Pretty Baby

by Mary Kubica

  I tote the baby on a hip, seeing that Willow has left the bathroom door slightly ajar as I pass by. I catch a glimpse of her in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, staring at her own image. Her hair, like mine, is still wet from a shower, dripping idle drops onto a shirt of Zoe’s. There is dark eyeliner placed on a single eye. She leans in close to the mirror to plant it on the second eye, but instead, hesitates, and pulls down the front of Zoe’s vintage wash shirt, far down, to the tender skin around her breast. I feel myself gasp for breath, willing the baby to remain silent. She runs her fingers over a lesion right there on the milky white skin, so close to the areola that I can see where the pigment changes colors. It’s instinctive when I lean in, desperate for a better look, of what appears to be teeth marks, the imprint of incisors and canines, teeth pressed hard enough to leave a mark. Hard enough to deface the skin forever.

  And then another knock, and I jump, moving quickly through the hall so that Willow doesn’t have a chance to see my mouth, gaping open at the sight of her scar. So that she won’t see me.

  Graham stands on the opposite side of the door. In his hands are two mugs of coffee, an outline of the Chicago skyline printed on their surface. Upon seeing the baby, he slips past me in the doorway and sets the mugs of coffee on the kitchen table. “So this is who I’m to thank for the ruckus these past few nights,” he says. “You didn’t tell me you had company coming,” and he sits down, kicking a second chair out with the toe of his shoe, inviting me to join him at my own kitchen table.

  “Where’s Chris?” he asks, his eyes moving about the mess which is my home, the baby’s paraphernalia taking up more than its fair share of space: baby bottles litter the kitchen sink, stacks of diapers and containers of wipes on the living room floor, a heaping laundry basket pressed up next to the front door, something that smells shockingly like feces wafting from the garbage can. “Off to work already this morning?” he asks, trying hard not to wrinkle his nose at the atrocious scent. It’s approaching seven o’clock.

  “New York,” I say, sliding into the chair beside him and catching the heavenly fragrance of his cologne, that earthy patchouli smell, blended with the intoxicating scent of coffee. I press the mug to my lips and inhale.

  Graham is dapper as always, his blond hair spiked to perfection, his body cloaked in a fitted crew-neck sweater and jeans. He says that he’s been up writing, since five, as is the case most mornings. During business hours, Graham works as a freelancer, writing for websites, magazines and sometimes the newspaper. But the early morning hours are reserved for his true passion: fiction writing. He’s been working on a novel for umpteen years, his baby, his pride and joy, which he hopes might one day work its way onto a shelf at the local indie store. I’ve read bits and pieces, here and there, an honor acquired only after three or four glasses of wine, after begging and pleading, after an exuberance of flattery and praise. It was good. What I read of it, that is. I hired Graham to tweak the wording on my nonprofit’s website, to help with pamphlets and to more or less write our annual appeal. Graham and I spent many late nights together, pouring over that appeal—over a bottle or two of my now-favorite Riesling—while Chris and Zoe were next door. I came home late, drunk, giddy, sensing no jealousy in Chris as I most certainly would have felt if the situation were reversed.

  What’s there to be jealous of? Chris asked, when I pressed him on it, something I never would have done in a sober state of mind. And then, the words that hurt the most: I hardly think you’re Graham’s type, and I remember the look of satisfaction on his face. The gratification at saying those words aloud.

  I spent days, months, years wondering what those words meant. Not Graham’s type, as in not the beautiful bombshell women who frequented his bed, who made the wall that separated our homes rattle from time to time, fragile baubles scooting dangerously close to the edge of a shelf. Is that what Chris was saying? That I was not good enough for Graham? That what I was, was the weathered woman next door, the one with brown hair being invaded by gray, with skin being annexed by wrinkles. I was the friend. The confidante. The chum. But I could never be more.

  Or maybe all Chris meant was that women were not Graham’s type, that Graham preferred men.

  I would never know. But now, I sit across the table and wonder if, in some other life, in some parallel universe, Graham could ever see me as something other than the lady next door.

  But inside I can think of little beside Willow, in the bathroom, running her fingers across the disfigurement on her chest. Teeth marks. Human teeth marks.

