A chance encounter sparks an unrelenting web of lies in this stunning new psychological thriller from national bestselling author Mary Kubica

She sees the teenage girl on the train platform, standing in the pouring rain, clutching an infant in her arms. She boards a train and is whisked away. But she can’t get the girl out of her head…

Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and apparently homeless, this girl could be a criminal—or worse. But despite her family’s objections, Heidi invites Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home.

Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow get back on her feet, but as clues into Willow’s past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to decide how far she’s willing to go to help a stranger. What starts as an act of kindness quickly spirals into a story far more twisted than anyone could have anticipated.

MARY KUBICA holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in History and American Literature.She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two children and enjoys photography, gardening and caring for the animals at a local shelter. Pretty Baby is her second novel. Visit her website, www.MaryKubica.com.

Also by Mary Kubica

THE GOOD GIRL

Pretty Baby

Mary Kubica

For the ones I’ve lost

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Dedication

HEIDI

CHRIS

HEIDI

CHRIS

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

CHRIS

HEIDI

CHRIS

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

CHRIS

WILLOW

CHRIS

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

CHRIS

HEIDI

CHRIS

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

CHRIS

HEIDI

WILLOW

CHRIS

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

CHRIS

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

CHRIS

WILLOW

HEIDI

WILLOW

CHRIS

HEIDI

WILLOW

Extract

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Endpages

Copyright

HEIDI

The first time I see her, she is standing at the Fullerton Station, on the train platform, clutching an infant in her arms. She braces herself and the baby as the purple line express soars past and out to Linden. It’s the 8th of April, forty-eight degrees and raining. The rain lurches down from the sky, here, there and everywhere, the wind untamed and angry. A bad day for hair.

The girl is dressed in a pair of jeans, torn at the knee. Her coat is thin and nylon, an army green. She has no hood, no umbrella. She tucks her chin into the coat and stares straight ahead while the rain saturates her. Those around her cower beneath umbrellas, no one offering to share. The baby is quiet, stuffed inside the mother’s coat like a joey in a kangaroo pouch. Tufts of slimy pink fleece sneak out from the coat and I convince myself that the baby, sound asleep in what feels to me like utter bedlam—chilled to the bone, the thunderous sound of the “L” soaring past—is a girl.

There’s a suitcase beside her feet, vintage leather, brown and worn, beside a pair of lace-up boots, soaked thoroughly through.

She can’t be older than sixteen.

She’s thin. Malnourished, I tell myself, but maybe she’s just thin. Her clothes droop. Her jeans are baggy, her coat too big.

A CTA announcement signals a train approaching, and the brown line pulls into the station. A cluster of morning rush hour commuters crowd into the warmer, drier train, but the girl does not move. I hesitate for a moment—feeling the need to do something—but then board the train like the other do-nothings and, slinking into a seat, watch out the window as the doors close and we slide away, leaving the girl and her baby in the rain.

But she stays with me all day.

I ride the train into the Loop, to the Adams/Wabash Station, and inch my way out, down the steps and onto the waterlogged street below, into the acrid sewage smell that hovers at the corners of the city streets, where the pigeons amble along in staggering circles, beside garbage bins and homeless men and millions of city dwellers rushing from point A to point B in the rain.

I spend whole chunks of time—between meetings on adult literacy and GED preparation and tutoring a man from Mumbai in ESL—imagining the girl and child wasting the better part of the day on the train’s platform, watching the “L” come and go. I invent stories in my mind. The baby is colicky and only sleeps in flux. The vibration of approaching trains is the key to keeping the baby asleep. The woman’s umbrella—I picture it, bright red with flamboyant golden daisies—was manhandled by a great gust of wind, turned inside out, as they tend to do on days like this. It broke. The umbrella, the baby, the suitcase: it was more than her two arms could carry. Of course she couldn’t leave the baby behind. And the suitcase? What was inside that suitcase that was of more importance than an umbrella on a day like this? Maybe she stood there all day, waiting. Maybe she was waiting for an arrival rather than a departure. Or maybe she hopped on the red line seconds after the brown line disappeared from view.

When I come home that night, she’s gone. I don’t tell Chris about this because I know what he would say: who cares?

I help Zoe with her math homework at the kitchen table. Zoe says that she hates math. This comes as no surprise to me. These days Zoe hates most everything. She’s twelve. I can’t be certain, but I remember my “I hate everything” days coming much later than that: sixteen or seventeen. But these days everything comes sooner. I went to kindergarten to play, to learn my ABCs; Zoe went to kindergarten to learn to read, to become more technologically savvy than me. Boys and girls are entering puberty sooner, up to two years sooner in some cases, than my own generation. Ten-year-olds have cell phones; seven- and eight-year-old girls have breasts.

Chris eats dinner and then disappears to the office, as he always does, to pour over sleepy, coma-inducing spreadsheets until after Zoe and I have gone to bed.

* * *

The next day she’s there again. The girl. And again it’s raining. Only the second week of April, and already the meteorologists are predicting record rainfall for the month. The wettest April on record, they say. The day before, O’Hare reported 0.6 inches of rain for a single day. It’s begun to creep into basements, collect in the pleats of low-lying city streets. Airport flights have been cancelled and delayed. I remind myself, April showers bring May flowers, tuck myself into a creamy waterproof parka and sink my feet into a pair of rubber boots for the trek to work.

She wears the same torn jeans, the same army-green jacket, the same lace-up boots. The vintage suitcase rests beside her feet. She shivers in the raw air, the baby writhing and upset. She bounces the baby up and down, up and down, and I read her lips—shh. I hear women beside me, drinking their piping-hot coffee beneath oversize golf umbrellas: she shouldn’t have that baby outside. On a day like today? they sneer. What’s wrong with that girl? Where is the baby’s hat?

