Pretty Baby

by Mary Kubica

  And yet I don’t know.

  “Just let me hold the baby,” I say, and then to appease her, “just let me hold Juliet.” And I’m thinking of all the things I should have done when we lost that baby. I should have consoled her more, I think; that’s what I should have done. I should have taken her to a shrink as her ob-gyn said to do. Among other things.

  But Heidi said she was okay. She said she was fine, after we’d made the decision to abort that child so the doctor could treat Heidi’s cancer. And yet I ignored the sadness I saw in her, the craving, the need. I figured if we ignored it, it would go away, like a stray cat, a pesky sibling.

  She’s quiet for a moment, watching me. I’m certain she’ll give in, if only I can convince her that it’s for the baby’s good. “Let me make her a bottle,” I say, my voice as soft as silk. “She’s hungry, Heidi. Just let me make her a bottle.”

  The words come out pleading, desperate. But Heidi doesn’t give in. She can read right through me, Heidi who knows me so well.

  She brushes past me and into the kitchen, where she rummages through drawers. I grab her by an elbow as she passes by, but she shoves me in a way I never thought my wife capable of, enough that I lose my balance and almost fall. By the time I get my bearings, I find her in the middle of the kitchen, holding a Swiss Army knife in the palm of a hand, the sharp blade aimed at me.

  I should have seen this coming; I should have known. I go through the past few days in my head, trying to figure out what I overlooked, some desperate cry of Heidi’s for help.

  A breakdown, that’s what was happening. A mental breakdown. A psychotic break.

  But how did I not see it coming? Did I ignore the warning signs?

  “Go away, Chris,” she says.

  She doesn’t have it in her to use that knife—or so I tell myself—but even I’m not sure.

  “Heidi,” I whisper, but she thrusts that knife into the air, stabbing the oxygen in the room. I glance at a clock on the wall and know that Zoe will be home soon.

  For once in my life I don’t think about me. I think about Heidi, Zoe, the baby.

  And I lunge. It’s not enough to gain control, but enough to knock the knife out of her hand. It lands on the hardwood floor with a thunk, leaving a chip in the oak floor that we’ll forever remember: a reminder of this day. We scramble for the knife, the both of us, the baby thrashing in Heidi’s unstable hands, her cry slowly caving in to exhaustion and fear. I charge for the Swiss Army knife on the kitchen floor, sliding headfirst, like a baserunner into second base, coming up with it in my hands.

  And it’s then that Heidi turns—before I have a chance to get to my feet—and sprints, down the narrow hall, slamming the door and locking herself and the baby in the bedroom.

  She’s crying; Heidi is crying. I can hear her through the door, sputtering some kind of mystifying diatribe about babies and Juliet, Cassidy and Graham, our neighbor Graham, the man from next door. Graham. I could call Graham for help. But there is no time. I try to reason with her—Heidi, please, open the door. Let’s talk. Let’s just talk this out.—but she won’t be reasoned with.

  I think of all the pseudo-weapons that are in that room and the adjoining bathroom: nail clippers, a nail file. Electrical sockets.

  And then there are the windows, five floors up from the concrete below.

  I don’t think twice. I reach for the phone and dial 911.

  “It’s my wife,” I say desperately to the dispatcher on the other end of the line when she asks the nature of my emergency. “I’m afraid she’s... I don’t know... She needs help,” I say then, shaking my head quickly from side to side; I don’t know what Heidi may do. Take her own life; take the baby’s life? Thirty minutes ago I would have said no, never, not Heidi.

  But now I didn’t know.

  “Just come,” I command instead, and I rattle off the address.

  And then I hurry toward the bedroom door, fully prepared to knock it to the ground.

  HEIDI

  I don’t know what happens first.

  They take my blood. They hold me down on the starch-white gurney, two men do, two men in face masks and bouffant caps, their hands clad in latex gloves. They hold me down while a third injects a needle into me and takes my blood; he steals my blood from me. Chris stands idly by behind a utility cart as I kick and scream, thrusting my body from the bed, until the men with the masks and the caps and the gloves press their weight into me until I can no longer move. Their alien faces stare at me: their massive, hairless heads, their frightening opaque eyes. They have no mouths, no noses as they probe me with this and that and I scream as Chris watches from afar, saying nothing.