  And then she appears, as if beckoned by my mind, standing there in the hallway, and Graham turns his eyes and smiles, the most bewitching smile of all, and politely says hello. Willow says nothing. I can see her feet start to flee, but then she must settle upon that smile: warm and welcoming, entirely kind, and she smiles in reply.

  It would be next to impossible to see Graham’s smile and not beam.

  “Willow,” I say then, “this is Graham. From next door,” and Graham says, “How do you do?”

  “Fine,” replies Willow. And then: “She’s awake?” meaning the baby, and I say yes, that she is.

  Willow asks if there’s more toothpaste, and I direct her to the linen closet at the end of the hall. She’s gone for a split second before Graham turns to me, his eyes wide with curiosity as if I’ve just given him the plot line of his next novel, and says, “Do tell,” his brain making the quick connection between the baby on my lap, and teenage girl fumbling around in the linen closet for a tube of toothpaste.

  * * *

  We sit on the “L”, side by side, and as we drive off, north this time, the baby becomes mesmerized with the motion of the train, the bright sunlight, the buildings that shoot past so fast that their colors and shapes begin to blur, redbrick bleeding into reinforced concrete and steel frames. I sit close enough to Willow that our legs touch and as they do, she pulls away instinctively though on the crowded train there’s no where else to go. Willow finds proximity with others to be disturbing, painful almost, in the way that she grimaces and recoils, as if my standing or sitting too close is as painful as a slap across the face. She’d prefer people to stay at an arm’s length, literally, in that extrapersonal space, that space which she can’t touch and, perhaps more importantly, can’t be touched.

  She doesn’t like to be touched. She winces at the slightest touch of a hand. She avoids eye contact as best she can.

  Is this the behavior of someone who’s been maltreated, I wonder, staring out the corner of my eye at the erratic hair she lets disguise her face, or the one who’s mistreated others? Are the dark, shadowy eyes—and the way they leer at Chris and Zoe, at me—an effect of abuse, or an indication of her own dishonorable behavior? I watch as others watch the girl beside me, the one with a baby on her lap, the one whose eyes wander off into space, her mind teleporting her to some distant realm outside this crowded train, while I secretly stroke the toes of the baby, with a single finger so Willow will not see.

  Are they seeing something I’ve failed to see?

  Are they plagued with some thought—some reservation—that never crossed my mind? Or perhaps it did cross my mind, that reservation about Willow, and I chose to ignore it, as I chose to ignore the blood on the undershirt, to take her words at face value and not consider that it could be more. A bloody nose, she’d said.

  And yet, in the time she’d been with us, her nose had yet to bleed.

  We take the train to a walk-in clinic in Lakeview. The baby’s fever still lingers, lying in wait for the most inopportune times to rear its ugly head. Tylenol soothes her, yes, and yet it’s only a temporary fix; we have yet to get at the root cause of the temperature, the discomfort that makes her miserable for hours on end.

  Zoe’s pediatrician was out of the question; I knew that much. There might be questions. But a walk-in clinic where I could pay cash—that was much better. Much better indeed.

  We depart the “L” and walk the block or two
to the clinic, a corner unit on a busy intersection that is loud at this time of day: cars screaming past, sawhorses and caution tape blocking parts of the sidewalk that the April rain has turned into lakes. People step into the street to get around it, stepping into oncoming traffic so that some driver lays on their horn and beeps.

  Willow has the baby tucked into her coat, the army-green coat with tufts of pink fleece poking out, a reminder of the day I first laid eyes on the duo, hovering at the Fullerton Station in the rain. I offer to carry the baby but Willow glances at me and says no. “No, thank you,” is what she says, but all I hear is no. A denial, a rejection. My face flames red, embarrassed.

  And so I wait until we’re in the vestibule, Willow and me, that quiet space between glass doors, to take the baby abruptly from her hands—so sudden she doesn’t have time to react—she is unable to react because the eyes on the other side of the glass may see—and say, “We’ll say she’s mine. It’s more believable this way. Fewer questions,” and I push through the second glass door and into the lobby of the clinic without waiting for her to respond.