The purple line express soars past; the brown line rolls in and stops and the do-nothings file their way in like the moving products of an assembly line.

I linger, again, wanting to do something, but not wanting to seem intrusive or offensive. There’s a fine line between helpful and disrespectful, one which I don’t want to cross. There could be a million reasons why she’s standing with the suitcase, holding the baby in the rain, a million reasons other than the one nagging thought that dawdles at the back of my brain: she’s homeless.

I work with people who are often poverty stricken, mostly immigrants. Literacy statistics in Chicago are bleak. About a third of adults have a low level of literacy, which means they can’t fill out job applications. They can’t read directions or know which stop along the “L” track is theirs. They can’t help their children with their homework.

The faces of poverty are grim: elderly women curled into balls on benches in the city’s parks, their life’s worth pushed around in a shopping cart as they scavenge the garbage for food; men pressed against high-rise buildings on the coldest of January days, sound asleep, a cardboard sign leaned against their inert body: Please Help. Hungry. God Bless. The victims of poverty live in substandard housing, in dangerous neighborhoods; their food supply is inadequate at best; they often go hungry. They have little or no access to health care, to proper immunization; their children go to underfunded schools, develop behavioral problems, witness violence. They have a greater risk of engaging in sexual activity, among other things, at a young age and thus, the cycle repeats itself. Teenage girls give birth to infants with low birth weights, they have little access to health care, they cannot be properly immunized, the children get sick. They go hungry.

Poverty, in Chicago, is highest among blacks and Hispanics, but that doesn’t negate the fact that a white girl can be poor.

All this scuttles through my mind in the split second I wonder what to do. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl.

But then, to my surprise, the girl boards the train. She slips through the doors seconds before the automated announcement—bing, bong, doors closing—and I follow along, wondering where it is that we’re going, the girl, her baby and me.

The car is crowded. A man rises from his seat, which he graciously offers to the girl; without a word, she accepts, scooting into the metal pew beside a wheeler-dealer in a long black coat, a man who looks at the baby as if it might just be from Mars. Passengers lose themselves in the morning commute—they’re on their cell phones, on their laptops and other technological gadgets, they’re reading novels, the newspaper, the morning’s briefing; they sip their coffee and stare out the window at the city skyline, lost in the gloomy day. The girl carefully removes the baby from her kangaroo pouch. She unfolds the pink fleece blanket, and miraculously, beneath that blanket, the baby appears dry. The train lurches toward the Armitage Station, soaring behind brick buildings and three and four flats, so close to people’s homes I imagine the way they shake as the “L” passes by, glasses rattling in cabinets, TVs silenced by the reverberation of the train, every few minutes of the livelong day and long into the night. We leave Lincoln Park, and head into Old Town, and somewhere along the way the baby settles down, her wailing reduced to a quiet whimper to the obvious relief of those on the train.

I’m forced to stand farther away from the girl than I’d like to be. Bracing myself for the unpredictability of the train’s movements, I peer past bodies and briefcases for the occasional glimpse—flawless ivory skin, patchy red from crying—the mother’s hollow cheeks—a white Onesies jumpsuit—the desperate, hungry suction on a pacifier—vacant eyes. A woman walks by and says, “Cute baby.” The girl forces a smile.

Smiling does not come naturally to the girl. I imagine her beside Zoe and know that she is older: the hopelessness in her eyes, for one, the lack of Zoe’s raw vulnerability, another. And of course, there is the baby (I have myself convinced that Zoe still believes babies are delivered by storks), though beside the businessman the girl is diminutive, like a child. Her hair is disproportional: cut blunt on one side, shoulder length the other. It’s drab, like an old sepia photograph, yellowing with time. There are streaks of red, not her natural hue. She wears dark, heavy eye makeup, smeared from the rain, hidden behind a screen of long, protective bangs.

The train slows its way into the Loop, careening around twists and turns. I watch as the baby is swaddled once again in the pink fleece and stuffed into the nylon coat and prepare myself for their departure. She gets off before I do, at State/Van Buren, and I watch through the window, trying not to lose her in the heavy congestion that fills the city streets at this time of day.

But I do anyway, and just like that, she’s gone.

CHRIS

“How was your day?” Heidi asks when I walk in the front door. I’m greeted by the funky scent of cumin, the sound of cable news from the living room TV, Zoe’s stereo blasting down the hall. On the news: record rainfall clobbering the Midwest. An accumulated collection of wet things resides by the front door: coats and umbrellas and shoes. I add to the collection and shake my head dry, like a wet dog. Moving into the kitchen I plant a kiss on Heidi’s cheek, more a force of habit than something sweet.

Heidi has changed into her pajamas already: red, flannel and plaid, her hair with its natural auburn waves deflated from the rain. Contacts out, glasses on. “Zoe!” she yells. “Dinner’s ready,” though down the hall, between the closed door of our daughter’s bedroom and the deafening sound of boy band music, there’s no chance she heard.

“What’s for dinner?” I ask.

“Chili. Zoe!”

I love chili, but these days Heidi’s chili is a vegetarian chili, loaded with not only black beans and kidney beans and garbanzo beans (and, apparently, cumin), but also what she calls vegetarian meat crumbles, to give the impression of meat without the cow. She snatches bowls from the cabinet, and begins ladling the chili. Heidi is not a vegetarian. But since Zoe began ranting about the fat in meat two weeks ago, Heidi made the family decision to go meat-free for a while. In that time we’ve had vegetarian meat loaf and spaghetti with vegetarian meatballs and vegetarian sloppy joes. But no meat.

“I’ll get her,” I say and head down the narrow hall of our condo. I knock on the pulsating door and, with Zoe’s blessing, poke my head inside to tell her about dinner and she says okay. She’s lying on her canopy bed, a yellow notebook—the one with all the teenybopper celebs she’s torn from magazines taped to the front—on her lap. She slams it shut the minute I enter, gropes for social studies flash cards, which lie beside her, ignored.

