Pretty Baby

by Mary Kubica

  What I wanted in our marriage was for us to be a team. Heidi and me. But these days it feels as if we’re nothing but opponents, opponents playing for rival teams. I start to feel bad for her, in this mess with that girl and the baby, all alone.

  And yet, I think, considering the haggard eyes and the spaghetti hair, this is her doing.

  But still, I can’t get that note out of my mind, the one in the briefcase with the single word: Yes. I pulled it out at the airport, on the plane. I pulled it out once we’d checked into our hotel, a luxury hotel in the heart of New York City. I pulled it out again after Cassidy, Tom, Henry and I had parted ways at the check-in desk, and Cassidy had said, “Toodle-oo,” with a one finger wave. I sat on the crisp, white bed in my stately room—staring at the view out the window: a bird’s-eye view of the building next door, not ten feet away, nothing but brick and windows—and pulled that note out and held it in my hand. I found myself appraising everything about that note: where she got the purple sticky note, the jaggedness of the letters. Was she nervous when she wrote it, short on time, jarred by the baby? Or did her handwriting just suck more than mine?

  I wonder when she wrote the note: ten o’clock, right after we’d gone to bed and she heard, through the cracks of the door, Zoe’s breathing morph into a snore, or sometime in the middle of the night, forced to my briefcase by sleeplessness, by plaguing memories of being hurt by someone that kept her tossing and turning all night long. Or maybe it was early in the morning, awakened by the sound of my alarm clock, when she tiptoed to the briefcase by the front door as I turned on the shower and stepped inside.

  Who knew?

  And now, a day later, my meetings done for the day, a rendezvous with Tom, Henry and Cassidy planned in the hotel’s bar in some twenty minutes, I debate telling Heidi about the note. But what good would it do? It would throw Heidi into a nosedive, that’s what it would do. Having proof that the girl was abused—or at least a claim of abuse—would be enough for Heidi to suggest we keep her. Forever. Like the damn kittens. They’re staying.

  There’s a knock at the door. I barely register the sound before Heidi, over the phone, snaps, “Who’s that?” and I lie, claiming, “Room service,” because I refuse to admit that Cassidy offered to stop by and proofread the offering memorandum—the company profile and financials for some asset we’re trying to sell—before we all head down to the hotel bar for a nightcap.

  I move from the bed and to the door, telling Heidi how I ordered room service. How I was staying in for the night to finish up the offering memorandum which I was supposed to finish last weekend. How I ordered a turkey club sandwich and cheesecake and how I might tune in for the end of the Cubs game, if I finish the offering memorandum in time.

  I slide the door open and find, as expected, Cassidy on the other side, bright red lipstick delineating her lips so that I can think of nothing but those lips.

  I raise a finger to my mouth and silently whisper Shh.

  And then, louder, so Heidi can hear, “Did you bring any ketchup?” and watch as Cassidy stifles a laugh.

  I’m going straight to hell, I think as I thank the bogus room service attendant and slam the door closed, grateful when Heidi says she’ll let me go so my food doesn’t grow cold.

  “Love you,” I say, and she says, “Me, too.”

  I toss my phone onto the bed.

  I watch Cassidy move across the room with gall. As if this is her room. There’s no hesitation about it, no hovering in the doorway waiting to be invited in. Not with Cassidy.

  She’s changed her clothes. Only Cassidy would change from a dress into a dress for a nightcap, replacing the formal black suit with a Grecian style dress, fitted and sleeveless, the color of rust. She sits on a low yellow armchair slinging one long leg across the other, asking first about the offering memorandum, and then about Heidi.

  “She’s good,” I say, pulling up the offering memorandum on my laptop and handing it to Cassidy, careful not to touch as the computer passes between hands. “Yup, she’s good.”

  And then I excuse myself before I say it a third time, forcing my eyes to stay on her eyes and not her legs or her lips, or her breasts in the rust-colored dress. Not big. But not small, either. The kind that work well on Cassidy’s lissome frame. Too much extra baggage would throw the whole thing off. She’d be disproportionate, I think as I stand, staring at the display of hotel freebies on the bathroom’s black sink—shampoo, conditioner, lotion, soap—as I rip open the soap and wash my face, splashing cold water on the skin so that I’ll stop thinking about Cassidy’s knockers.