  Willow lags behind, a half step or more, watching me, the flare of her icy blue eyes burning a hole in my shirt.

  WILLOW

  “I’d never been out of the house,” I say. “That was the very first time.”

  I tell Ms. Flores how Matthew appeared after Joseph and Isaac had gone for the day, how he had an old pair of gym shoes with him, with laces he had to help me tie, how he told me to put them on because where we were going, I couldn’t go barefoot.

  I didn’t know where he got the shoes. I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask where he got the sweatshirt, a thin hooded sweatshirt the color of tangerines that he helped me put on.

  “Where are we going?” I asked him, the first of three times.

  “You’ll see,” he said and we walked right out the front door of that Omaha home.

  “You’re telling me you hadn’t been out of that house in what—six years?” Ms. Flores asks, doubtfully. She sinks a tea bag into a steaming mug of water, moving it up and down, up and down like a yo-yo because she hasn’t got the patience to wait for the tea to steep.

  Momma used to love tea. Green tea. I catch the scent of Ms. Flores’s tea and in an instant, it reminds me of Momma, of the way she swore her green tea fought cancer and heart disease and old age.

  Too bad it didn’t do anything to stop Bluebirds from tumbling down the road.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I reply, trying hard to ignore the way Ms. Flores’s gray eyes call me a liar. “It was the first time I’d been anywhere, at least,” I say, “other than the backyard,” and even that was rare.

  “Didn’t you think it was a bad idea?” asks Ms. Flores.

  My minds drifts back to the day that Matthew and I left the Omaha home. I tell Ms. Flores that the air was cold. It was fall. The clouds in the sky were thick and heavy.

  I can picture it still, that first day Matthew took me outside.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you tell Matthew that? Did you tell him it was a bad idea?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She yanks that tea bag from the cup and sets it on a paper napkin. “Well, why not, Claire? If you knew it was a bad idea, then why didn’t you say that to Matthew?” she asks, and I feel my shoulders rise up and shrug.

  I remember that I walked close to Matthew, terrified to be outside. Terrified of the way the trees shook in the wind. Terrified of the cars that zoomed past, cars which I’d only ever seen from my bedroom window. I hadn’t been in a car since that day six years ago when Joseph and Miriam drove me to their home. For me, cars were bad. Cars were how Momma and Daddy died. Cars were how I ended up there, at Joseph and Miriam’s home.

  I remember that Matthew tugged on my sleeve and we crossed the street. I peered back to see the house from outside, a house that was pretty almost, almost quaint. It wasn’t the newest house on the block, but it was charming nonetheless, with its crisp white paint, and the black shutters, and the gray stone that wrapped around the home. The front door was red.

  I’d never seen the home from that angle before, from outside, from the front yard.

  And then, for some reason, I got scared.

  And I started running.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Matthew said, tugging on my shirt to stop me from running. The gym shoes felt big and clunky, like ten pound weighs on the bottom of my feet. I wasn’t used to wearing shoes. Around the house, all I did was walk barefoot. “What’s the hurry?” Matthew asked, and when I turned to him, he could see the panic in my eyes, the fear. He could see that I was shaking. “What is it, Claire? What’s wrong?”

  And I told him how I was scared of the cars, the clouds, the naked trees that shivered in the cold November air. Of the kids who peered from behind curtains of their own homes, the kids with the bikes and the chalk, and their mean names: dickhead, retard.

  And that’s when Matthew clasped me by the hand, something he’d never done before. No one had held my hand for a real long time, not since Momma did when I was a girl. It felt good, Matthew’s hand somehow warm though mine was made up of ice cubes.

  Matthew and I kept walking, down the block and around a corner, where he dragged me to a funny blue sign. “This is our stop,” he said. I didn’t know what that meant: our stop. But I followed him over to the sign where we stood and waited for a real long time. There were others there, too, other people hovering around the sign. Just waiting.

  Matthew let go of my hand to feel around in his pants pocket for a handful of coins, and when he did, the cold November air whooshed up and snatched my hair. A car lurched by, with music that was loud and mad. I felt suddenly as if it was hard to breathe, as though I was choking on that raw air, like everyone was looking at me. What you can’t see, can’t hurt you, I reminded myself, and I pressed in close to Matthew, trying to forget the cold air, the loud music, the brassy eyes.