I don’t mention the crumbles. I trip over the cat on the way to Heidi’s and my bedroom, loosening my tie as I do.

Moments later, we sit at the kitchen table, and again Heidi asks me about my day.

“Good,” I say. “You?”

“I hate beans,” Zoe declares as she scoops up a spoonful of chili, and then lets it dribble back into the bowl. The living room TV is muted, yet our eyes drift toward it, trying our best to lip-read our way through the evening news. Zoe slumps in her chair, refusing to eat, a cloned version of Heidi, from the roundness of their faces to the wavy hair and brown eyes, everything alike down to their cupid’s-bow lips and a handful of freckles splattered across their snub noses.

“What did you do?” Heidi asks and internally I grimace, not wanting to relive the day, and her stories—Sudanese refugees seeking asylum and illiterate grown men—are depressing. I just want to lip-read my way through the evening news in silence.

But I tell her anyway about a customer due-diligence call and drafting a purchase agreement and a ridiculously early conference call with a client in Hong Kong. At 3:00 a.m. I sneaked from the bedroom that Heidi and I share and crept into the office for the call, and when it was finished, I showered and left for work, long before Heidi or Zoe began to stir.

“I’m leaving in the morning for San Francisco,” I remind her.

She nods her head. “I know. How long?”

“One night.”

And then I ask about her day and Heidi tells me about a young man who emigrated from India to the United States six months ago. He was living in the slums of Mumbai—Dharavi, to be exact; one of the largest slums in the world, as Heidi tells me, where he was earning less than two American dollars a day in his home country. She tells me about their toilets, how they’re few and far between. The residents use the river instead. She’s helping this man, she calls him Aakar, with his grammar. Which isn’t easy. She reminds me: “English is a very difficult language to learn.”

I say that I know.

My wife is a bleeding heart. Which was absolutely adorable when I asked her to marry me, but somehow, after fourteen years of marriage, the words immigrant and refugee hit a nerve for me, generally because I’m sure she’s more concerned with their well-being than my own.

“And your day, Zoe?” Heidi asks.

“It sucked,” Zoe grumbles, slumped in the chair, staring at that chili as though it might just be dog shit, and I laugh to myself. At least one of us is being honest. I want a do-over. My day sucked, too.

“Sucked how?” Heidi asks. I love when Heidi uses the word sucked. Its unnaturalness is comical; the only time Heidi talks about things sucking it’s in reference to a lollipop or straw. And then, “What’s wrong with your chili? Too hot?”

“I told you. I hate beans.”

Five years ago, Heidi would have reminded her of the starving children in India or Sierra Leone or Burundi. But these days just getting Zoe to eat anything is an accomplishment. She either hates everything or it’s loaded with fat, like meat. And so instead we eat crumbles.

From the recesses of my briefcase—sitting on the floor beside the front door—my cell phone rings and Heidi and Zoe turn to me, wondering whether or not I’ll abscond with the phone in the middle of dinner to my office, the third bedroom we converted when it was clear there would be no more children for me and Heidi. I still catch her sometimes, when she’s in the office with me, her eyes roving along espresso office furniture—a desk and bookshelves, my favorite leather chair—imagining something else entirely, a crib and changing table, playful safari animals prancing on the walls.

Heidi always wanted a big family. Things just didn’t work out that way.

It’s rare that we get through a quick dinner without the obnoxious sound of my cell. Depending on the night, my mood—or, more important Heidi’s mood—or whatever emergency cropped up at work that day, I may or may not answer it. Tonight I stuff a bite of chili into my mouth as a rebuttal, and Heidi smiles sweetly, which I take to mean: thank you. Heidi has the sweetest smile, sugar-coated and delicious. Her smile comes from somewhere inside, not just planted on those cupid’s-bow lips. When she smiles I imagine the first time we met, at a charity ball in the city, her body cloaked in a strapless vintage tulle dress—red, like her lipstick. She was a work of art. A masterpiece. She was still in college, an intern at the nonprofit she now all but runs. Back in the days when pulling an all-nighter was a piece of cake, and four hours of sleep was a good night for me. Back in the days when thirty seemed old, so old in fact that I didn’t even consider what thirty-nine would be like.

Heidi thinks that I work too much. For me, seventy-hour workweeks are the norm. There are nights I don’t get home until two o’clock; there are nights I’m home, but locked in my office until the sun begins to rise. My phone rings at all hours of the day and night, as if I’m an on-call physician and not someone who deals with mergers and acquisitions. But Heidi works at a nonprofit agency; only one of us is making enough money to pay for a condo in Lincoln Park, to cover Zoe’s expensive private school tuition and save for college.

The phone stops ringing, and Heidi turns to Zoe. She wants to hear more about her day.

It turns out that Mrs. Peters, the seventh grade earth science teacher, wasn’t there and the sub was a total... Zoe stops herself, thinks of a better adjective than the one implanted in her brain by misfit preteens...a total nag.

“Why’s that?” Heidi asks.

Zoe avoids eye contact, stares at the chili. “I don’t know. She just was.”

Heidi takes a sip of her water, plants that big-eyed, inquisitive look on her face. The same one I got when I mentioned the 3:00 a.m. call. “She was mean?”

“Not really.”

“Too strict?”

“No.”

“Too...ugly?” I throw in to lighten the mood. Heidi’s need to know sometimes puts a strain on things. She’s convinced herself that being an involved parent (and by this I mean overinvolved) will assure Zoe that she’s loved as she enters into what Heidi calls: the tumultuous teenage years. What I remember from my own tumultuous teenage years was the need to escape my parents. When they followed, I ran faster. But Heidi has taken out books from the library: psychology books on child development, parenting with love, secrets of a happy family. She’s bound and determined to do this right.