  And then they sit me down at a table, a folding table of sorts with three padded black chairs, a clock on the wall, the requisite one-way mirror you see on TV.

  Not the aliens. No not the aliens. Someone else. Someone else entirely.

  I don’t know what happens first.

  “My daughter. I need to see my daughter,” I continue to chant, but they say to me that if I cooperate I’ll be able to see my daughter soon. If I cooperate. But whether it happens before or after the blood, I don’t know. I can’t say. There’s a woman there, an older woman with long silver hair and I’m watching as my Juliet gets passed from one person’s arms to the next, to the next, before she disappears.

  “Do something!” I beg of Chris, but he ignores this, standing there in a room with dozens of desks and chairs. He ignores me, staring past me and through me, but never at me as they lead me into a room and close the door where Chris can no longer see. I wonder if I am invisible, if that’s that reason Chris cannot see me. Like air, oxygen, ghosts. Perhaps I am a ghost, an apparition; perhaps I am dead. Perhaps they did not take my blood but rather injected me with potassium chloride so that I would die, there on the gurney with the men in face masks. But my hands are bound in cuffs, and the woman with the long silver hair, she can see me. She asks questions about a Claire Dalloway, setting photographs on the table between us, gruesome images taking up residence in my mind, gory, bloody images of a man, spilled across a bed, a woman beside him, her torso strewn upon his, each slathered with blood. Carmine blood, thick and gooey, absorbing into the tawny sheets.

  I remember the blood on Willow’s undershirt and I begin to scream.

  “Where have they taken the baby?” I cry out, trying in vain to free my hands from their cuffs, so that the handcuffs scrape the inner lining of my wrist. My hands are bound behind my back so that I can hardly move, a guard forcing me into my chair each time I attempt to stand, to rise from my perch and find my baby. “Where have they taken my Juliet?” I plead again when she fails to respond. And then I hear it, clear as day: I hear my baby cry. My eyes dash around the soundproofed room, searching every nook and cranny for my Juliet. She’s here. She’s here somewhere.

  “She’s in good hands,” the woman says, but she doesn’t tell me where. I drop my head beneath the table to see: is she there? Hidden beneath the table?

  “Mrs. Wood?” the woman asks, tapping on the table to get my attention. She’s impatient and short-tempered, this woman with her tape recorder and her felt-tip pens. “Mrs. Wood, what are you doing, Mrs. Wood?”

  But no. Only a washed-out tile floor, varnished with coffee stains, and smut, grime, filth.

  “I need to see my baby,” I say, raising up to look her in the eye. “I have to see my baby.”

  There’s a moment of silence. The woman, Louise Flores, the assistant state’s attorney or so she says she is, stares at me with dull gray eyes. And then: “You must be mistaken, Mrs. Wood. The baby you brought in,” she tells me, “that baby is Calla Zeeger. She is not your baby.”

  And I’m gripped with a sudden onset of wrath and fury, and I find myself rising with great difficulty to my feet and screaming at her, that she’s wrong, that the baby is mine. Mine! I ignore the pain I feel in my arms, my back as I stretch them in ways I didn’t know I could move, like women whose children are pinned
beneath cars, finding they can suddenly lift four thousand pounds in a single motion, in one single hoist.

  A guard is coming at me quickly, ordering me to sit down. “Sit down now,” he barks, and I see him then, I see him clearly: a Perro de Presa Canario with a coarse brindle coat bounding across the room, barring razor-sharp teeth, growling—a rasping, gravelly growl: a warning. Slobber dribbles from his wide-open mouth, his teeth like spears, his eyes intent on his next meal. His hands are firm on me, on my shoulders, pressing me into the chair so that it hurts along the ridges of my shoulders where his hands meet my flesh. And he bites, that Presa Canario does, he bites quickly, unexpectedly, tearing the skin, so that blood runs its course down my arm, and I stare at that blood, blood which the others—the woman, the man—do not see. Blood which is invisible, like me.