  A big bus—white and blue with tinted black windows—came to a stop right before us. Matthew said, “This is our bus,” and we climbed up the huge steps with the other people, and feeling me hesitate, Matthew said, “It’s okay. No one’s gonna hurt you,” before dropping a handful of quarters in a machine and leading me down the dirty aisle to a hard blue seat. The bus lurched forward, and I felt as though I was gonna fall from my seat, onto the dirty floor. I stared at that floor, the one with an oozing soda can and an old candy wrapper and the gook from someone else’s shoes.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Matthew again, and again he said, “You’ll see,” as the bus seesawed down the busy street, pitching me back and forth on that hard plastic seat, stopping every block or so to let more and more people on, until the bus nearly burst with folks.

  I did what I usually did when I was scared. I thought of Momma, with her long black hair and her blue eyes. I thought back to Ogallala. Just whatever random memories I could bring to mind. They were few and far between these days: stuff like riding on the back of the shopping cart at Safeway, staring at an abandoned grocery list the last shopper left behind in the basket of the cart, the blue ink smeared across the page in a billowing cursive I couldn’t read—with Lily tucked in the seat. I thought about biting into a ripe ol’ peach and laughing with Momma as the juice dripped from my chin, and sitting under that huge oak tree that nearly consumed the backyard of our prefab home, reading to Momma from books that were meant for adults only to read.

  “If you were so scared, why didn’t you tell Matthew you didn’t want to go?”

  I thought about that for a minute or two. I watched Louise Flores nibble a prepackaged shortbread cookie and I thought about her question. I was scared for a whole bunch of reasons. I was scared about the people outside the home, but even more than that, I was scared about Joseph finding out we’d been gone. I knew in my mind that Joseph was at work, and that Isaac would be at school first, followed up by an after school job as was usually the case, but still, I wasn’t so sure. And Miriam? Well, Miriam hard
ly knew when I was there so she’d hardly know when I wasn’t. But still, I was scared.

  So why didn’t I tell Matthew I didn’t want to go then? It was simple really. I did want to go. I was terrified, but I was excited, too. I hadn’t been out of that house for a long time. I was fourteen or fifteen by then. Getting out of that home was the third biggest wish I’d had for six long years, the first being that Momma and Daddy come back to life, and the second being to get Lily back. My Lily. I trusted Matthew like I hadn’t trusted anyone in the past six years, even more than Ms. Amber Adler who’d come to the home in Ogallala with the police officer to tell Lily and me that our folks were dead, as she kneeled down before me on the laminate flooring and with the kindest smile on her simple face, promised to take care of Lily and me and find us a good home.

  I never thought for once that she was lying. In her mind she did just exactly what she said.

  But Matthew was different. If Matthew said everything was okay, then everything was okay. If he said no one would hurt me, then no one would hurt me. It didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified as we hopped off one blue-and-white bus and onto another—and then yet another—thinking of as many memories of Momma as I could possibly dredge up (Mrs. Dahl and her cattle, Momma’s taste for banana and mayonnaise sandwiches or the way she would eat all the way around the crust first, saving the insides—the guts she called them—for last) because thinking of Momma helped quash that notion of being scared half to death.

  I love you like bananas love mayonnaise, she’d say, and I’d just shake my head and laugh, watching her prance around our home in her black shift dresses and beehive hairdos.

  That bus took us past buildings that looked like the apartment buildings I remembered from Ogallala, short buildings splayed over the tawny lawn, made of pressed clay bricks, brick red. There were parking lots as wide as the buildings themselves. Electrical wires running alongside the street, making the air through the open bus window buzz. We drove through slummy neighborhoods, past run-down, boarded-up houses, past ratty cars and rough-looking people who loitered along the cracked sidewalks. Just loitered. We passed American flags, flying in the stubborn wind, patches of dirt showing through the deadening grass on the side of the street, past bushes with puny leaves, brown and tumbling to the ground, and trees, naked trees, hundreds of thousands of them.