Zoe giggles. When she does—and it doesn’t happen often—she becomes six again, consummately pure, twenty-four-karat gold. “No,” she answers.

“Just...a nag then? A nasty old nag,” I suggest. I push aside the black beans and look for something else. A tomato. Corn. A chili scavenger hunt. I avoid the vegetarian meat crumbles.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“What else?” Heidi asks.

“Huh?” Zoe’s got on a tie-dye shirt with the words peace and love written in hot pink. It’s covered in glitter. She’s got her hair in this side ponytail thing that makes her look too sophisticated for the tangerine braces that line her rambling teeth. She’s drawn all over her left arm: peace signs, her own name, a heart. The name Austin.

Austin?

“What else sucked?” Heidi asks.

Who the hell is Austin?

“Taylor spilled her milk at lunch. All over my math book.”

“Is the book okay?” Heidi wants to know. Taylor has been Zoe’s best friend, her bestie, her BFF, since the girls were about four. They share matching BFF necklaces, skulls of all things. Zoe’s is lime green, and draped around her neck at all times, day or night. Her mother, Jennifer, is Heidi’s best friend. If I remember correctly, they met at the city park, two little girls playing in the sandbox, their mothers taking a breather on the same park bench. Heidi calls it happenstance. Though I believe, in reality, Zoe threw sand in Taylor’s eye and those first few moments weren’t so fortunate after all. If it hadn’t been for Heidi with her spare water bottle to wash off the sand, and if Jennifer hadn’t been in the midst of a divorce and desperate for someone on whom to unload—the story might have had a very different ending.

Zoe replies, “I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Do we need to replace it?”

No comment.

“Anything else happen? Anything good?”

She shakes her head.

And that, in a nutshell, is Zoe’s sucky day.

Zoe is excused from the table without eating her chili. Heidi convinces her to take a few bites of a corn bread muffin and finish a glass of milk, and then sends her to her room to finish her homework, leaving Heidi and me alone. Again, my cell phone rings. Heidi jumps up to start the dishes and I linger, wondering whether or not I’ve been excused. But instead I grab some dishes from the table and bring them to Heidi who’s dumping Zoe’s chili down the garbage disposal.

“The chili was good,” I lie. The chili was not good. I stack the dishes on the countertop for Heidi to rinse and hover behind her, my hand pressed to plaid red flannel.

“Who’s going to San Francisco?” Heidi asks. She turns off the water and turns to face me, and I lean into her, remembering what it feels like when I’m with her, a familiarity so ingrained in us both; it’s natural, habit, second nature. I’ve been with Heidi for almost half my life. I know what she’s going to say before she says it. I know her body language, what it means. I know the inviting look in her eye when Zoe is at a sleepover or long after she’s in bed. I know that now, as she slips her arms around me and pulls me into her, locking her hands around the small of my back, it isn’t an act of affection; it’s one of ownership.

You are mine.

“Just a couple people from the office,” I tell her.

Again with the big inquisitive eyes. She wants me to elaborate. “Tom,” I say, “and Henry Tomlin.” And then I hesitate, and it’s probably the hesitation that does me in. “Cassidy Knudsen,” I admit, meekly, throwing in the last name as if she doesn’t know who Cassidy is. Cassidy Knudsen, with the silent K.

And with that she removes her hands and turns back to the sink.

“It’s a business trip,” I remind her. “Strictly business,” I say as I press my face into her hair. It smells like strawberries, sweet and juicy, combined with a hodgepodge of city smells: the dirtiness of the street, strangers on the train, the musty scent of rain.

“Does she know that?” Heidi asks.

“I’ll be sure to tell her,” I respond. And when the conversation goes quiet, the room silenced except for the indelicate propulsion of dishes into the dishwasher, I seize my opportunity to slip away, wandering into the bedroom to pack.

It isn’t my fault I have a coworker who’s nice on the eyes.

HEIDI

When I wake in the morning, Chris is gone. Beside me, on the distressed wooden nightstand, is a mug of coffee, tepid and likely filled to the gills with hazelnut creamer, but still: coffee. I sit up in bed and reach for the mug and the remote control and, flipping on the lifeless TV, stumble upon the day’s forecast. Rain.

When I finally wobble down the hall to the kitchen, bypassing Zoe’s school portraits from kindergarten through seventh grade, I find her standing in the kitchen, pouring milk and cereal into a bowl.

“Good morning,” I say, and she jumps. “Did you sleep okay?” I ask, and kiss her gingerly on the forehead. She congeals, uncomfortable with the mushy stuff these days. And yet, as her mother, I feel the need to show my affection; a high-five—or secret handshake as Chris and Zoe share—simply won’t do, so I kiss her and feel her pull away, knowing I’ve planted my love for the day.

Zoe’s dressed already in her school uniform: the pleated plaid jumper and navy cardigan, the suede Mary Janes that she hates.

“Yeah,” she says and takes her bowl to the kitchen table to eat.

“How ’bout some juice?”

“I’m not thirsty.” Though I see her eye the coffeemaker nonetheless, a door that she previously opened and I firmly closed. No twelve-year-old needs a stimulant to get going in the morning. Yet I fill my mug to the brim and douse it with creamer, sit beside Zoe with a heaping bowl of Raisin Bran and attempt to make small talk about the anticipated day. I’m inundated with yeses, noes, and I don’t knows, and then she scampers away to brush her teeth, and I’m left with the silence of the kitchen, the steady percussion of raindrops on the bay window.

We head out into the soggy day, bypassing a neighbor in the hall. Graham. He’s pressing at buttons on a snazzy watch, the gadget letting out various beeps and bleeps. He smiles to himself, clearly pleased.

