. Onlookers—a handful of zealot joggers in water-repellant running gear—circumvent the scene, stepping onto Fullerton to risk their lives in oncoming traffic rather than assist Willow, the young girl who appears to have aged thirty years in the course of a single night, carrying the facial features of a middle-aged woman: dramatic creases on her face, baggage under the eyes. The whites of her eyes are red, the blood vessels of the sclera swollen. She trips over a crack in the sidewalk, tosses Ruby roughly over a shoulder, patting her back in a manner that verges on unkind. Shhh...shhhh, she says, but the words are not gentle, not pacific. What she means to say is shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  She bounces her angrily, as I remember willing myself not to do when Zoe was a baby, when her yowling kept me up all night long and it was all I could do not to lose control. I don’t know much about postpartum depression, personally, but the media is quick to spin sensationalist stories of unstable, disturbed women driven by the intrusive thoughts that jump unsolicited into their minds: thoughts of hurting their babies, of stabbing them or drowning them or throwing them down a flight of stairs. Thoughts of driving their minivan to the bottom of a retention pond with their children buckled safely in the backseat. I know there are women who, fearing they might hurt their babies, abandon their newborns instead, in an effort to avoid physical harm. I commend Willow for not leaving Ruby on the steps of a church or shelter, for not telling her to shut up when I know it’s exactly what she wants to say. The joggers look and frown—what is that girl doing with that baby?—but what I see is a tenacious girl with more gumption than half the grown women I know. Without my mother to complain to on the phone, without Chris to steal a hysterical Zoe from my arms when I’d had enough for one day, I’m not certain what I would have done, how I would have survived that first year of motherhood (though now knowing the perplexities of a twelve-year-old girl, infancy doesn’t seem so bad).

  “I brought you coffee,” I say, sweeping up from behind and startling the girl. As if coffee will truly fix anything, steal her away from a life on the streets, provide any nourishment for her meager body. She is completely exhausted, her body heavy, her legs on the verge of collapse. I know without her having to tell me that she’s been pacing up and down Fullerton since the middle of the night, any effort to calm Ruby down. Her body is sleepy, though her eyes are rabid, like a dog in the furious stage of rabies: aggressive and ready to attack. There’s a loss of coordination, an irritability in the forceful way she snatches the cup from my hand, in the way she drops to the wet ground and devours both the cinnamon chip scone and the “very berry” coffee cake in a matter of moments.

  “She’s been crying all night,” she says between mouthfuls, crumbs escaping the corners of her mouth and falling to the concrete, where she ambushes them and forces them back in. She tucks herself and Ruby into a doorway, under an indigo awning on the steps of an eclectic little shop with wind chimes and ceramic birds in the front window. The store is open, the contour of a woman watching us through the window, from afar.

  “When is the last time she ate?” I ask, but Willow shakes her head, delirious.

  “I don’t know. She won’t eat. Kept pushing the bottle out. Screaming.”

  “She wouldn’t take the bottle?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. She removes the top of the café mocha and begins lapping up the whipped cream with a tongue. Like a dog, lapping water from a bowl on the floor.

  “Willow,” I say. She doesn’t look at me. There’s a rotten smell coming from her: clothing that has been soaked by rain—damp and filthy—days, maybe weeks, of body odor. An atrocious smell wafting from Ruby’s diaper. I peer up and down the street and wonder: where does Willow go to use the facilities? The employees at local restaurants and bars would shoo her away like a stray cat, a feral cat. I’ve seen signs plastered in storefront windows: No Public Restrooms. I think of the park, blocks away, and wonder if there’s a public toilet, a port-a-potty, anything for her to use? “Willow,” I start again, this time dropping to the concrete beside her. She watches me closely, cautiously, and scoots a bit away, regaining her three feet of personal space. But she claws the coffee, the microscopic pastry crumbs that remain in the soppy paper sack, in case I have the gall to steal them from her hand.

  “Willow,” I say again, and then, “Would you let me hold Ruby?” finally forcing the words from my mouth. Oh, how I want to hold that baby in my arms, to feel the weight of her! I recall that wonderful baby smell from Zoe’s youth: a conglomeration of milk and baby powder, sour and unpleasant, and yet entirely delicious, wistful, nostalgic. What I’m expecting from Willow is a firm no, and so I’m taken aback by the ease with which she hands me the hysterical child. It’s not instantaneous, no. Not by any means. She scrutinizes me up and down: who is this woman and what does she want? But then, perhaps, some literary verse runs through her mind, some proverb about faith and trust and, as J. M. Barrie would say, pixie dust. She slips the child into my hands, grateful to be free of the thirteen or so pounds of body weight that hampered her all night, that must make her feel waterlogged, snowed over. Willow’s body relaxes, her bones sink into the cold concrete, her muscles slack against the glass door.

  And in my arms, Ruby quiets. It has nothing to do with me, per se, but rather a change in position, new eyes to see, a smile. I collapse the umbrella and stand from the ground, protected, to some extent, from the elements beneath the indigo awning, and in my arms, sway her back and forth in a gentle lilt, humming. My mind time travels to Zoe’s baby nursery, pale purple damask sheets, the sleigh glider where I would sit for hours on end, rocking the tiny figure in my arms until long after she’d fallen asleep.

  Ruby’s diaper alone must weigh ten pounds. She’s soaked through and through, urine and diarrhea seeping through a Onesies jumpsuit and onto my coat. Her jumpsuit, which used to be white, with the words Little Sister embroidered in a pastel thread, is caked with throw up and spit up, some milky white, others Technicolor yellow. She’s warm to the touch, her forehead radiating heat, her cheeks aglow. She’s running a fever.

  “Ruby has a sister?” I inquire, trying, with the back of my hand to determine the baby’s temperature. 101. 102. I don’t want to alarm Willow and so I try to be sly, try to make small talk so she doesn’t see the way I press my lips to the forehead of the baby. 103?

  “Huh?” Willow asks, turning white with confusion and I point out the jumpsuit, the lavender L, the salmon I, a pair of baby blue Ts and so forth.

  A cyclist passes by on the street—bike wheels spinning wildly through puddles on the road—and Willow’s eyes turn to watch him: the red sweatshirt and black biker shorts, a gray helmet, a backpack, calf muscles that put my own to shame. The way the water mushrooms beneath the tires. “I got it at a thrift st
ore,” she says, not looking at me, and I reply, “Of course.” Of course, I think. Where would the sister be?

  I stroke a finger down Ruby’s cheek, feeling the soft, cherubic skin, staring into the innocent, ethereal eyes. The baby latches on to my index finger with her chubby little fist, the bones and veins tucked away under layers and layers of baby fat, the only time in one’s life when fat is adorable and heavenly. She plunges a finger into her mouth and sucks on it with a vengeance.

  “I think she might be hungry,” I suggest—hopeful—but Willow says, “No. I tried. She wouldn’t eat.”

  “I could try,” I offer, adding, “I know you’re tired,” careful not to usurp her role as the mother. The last thing in the world I want to do is offend Willow. But I know babies can be more confusing than preteen girls, more baffling than foreign politics and algebra. They want a bottle, they don’t want a bottle. They cry for absolutely no reason at all. The baby that devours pureed peas one day won’t touch them the next. “Whatever you think is best,” I say.

  “Whatever,” she says, shrugging, indifferent. She hands me the one and only bottle she owns, filled with three or four ounces of formula, put together in the wee hours of morning. It’s curdled now and though I know Willow intends me to plunge this very bottle, this very formula, into Ruby’s cavernous mouth, I cannot. My hesitation makes the baby wail.

  “Willow,” I say over the sound of Ruby’s hysterics.