  Or her long legs.

  Or the lips. Red lips. The color of a cayenne pepper.

  She calls to me from the adjoining room, and I step from the bathroom, patting my face dry with a towel. I slide into my own low yellow armchair beside hers, and pull it up to the round table.

  We go over the offering memorandum. I focus on words like shares and stocks and per unit, and not the manicured hands that work their way across the computer screen, or the skirt of the rust-colored dress hovering mere millimeters from my leg.

  * * *

  We head downstairs when we finish, standing side by side on the elevator. Cassidy leans close to me to mock a man riding downstairs with us, a man with a bad toupee, as she elongates her neck and laughs out loud, her fingernails grazing the skin on my forearm.

  I wonder what others think of us: me with a wedding band, her without.

  Do they see us as colleagues in New York on a business trip, or something more than that: me the adulterer and her the mistress?

  In the hotel’s bar, I snag the steel side chair so that Cassidy is forced onto a low sofa with Tom and Henry. We drink. Too much. We talk. Gossip. Make fun of coworkers and clients, which is far too easy to do. Satirize spouses, and then claim to be kidding when someone’s wife becomes the butt of a joke.

  Heidi.

  Cassidy sips from a Manhattan, leaving ruby red lip marks along the edges of the cocktail glass, and says, “See this, gentlemen, is the reason I’ll never get married,” and I wonder which it is: that she refuses to be the butt of some joke, or refuses to mock the one she vowed to love in good times and in bad. Sickness and health. So long as they both shall live.

  Or maybe it’s the whole monogamy thing that dissuades her.

  And then, later, in the john, a completely sauced Henry accosts me with a condom. “In case you need this later,” he says, and he laughs a haughty laugh with that lewd sense of humor that is Henry Tomlin.

  “I hardly think Heidi and I need birth control,” I say, but I take it anyway and slide it into my pants pocket, not wanting to be crass and leave it on the bathroom sink.

  Henry leans in close, reeking of good old Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, a throwback to his redneck days, and whispers, “I wasn’t talking about Heidi,” and gives me a wink.

  We lose track of time. Tom orders another round on him, some type of pilsner for Tom and me, more Jack Daniel’s for Henry, an Alabama Slammer for Cassidy. She pulls the fruit out—an orange and a maraschino cherry—and eats that first. The bartender announces, “Last call.”

  I forget about my phone completely, the one tossed onto the bed, hidden beneath the folds of the white bedspread.

  HEIDI

  Zoe goes to bed early, riddled with a headache and stuffy nose, the return of spring allergy season, or maybe just a cold. It’s impossible to tell, as is nearly always the case this time of year, when tree pollens are at their height, but cold and flu season has yet to recede from view. So I dole out both pain relievers and antihistamines, and Zoe falls into bed, drifting immediately into a drug-induced sleep, as I kiss her forehead gingerly, leaving the TV on in Chris’s and my bedroom, as the sound of some reality TV show permeates the walls.

  Willow and I sit, perched in the living room—she, reading silently from Anne of Green Gables, and me on my laptop, feigning work though it’s the furthest thing from my mind. It’s been three days since I’ve be
en into the office, three days since anything work related has crossed my mind.

  My absence has been felt at work, a happy bouquet of roses and lilies now taking up residence on my kitchen table with a Get Well Soon card. Each morning I prepare my most macabre voice and put in a call to Dana, receptionist extraordinaire, and say that I’m unwell, the flu, I believe, and blame my own foolishness for not getting the vaccine. My temperature hovers somewhere around 102, depending on the day, and my body aches through and through, everything from the hairs on my head to the tips of my toes. I’ve wrapped myself in blankets and layer upon layer of clothes, and yet I’m overwhelmed by chills, never warm, praying that Zoe doesn’t get sick though, being the good mother I am, Zoe, of course, had her vaccine.

  But still, I say, before breaking into a coughing fit that sounds really quite sincere, silently giving myself kudos for thespian abilities of which I was unaware I possessed—the compression of air in my lungs, the muculent secretions that erupt from my chest like hot lava from Mauna Loa—you never know.