“Fancy meeting you here, ladies,” he warbles with the most decadent smile I’ve ever seen. Graham’s longish blond hair flops against a glossy forehead, strands that will soon be fully erect thanks to a generous supply of gel. He’s wet, though from rain or perspiration, I honestly can’t say.

Graham is heading home from a morning run along the lakefront in his head-to-toe Nike attire, an overpriced watch that tracks mileage and splits. His clothing matches entirely too well, a lime-green stripe in his jacket to match the lime-green stripe in his shoe.

He’s what one would call metrosexual, though Chris feels certain there’s more to it than that.

“Morning, Graham,” I say. “How was the run?”

Leaning against the wheat colored walls with their white wainscoting, he squirts a swig of water into his mouth and says, “Incredible.” There’s a look of euphoria on his face that makes Zoe blush. She glances down at her shoes, kicks invisible dirt from one shoe with the toe of another.

Graham is a thirtysomething orphan, living in this building because the unit next door to theirs was left to him in his mother’s will when she died years and years ago, and Graham, consequently, made out like a bandit, acquiring not only his mother’s inheritance, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a hospital settlement, as well, money that he’s slowly squandered away on fancy watches, expensive wines and lavish home decor.

Graham planned to put the home on the market after his mother died, but instead he moved in. Moving vans replaced all of her eclectic furniture and belongings with Graham’s modern ones, so sleek and stylish it was as if he’d climbed from the pages of a Design Within Reach catalog: the crisp lines and sharp angles, the neutral colors. He was a minimalist, the condo sparse but for sheets and sheets of computer paper that littered the floor.

“Gay,” Chris assured me after we’d stepped foot in Graham’s new condo for the first time. “He’s gay.” It wasn’t only the home decor that caught Chris’s eye, but the closets full of clothes—more clothes than even I owned—that he left purposefully open so we would see. “Mark my words. You’ll see.”

And yet women came to call quite regularly, stunning women that left even me speechless. Women with bleach-blond hair and unnaturally blue eyes, with bodies like Barbie dolls.

Graham had arrived when Zoe was still a toddler. She took to him like fruit flies to a bowl of browning bananas. As a freelance writer, Graham was often home, staring blankly at a computer screen and overdosing himself on caffeine and self-doubt. He came to our rescue more than once when Zoe was ill and neither Chris nor I could miss work. Graham welcomed her onto his tufted sofa where together they watched cartoons. He is a go-to when in need of a cup of butter, a dryer sheet or someone to hold the door. He’s also top-notch at expository writing, helping Zoe with English homework when neither Chris nor I could. He’s an expert at dressing a turkey, something I learned that I couldn’t do three-quarters of the way through cooking Thanksgiving dinner for in-laws.

In short, Graham is a good friend.

“You two should join me sometime,” Graham says about the run. I see the multitude of water bottles harnessed to his waist and think we best not.

“You’d be sorry if I did,” I say, watching as Graham tousles Zoe’s hair and again she blushes, this time the rosy tint having nothing to do with his sexual innuendos.

“What about you?” he says to Zoe, and she shrugs. Being twelve has its advantages, the fact that a shrug and a shy smile can get her off the spot. “Think about it,” he says, flashing that decadent smile, the teeth lined in a row like well-behaved school children, impeccably white. The insinuation of facial hair where he has yet to shave, the downturned eyes, which Zoe avoids like the plague. Not because she doesn’t like him. But because she does.

We say our goodbyes and head out, into the rain.

* * *

I walk Zoe to school before continuing on to work. Zoe attends the Catholic school in our neighborhood, nestled beside a cumbersome Byzantine church, with its gray brick exterior, its heavy wooden doors, its heavenly dome that reaches to the sky. The church is entirely ornate, from the golden murals that run wall to wall, to the stained-glass windows and marble altar. The school sits behind the church, tucked away, a regular brick school building with a playground and a mass of children in matching plaid uniforms hidden beneath multicolored raincoats, their backpacks too obese for their tiny bodies. Zoe slips away from me with barely a goodbye and I watch, from the curb, as she unites with other seventh graders and hurries from the waterlogged street into the dry building, staying away from the little ones—those clinging to parents’ legs and vowing that they don’t want to go—as if they have some communicable disease.

I watch, until she is in the building, and then continue on my way to the Fullerton Station. At some point along the way, the rain, with all of its urgency, turns to hail, and I find myself running, gracelessly, down the street, my feet stomping through puddles, splashing dirty rainwater upon my legs.

The girl and her baby come to mind and I wonder if they, too, are somewhere out there, being pelted by rain.

When I arrive at the station, I use my fare card to unlock the turnstile, then dash up the slippery steps, wondering if I will see them: the girl and her baby, but they are not there. Of course I’m grateful that the baby and her mother are not on the platform in this atrocious weather, but my mind begins to wander: where are they and, more important, are they safe? Are they dry? Are they warm? It’s the definition of bittersweet. I wait impatiently for the train and, when it arrives, I get on, my eyes anchored to the window, half expecting to see the two appear at any second: the army-green coat and lace-up boots, the vintage leather suitcase and sodden pink fleece blanket, the baby’s exposed creamy head, with faint, delicate plumage, the baby’s toothless smile.

At work, a third-grade field trip arrives at our literacy center. With a handful of volunteers, we read poetry to the students, and then the students try their hand at writing and illustrating some poetry of their own, which the more adventurous of the bunch share with the group. The students coming to the center are mostly from lower class, urban neighborhoods, mostly African-American or Latino. Many are from low-income homes, and a smattering speak something other than English—Spanish, Polish, Chinese—in the home.

Many of these children come from families where both parents work, if both parents are still around. Many are from single-parent homes. Many are latchkey kids who spend their afternoons and evenings alone. They are overlooked for more pressing matters: food and housing, to be exact. A morning at our facility is about more than literacy and developing a love of sonnets and haiku. It’s about the doubt that overtakes the children when they walk in our doors (quietly grumbling about the task at hand), and the fortitude with which they leave after a few hours of hard work and the undivided attention of our staff.