  I sit. But I don’t stay seated. I stand again from my chair and push past the guard, losing balance and crashing headfirst into the wall. “I need to see my daughter!” I scream. “My daughter. My daughter,” over and over again, maybe a thousand times or more, before I fall to the ground in tears.

  And then that woman decides that she’ll leave, then and there, with an autonomy that no longer belongs to me, rising from her chair. “I think we’re through here,” she says, her gray eyes not making contact with mine.

  I hear her say something about the need for a psych consult, the words delusional and disorder suffusing the room long after she leaves.

  And then the blood. And the gurney. And the men with the face masks and gloves. Aliens. My ears ring as they inject me with needles and probes. But what comes first, I can’t say. I don’t know what happens first, how Chris comes to loiter at the far end of the room behind the utility cart, watching as aliens inject me and take my blood, as they administer a lethal dose of potassium chloride so that I will die. “Stop them!” I demand of Chris, but he ignores this, again, as he ignores me, and once again I am invisible, a phantom, a spook.

  My Chris, who never cries, is wet with tears. He stands, still as a statue, behind that utility cart, refusing to move. I’ll never forgive him for this.

  And then I am tired, oh so very tired all of a sudden, the fatigue weighing on me like a thousand bricks there on the gurney while the men with the face masks and gloves watch, they watch as I stare at the tubular flourescent lights that line the ceiling tiles, my eyes suddenly becoming too heavy to hold open and I wonder, in that final moment before I go to sleep, what else they will take from me.

  I want to beg Chris to stop them, to plead with him to do something, but I find that I can no longer speak.

  * * *

  I awake in a room on a bed with a window that overlooks a green grassy park. A woman stands before that window in a pair of wide-leg pants and a button-down shirt, her back to me, staring out at the scenery. There is wallpaper on the walls: herringbone stripes in ecru and sage, and hardwood on the floor.

  When I try to move I find myself bound to the bed; the chime of metal on metal makes the woman turn to me, to stare at me with gracious green eyes and a smile.

  “Heidi,” she says most pleasantly, as if we know one another, as if we’re friends. But I don’t know this woman; I don’t know her at all. But I find that I like that smile, a smile that makes me half-certain the men with the face masks, the woman with the questions, the potassium chloride, and the dog—the Presa Canario with its coarse brindle hair—were all a dream. I peer down to my arms and find no blood, no cavernous teeth marks left in the skin, no bandages to stop the bleeding. My eyes bound around the sterile room, searching for Juliet, behind the sheer curtains, in the folds of the bedspread.

  “Where have they taken my baby?” I ask weakly, the words tired and paltry, my mouth like cotton. I can no longer scream. I pull dispiritedly on the handcuffs, trying to free myself from the bed.

  “They’re for your own safety,” the woman says as she moves closer and sits in a chair beside the bed, an armchair she pulls close, skidding it across the tile floor as she says to me, “You’re in good hands, Heidi. You are safe. The baby is safe,” and I don’t know if it’s the compassion in her voice, or my overwhelming fatigue and despair, but I begin to weep. She snatches two, and then three, tissues from a dispenser on the bedside table and presses them to my face, for I cannot reach with my own hands. I pull away at first, away from this stranger’s touch, but find myself leaning into it then, into the warmth of her hands, the softness of the tissue.

  She tells me her name, a name I instantly forget, save for the title that precedes it. Doctor. And yet she doesn’t look like a doctor at all, for there is no lab coat, no stethoscope. No balding head.

  “We just want to make you feel better, that’s all,” she says, her voice pleasant and accommodating, as she runs that tissue across my cheek and wipes the tears from my eyes. Her hands, they smell of honey and coriander, reminding me of my mother’s cooking. My mind drifts back to my childhood home, the chunky farm table around which the four of us sat: my mother, my father, my brother and me. But my thoughts get stuck on my father, my father who is dead. I see the casket being lowered into the ground, lavender roses in the palm of my hand, my mother beside me, ever stoic, waiting for me to disintegrate into a million pieces in that graveyard, the one saturated by rain. Or wait—I wonder—was it the other way around? Was I the one who watched my mother, waiting for her to disintegrate?

  I long to reach out and hold his wedding band, my father’s wedding band, in the palm of my hand, to wrap my fingers around the golden chain, but I’m affixed to the bed and cannot budge.