  None of it, of course, is true.

  I’m finding myself to be quite skilled in the art of lying.

  I gaze eagerly at the baby, sound asleep on the floor, waiting impatiently for the first hint of movement—the fluttering of eyelids, the flicker of a hand—which will eject me from my chair and to her side a split second before Willow, like children in a competitive game of slapjack, both driven to be the first to spot the jack and whack it with their hand.

  I type meaningless words into the computer screen, evidence that I am working.

  My eyes move from Ruby, to Willow, to the laptop, and back again, a never-ending circuit that makes me giddy, afflicted with the sudden sensation of vertigo.

  I listen as, from the adjoining wall, the laughter of Graham and his latest ladylove drift through the drywall to greet me, the tone of her voice—flirty and insincere—indicative of a brief dalliance and nothing more. Graham’s specialty. I watch as Willow’s eyes rise up from the book to listen, to listen to the kittenish laughter and the shrill tone of voice, and as they intersect mine, as those icy blue eyes cut through my own jittery orbs, I find myself looking away quickly, considering the ochre bruise and wondering what it would take for someone like Willow to snap. How much maltreatment and exploitation someone could handle before losing self-control.

  I cannot look at her, into those eyes that threaten me. I stare at the white walls, instead, a framed photo collage of Chris and Zoe and me, black-and-white photographs in wooden frames, the cats in theirs, the word family carved from fiberboard, handpainted and hung in the middle of the display.

  I pat at the pocket of my purple robe and feel for the Swiss Army knife inside.

  A precaution. I heed Chris’s warning: How much can you really know about another person?

  And then the baby does start to stir, her eyelids flutter and there’s a flicker of the hand, but it’s Willow—not me—with her lightning-fast reflexes who reaches the baby first and lifts her from the floor in that rickety way that she does, her arms shaky, her grasp insecure so that for a fraction of a second, or more, I’m certain Ruby will fall. I feel myself rise and step forward to catch the plummeting child, but then Willow’s eyes stop me in my tracks, staring at me, smug, taking great delight in my distress. Ha! those eyes mock me, and I beat you, as if she knew all along that I was waiting. Waiting ever so patiently to hold the baby. To hold that beautiful baby in my arms when she awoke from sleep.

  I lift a hand to my mouth to stifle a scream that threatens to emerge from somewhere deep within.

  “Are you okay?” she asks me, as she returns to the chair, bundling Ruby in the pink blanket. And then, when I don’t respond fast enough, she asks again, “ma’am?”

  My hand drops from my gaping mouth to my splintered heart and I lie, “yes, just fine,” finding that lying is so easy to do as an air of serenity disguises my turbulent state, the tempestuous clouds that roll in before a storm.

  I’m aware suddenly of the TV in the bedroom, blaringly loud. The reality show has broken for commercial, and suddenly we are being screamed at, chided and admonished, to buy some sort of fabric softener which smells of eucalyptus leaves. It enrages me; the sound of it, loud and emphatic, might wake Zoe from sleep. I curse it out loud, that damned commercial, I curse the TV and the network and the eucalyptus fabric softener which I will never buy. I march down the hall to turn the TV off, pressing power so vehemently that the TV slides two inches or more on the console, scratching the wall. Behind me, in the queen-size bed, beneath the matelassé comforter, Zoe rolls over onto a side, her hands still clutching the remote control though she sleeps.

  She lets out a sleepy sigh.

  My heart drums loudly in my chest, overwhelmed by that sense of being completely out of control. Powerless. On the verge of going mad. As I stand there, in the bedroom, staring at the blank TV screen, I feel overcome by a sudden wave of nausea, my legs turn to jelly and, for one split second, I’m certain I’ve gone into cardiac arrest.

  I inch into the bathroom as blackness sweeps across my eyes like window cleaner splashed on a dirty pane. I drop onto the edge of the bathtub and set my head beneath my legs, forcing the blood back up to my brain.

  And then I reach for the faucet and turn the water on so that Zoe, if she awakes from her anesthetized doze, will not hear me cry.