But once they’re gone, thoughts of the girl and her baby return.

The rain has quieted to a needless drizzle when lunchtime comes. I fasten my raincoat and head outside, careening down State Street while feasting on some healthy granola bar in lieu of lunch, heading to the library to pick up a book I have on interlibrary loan. I absolute love the library, with its sunlit atrium (though not sunlit today) and grotesque granite gargoyles and millions and millions of books. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.

I pause beside a homeless woman leaning against the redbrick building, and set dollar bills in her outstretched hand. When she smiles at me, I see that many of her teeth are missing, her head covered in a thin black hat that’s supposed to keep her warm. She mumbles a thanks, inarticulate and hard to understand, what teeth she has blackened from what I take to be methamphetamine use.

I find my book on the holds shelf and then take a series of escalators up to the seventh floor, bypassing security guards and elementary school field trips, wandering vagrant men, and women with other women, talking too loudly for the library. The library is warm and calm, and entirely welcoming as I make my way to the literature aisles in search of something enjoyable to read, the latest New York Times bestseller.

And it’s there that I see her, the girl with her baby, sitting cross-legged on the ground in the midst of the literature aisles, the baby laid across her lap, its head elevated by a knee. The suitcase sits on the ground beside her. The girl, it appears, is grateful to be free of its weight for the time being. The girl pulls a bottle from the pocket of the army-green coat, sets it into the obliging baby’s mouth. She reaches for a book from the bottom shelf and—as I sneak into the nearest aisle, yanking some sci-fi thriller from the shelf and flipping to page forty-seven—I hear her voice softly reading aloud from Anne of Green Gables while stroking the underside of the baby’s toes.

The baby is utterly calm. I spy through the metal shelves as the baby consumes the bottle, down to the residual bubbles at the bottom, and as she does her eyes become too heavy to keep open, and they slowly, slowly drift closed, her body gravitating to dormancy, perfectly still with the exception of involuntary twitches here and there. Her mother continues to read, continues caressing the tiny toes with a thumb and forefinger and suddenly I’m eavesdropping on a very personal moment between mother and child.

A librarian appears. “Can I help you find something?” she asks, and I jump, clutching the sci-fi thriller in my hand. I feel guilty, flustered, my coat still dripping with rain. The librarian smiles, her features soft and kind.

“No,” I say quickly, quietly; I don’t want to wake the baby. I whisper, “No. I just found it,” and I hurry to the escalators and downstairs to check out my new book.

* * *

I stop on the way home from work at the video store and rent a movie, a chick flick for Zoe and me, and a box of microwave popcorn, fat-free. Chris has always been a road warrior. As a young girl, Zoe was adversely affected by her “here one-minute, gone the next” father. When he traveled, we would invent fun things to do when we couldn’t be with daddy: movie nights and sleepovers in the big bed, pancakes for dinner, inventing stories in which Chris was a time traveler (much more entertaining) instead of a traveling investment banker (boring).

I take the elevator up to the fifth floor of our vintage building and as I walk inside I find it eerily quiet, strangely dark. Generally it’s the blaring sound of Zoe’s stereo that greets me. But tonight it’s silent. I flip on a lamp in the living room, call out her name. At her bedroom door, I knock. I can see the light leaking out under the door, but there’s no response. I let myself inside.

Zoe, still in her plaid uniform—which is a rarity, these days—is sprawled across the creamy shag rug that lines the hardwood floors. Her uniform is usually discarded for something graphic, something with sequins or rhinestone studs the minute she walks in the door. I can tell she is breathing—asleep—and so I don’t panic. But I watch her, hugging that yellow notebook in her arms, lying aimlessly on the floor as if her body suddenly became too heavy to hold. She’s wrapped in a plush blanket, her head propped on a throw pillow that reads Hugs & Kisses. Her space heater, which Chris bought after Zoe’s many complaints that her bedroom was too cold, is set to seventy-nine degrees. Her bedroom is a furnace, an oven, and Zoe, lying two feet away, is being cooked. Her cheeks are flushed; it’s a wonder the blanket didn’t catch fire. I hit the power button and turn the thing off, but it will take hours for the room to cool.

My eyes deviate around the room, something Zoe would bark at if she were not asleep: the exposed brick walls that appear at random throughout the condo, the reason, Chris deduced, that Zoe’s room was so cold; the unmade canopy bed with the patchwork quilt; the posters of teen celebs and tropical paradises mounted to the walls with putty. Her backpack is on the floor, spilled open, the granola bar I thrust into her hand before school for an after-school snack lying untouched. Balled up notes from classmates are scattered upon the floor. The cats lie beside Zoe, embezzling the feverish heat for themselves.

I run my hands through her long hair and quietly call her name once, and then twice. When she comes to, she sits up at once, her eyes wide, as if she’s been caught doing something wrong. Something bad. She jumps to her feet, the cats falling to theirs, and tosses the blanket to her bed.

“I was tired,” she reasons, and her eyes dart around the room wondering what, if any, transgressions I found. None. It’s nearly seven o’clock, and outside, somewhere behind the dark, plump clouds, the sun is beginning to set. Chris, in San Francisco, is likely sitting down to an outrageous dinner at some extravagant restaurant, studying Cassidy Knudsen across the table. I push the thought from my mind.

“Then I’m glad you took a nap,” I say, eyeing the creases across her cheek, her exhausted brown eyes. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” she says, snatching the yellow notebook from the floor. She clings to it like a baby lemur clinging to its mother’s fur.

“Was Mrs. Peters there?”

“No.”

“She must really be sick,” I say. The flu, it appears, is peaking late this year. “Same sub? The nag?”

Zoe nods. Yes. The nag.