  “Where is my baby?” I ask again, but she only says that she is safe.

  She tells me without my asking that she has kids, too. Three of them. Two boys and a daughter named Maggie, only three months old, and it’s only then that I notice the baby weight on the woman’s otherwise slender frame, baby weight that has yet to fade. It’s this, the mention of her own children, that makes it easier to talk, easier to reveal the secrets I’ve held inside for so long.

  Ruby, Juliet, Ruby, Juliet, and I remember then, that famous Rubin’s vase.

  And so we talk about the sleepless nights and the fatigue. I tell her that Juliet has yet to sleep through the night, though my thoughts are heavy and opaque, words trapped in the sky on a cloudy day. I explain how she’s been ill—a urinary tract infection, I say—making it all the more difficult, to console a child who’s in pain. And the kind woman nods her head and agrees, and she tells me of her Maggie, born with a congenital heart disease, forced to undergo surgery just days after she left her mother’s womb. And I know then that this doctor, she understands. She understands what I’m saying.

  And then she asks about Willow, not in the way the other woman did, but kinder, more gentle. She asks when she left, and why. “Why did she leave?” she asks, and so I tell her. I tell her about my father’s wedding band and the golden chain. About discovering the filigree bird hook with its distressed red finish completely bare, though I knew that I’d hung the chain there.

  But no, I think, yanking again on hands that are bound to the bed in handcuffs, trying hard to peer down and prove to myself that the chain is there, around my neck as it should be. I ask the woman for it, for my father’s wedding band on the golden chain, but she peers beneath the neckline of a hospital gown and tells me there is no chain, no wedding band there.

  And it’s then that my mind replays a scene, obscured somehow, by fog. Like a movie I’d seen in the past, the character’s names and title of the film long gone, but snippets of the movie left here and there in the recesses of my memory. Quotations, love scenes, a passionate kiss.

  But in this scene, I offer medication to Zoe on the palm of my hand, two oblong white pills, and then I watch from the edge of a bed as she thrusts the pills into her mouth without a glance. I watch as she swallows, then, with a long swig of water. And then I return to the bathroom to replace a prescription pill bottle into an open medicine cabinet, the word Ambien staring me straight in th
e eye, beside pain relievers, beside antihistamines. And then I quietly close the door.

  “Why didn’t you report her to the police?” the woman asks when I tell her about the wedding ring. I shrug my shoulders, on the verge of tears, and say that I don’t know. I don’t know why I didn’t call the police.

  But I do know, don’t I?

  And then there I am again, closing the door to the medicine cabinet and watching Zoe, anesthetized by my Ambien and not an antihistamine at all, drift off to sleep so that she won’t be awoken in the night. And I recall the words, my words running that night through my mind: there’s no telling what the night will bring.

  I see myself remove the golden chain from around my neck and begin to hang it on the filigree bird, but then I don’t. I stop just short and conceal it, instead, in the palm of my hand, kissing Zoe on the forehead in the adjoining master bedroom before I leave the room.

  And I step into the living room to find Willow in a chair, my Juliet sound asleep on the floor. I set to cleaning the remains of dinner, and in my visions, in this foggy memory—or maybe not a memory at all, but a daydream, a fantasy—as I discard leftover spaghetti into a plastic garbage bag, I watch from a distance as the golden wedding chain and band tumbles from my hand and into the garbage bag, comingling with hardening noodles and bloodred spaghetti sauce, and then I hoist the plastic bag out into the hall and down the garbage chute.

  But no, I think, shaking my head. That can’t be. This is not true.

  Willow took my father’s ring. She killed that man and then she took my father’s wedding ring. She is a murderer, a thief.

  “Is there more?” the woman asks of me as she watches me shake my head from side to side like the bob of a grandfather clock. “Do you have any idea where Willow might be?”

  It can’t be. Willow took that ring, I remember then and there, the way I sat on the edge of the bathtub, water running so that Zoe—sick with a cold, or maybe allergies—would not hear me cry. The way I looked up and discovered the hook completely bare, the way I tried in vain to call Chris for advice, but he was too busy with Cassidy Knudsen to answer my call.