  And that’s when I see it: the filigree bird painted a distressed red, the shabby chic hook on the wall. An extra hole, poorly plastered and painted, a reminder that when Chris hung the hook, he hung it askew.

  I purchased the hook from a flea market in Kane County, on a road trip Jennifer and I made some six, maybe, seven years ago. The forty-some miles out of the city and to St. Charles was the closest either of us had been to a vacation in years. As Jennifer and I scoured through antiques and collectibles for things we didn’t need, the girls, Zoe and Taylor, rode behind in a red wagon, stuffing themselves with hot dogs and popcorn to stay quiet and satisfied.

  The hook, completely bare.

  I grope at my neck but come up empty, as I knew with certainty I would do, for I recall hanging the chain—the golden chain with my father’s wedding band, the words The beginning of forever engraved along its inside—from the filigree bird before I kissed Zoe on the forehead good-night. Before I left the bedroom—dimming the lights—and returned to the kitchen to clean pots and pans that awaited me on the cooling stove. Before I gathered the foul-smelling plastic bag from the garbage can and marched it down the hall to the chute. Before I settled down with my laptop to type meaningless words onto the screen, waiting fruitlessly for Ruby to stir.

  She has taken my father’s wedding ring.

  All at once, it’s as if he’s died again, my father. I’m teleported to the morning my mother phoned from their Cleveland home. He’d been sick for months and so it should have come as no surprise to me, the fact that he was dead. And yet the news of it, the very words slipping from my mother’s tongue, her tone newsy rather than sorrowful—he’s dead—completely bowled me over, left me stupefied. For weeks I went on believing it was a mistake, a misunderstanding, certainly this couldn’t be true. There was the funeral and the burial, of course, and I watched as some man resembling my father—but cold and rubbery, his features pliable and strange—was lowered into the ground, and then, like the dutiful daughter I was, I tossed my roses on top of the casket because it was what my mother carried when they were wed. Lavender roses.

  Though I believed in my heart of hearts it wasn’t my father inside that box.

  I tried phoning him each and every day, my father, worried when he didn’t answer his cell phone. From time to time my mother would answer, and in her kindest, gentlest voice she’d say, “Heidi, dear, you can’t keep calling like this,” and when I continued to call, she suggested to me, to Chris, that I see someone, someone who could help me sort through my grief. But I refused.

  As I refused to see someone—a counselor, a shrink—as the ob-gyn
suggested I do after he killed Juliet, after he appropriated my womb.

  It’s nearing ten o’clock in New York City. I call Chris from a cell phone stashed in my pocket, to tell him that Willow has stolen from me, and yet his cell phone rings and rings without an answer.

  I wait ten minutes and then try again, knowing that Chris is a night owl, and so he is certainly awake, certainly slaving away on some offering memorandum that he swore he’d be writing.

  Or so he said.

  When again there is no response, I text a message: Call me. ASAP. And proceed to wait futilely for twenty minutes or more.

  And then I begin to seethe.

  I search online for a phone number for the Manhattan hotel and put in a call, asking reception to transfer me to Chris Wood’s room. I whisper for Zoe’s sake, and she asks me more than once to repeat myself. There’s a pause as the woman tries to make the connection, but then she comes back on the line and says apologetically, “There’s no answer in that room, ma’am. Would you like to leave a message?”

  I hang up the phone.

  I consider calling again and asking to be transferred to Cassidy Knudsen’s room.

  I consider a red-eye flight out to New York, a surprise appearance in the lobby of his hotel, desperate to catch him and Cassidy flitting about, laughing at some joke the rest of the world is not privy to. I see Cassidy in her hotel-issued robe, Chris in his, champagne delivered via room service, and strawberries. Yes, of course, strawberries.

  The Do Not Disturb door hanger placed on the handle.

  I can feel the blood creeping up my neck, making my ears ring. My pulse loud enough that Zoe, sound asleep, can certainly hear. My heartbeat is so erratic it makes me dizzy, and I drop my head again beneath my legs to catch my breath, thinking evil thoughts toward my husband and that woman, thoughts of planes bound for Denver bursting into flames and crashing to the ground.