“I’ll start dinner,” I tell Zoe but to my surprise she says, “I already ate.”

“Oh?”

“I was hungry. After school. I didn’t know what time you’d be home.”

“That’s fine,” I tell her. “What’d you have?”

“Grilled cheese,” she says and then, for good measure, “and an apple.”

“Okay.”

I realize I still have on my raincoat, my rubber boots, and my bag is still draped across my body. I thrust my hand excitedly into the bag and produce the movie and popcorn.

“You up for a movie night?” I ask. “Just you and me?”

She’s quiet, her face flat, no animated smile like the silly one on my own. I sense the no long before it appears.

“It’s just...” she starts. “I have a test tomorrow. Mean, median and mode.”

I drop the movie into my bag. So much for that idea. “Then I can help you study,” I suggest.

“That’s okay. I made flash cards.” And she shows them as proof.

I try not to be overly sensitive because I know there was a time that I was twelve—or sixteen or seventeen—and would have rather had dental work than hang out with my mom.

I nod. “Okay,” I say and slip from the room. And, as quiet as a mouse, she closes and locks the door behind me.

CHRIS

We’re sitting in a hotel room: Henry, Tom, Cassidy and me. It’s my hotel room. There’s a half-eaten box of pepperoni pizza (meat!) on top of the TV, open cans of soda lying around the room. Henry’s in the bathroom, taking a deuce, I think, because he’s been in there so long. Tom is on the phone, in the corner, with a finger pressed in one ear so he can hear. There are pie charts and bar graphs spread across my bed, dirty paper plates everywhere, on the table, on the floor. Cassidy’s plate is on the end table, the one with the pepperoni plucked off and left in a neat pile beside her can of diet soda. I snag a piece of pepperoni and pop it in my mouth and when she looks at me, I shrug and ask, “What? Heidi’s gone meatless these days. I’m becoming protein deficient.”

“The New York Strip steak didn’t satisfy that craving?” she asks. She’s smiling. A frisky sort of smile. Cassidy Knudsen is somewhere in her twenties, late twenties, right off an MBA. She’s been working with us for about ten months. She’s a freaking genius, but not the awkward, nerdy type. The kind that can use words like fiduciary and hedging and actually sound cool. She’s built like a lamp post, tall and thin, with a sphere at the top that glows.

“If I wanted my wife here, I would have brought her.”

She’s sitting on the edge of my bed. She wears one of those pencil skirts with three-inch heels. A woman of Cassidy’s stature does not need three-inch heels, which makes it all the more risqué. She runs her hands through champagne hair, a sleek bob cut, and says to me, “Touché.”

Outside the window the San Francisco skyline lights up the night. The heavy, hotel curtains are open. From the right angle we can see the Transamerica Pyramid, 555 California Street, and San Francisco Bay. It’s after nine o’clock. In the room next to us, the TV is loud, the sound of preseason baseball drifting through the walls. I pluck another piece of pepperoni from Cassidy’s plate and listen: Giants are up 3 to 2.

Henry emerges from the bathroom and we try hard to ignore the stench that follows. “Chris,” he says, offering his cell phone in an outstretched hand. I wonder if he washed that hand. Wonder if he was on the phone the whole time he was in the bathroom. Henry isn’t the classiest guy in the world. In fact, as he walks from the bathroom I see that the fly of his trousers is down and I would tell him, except that he just stunk up my room. “Aaron Swindler wants to talk to you.” I take the phone from his hand and watch as he gropes for another slice of pizza and quickly lose my appetite.

It’s no coincidence the prospective client’s last name is Swindler. I put on my best salesman voice and saunter to my own corner of the cramped hotel room. “Mr. Swinder,” I say. “How about them Giants?” though from the catcalls in the adjoining room I bet the Giants are no longer winning this game.

I didn’t always want to be an investment banker. When I was six years old I had all sorts of lofty goals: an astronaut, a professional basketball player, a barber (it felt lofty at the time, kind of like a surgeon for hair). As I got older it wasn’t so much about the career itself, but how much it paid. I envisioned a penthouse on the Gold Coast, a fancy sports car, people looking up to me. My mind leaped to lawyers and doctors, pilots, but none of those interested me. By the time college rolled around, I had such a penchant for money that I majored in finance because it felt like the right thing to do. Sit in class with a bunch of other overindulged kids and talk about money. Money, money, money.

That, in retrospect, is probably what enticed me the most about Heidi when we first met. Heidi didn’t obsess with money like everyone else I knew. She obsessed with the lack of money, the have-nots verses the haves, where all I was concerned with was the haves. Who had the most money and how could I get my hands on some?

Aaron Swinder is going on and on about derivatives when I hear my own phone ring from across the room, where it lies on the striped comforter beside Cassidy and now Henry, who, forty and notably single, is staring not so subtly at the sheer pantyhose on her legs. I’m waiting for an important call, one I can’t miss, so I motion to her to answer it, and hear her chant, “Hi there, Heidi,” into the receiver.

I deflate, like a helium balloon after a party. Shit. I hold up a finger to Cassidy—hold on—but since Aaron Swinder won’t stop talking about damn derivatives I’m forced to listen to a protracted conversation between Cassidy and my wife, about the flight to San Francisco, dinner at an expensive steakhouse and the goddamn weather.

Heidi has met Cassidy exactly three times. I know because after each and every one of these meetings I’ve been bombarded with the silent treatment, as if I had anything to do with her recruitment to our team or her good looks for that matter. The first time they met was last summer at a work picnic at the botanical gardens. I’d never mentioned Cassidy to Heidi. She had only been working with us about six weeks. It didn’t feel like the necessary, or prudent, thing to do. But as Cassidy sauntered near us in a long, strapless summer dress—where we hid in the shade of a maple tree on a ninety degree day, sweating and feeling totally gross—I saw Heidi grope awkwardly at a jean skirt and blouse, which she was clearly sweating through. I saw all shreds of self-confidence dissolve.

“Who’s that?” Heidi asked later, after the phony smiles and “So nice to meet yous” were through, after Cassidy had walked away in search of another happy marriage she could muddle. “Your secretary?”

I never knew what Heidi meant by that, if it would have been better or worse if Cassidy Knudsen was my secretary.

Later, at home, I caught Heidi pulling negligible gray hairs from her head with a pair of tweezers. Soon after, beauty products besieged our vanity, those laden with antiwrinkle agents and age defying vows.

This is what I’m remembering as I thrust Henry’s cell phone back at him, making sure to say, “Here you go, Henry,” in a powerful tone so that Heidi, back home in Chicago, knows Cassidy and I are not alone, and flee into the hallway with my own phone. Heidi is a beautiful woman, don’t get me wrong. Gorgeous. A person would never guess an entire decade sat between Cassidy and my wife.

And yet, Heidi knew.

“Hey,” I say.

“What was that all about?” she asks. I envision her at home, in bed, pajamas on, red flannel or maybe the polka-dot nightgown Zoe picked out for her birthday. The bedroom TV is tuned in to the news, her laptop spread across her legs. Heidi’s hair is pulled into one of those messy updos—anything to keep it out of her eyes—while she searches online for information on the slums of Dharavi or maybe poverty statistics from around the world. I don’t know. Maybe, when I’m not home, she searches for porn. No. I change my mind. Not Heidi. Heidi is much too tasteful for porn. Maybe she’s looking up some practical use for vegetarian meat crumbles. Cat food? Cat litter?

“What?” I say dumbly. As if I hadn’t noticed. The hotel hallway is covered with the most awful wallpaper, some kind of geometric red design that makes my head hurt.

“Cassidy answering your phone.”

“Oh,” I say. “That.” I tell her about my phone call with Aaron Swindler and then change the subject as fast as I can, blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. “Still raining back home?” I ask. There can be nothing more mundane than talking about the weather.

It is. All day long.

“What are you doing up so late?” I ask. It’s after eleven o’clock back home.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Because you miss me,” I suggest, though of course we know it’s not the case. Chances are I’m not there more than I am there, as has been the case since we started dating. Heidi is used to me being gone. As they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder. That’s what she says anyway when I ask if she misses me. I think she secretly likes having the bed all to herself. She’s a stomach sleeper—and a blanket stealer—with a fondness for sleeping diagonally. For our marriage, me in a hotel room simply works.

“Sure,” she says. And then the expected: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Who said that anyway?” I ask.

“Not sure.” I can hear her fingers moving across the laptop. Click, click, click. “How’s everything going?”

“Fine,” I say and will her to leave it at that.

But she doesn’t. Not my Heidi. “Just fine?” she pries, and I’m forced to relay news of the delayed flight due to rain, followed by turbulence and a glass of spilled orange juice, lunch with a client at Fisherman’s Wharf, the reasons I don’t like Aaron Swindler.

But when I ask about her day, it’s Zoe she wants to talk about. “She’s being weird,” she says.

I chuckle. I slide down the red geometric wallpaper and have a seat on the floor. “She’s twelve, Heidi,” I say. “She’s supposed to be weird.”

“She was taking a nap.”

“So she was tired,” I say.

“She’s twelve, Chris. Twelve-year-olds don’t nap.”

“Maybe she’s getting sick. The flu, you know,” I say, “it’s going around.”

“Maybe,” she says, but then, “she didn’t look sick.”

“I don’t know, Heidi. I haven’t been twelve in a long time. And besides, I’m a guy. I don’t know. It’s probably a growth spurt, maybe some puberty thing. Maybe she just didn’t sleep well.”

I all but hear Heidi’s chin hit the floor. “You think Zoe’s going through puberty?” she asks. If Heidi had her way, Zoe would have remained in diapers and fleece footie pajamas for the rest of her life. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “No,” she says, deciding for herself. “Not yet. Zoe hasn’t even started menstruating.”

I cringe. I hate that word. Menstruating. Menstruation. Menstrual flow. The idea of my daughter wearing tampons—or me having to hear about it for that matter—fills me with dread.

“Ask Jennifer,” I suggest. “Ask Jennifer if Taylor is—” I grimace and force out the word “—menstruating.” I know how women are. A little camaraderie can fix anything. If Taylor’s going through puberty, too, and Heidi and Jennifer can call and text each other about emergent pubic hair and training bras, then all will be fine.

“I will,” she says decisively. “That’s a good idea. I’ll ask Jennifer.” Heidi’s voice quiets, the worried thoughts that consume her mind buttoned up for the time. I imagine her shutting down the laptop, setting it on my side of the bed: a snuggle buddy for the night. “Chris,” she says.

“What?”

But she reconsiders. “Never mind.”

“What is it?” I ask again. A couple walks down the hall, hand in hand. I pull my legs into me to let them pass. The woman, with a very grandiose tone says, “Pardon me, sir,” and I nod in reply. They must be sixty-five years old, still holding hands. I watch them, in their matching khaki pants and spring coats, and remember that Heidi and I rarely hold hands. We’re like the wheels of a car: in sync but also independent.

“It’s nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” she says. “We’ll talk about it when you get home,” and for the first time she decides that she’s tired. Her voice sounds tired. I see her drifting farther and farther under the covers, a stuffy duvet that makes me sweat even in the dead of winter. I envision the bedroom lights off, the TV off, Heidi’s glasses on the end table beside our bed, as is always the routine.

An image pops into my head, unsought and unwanted, and I force it out quickly, like a cannonball from a cannon. What does Cassidy Knudsen wear when she sleeps?

“Okay,” I say. From inside my hotel room, someone knocks on the door. I’m wanted. I rise to my feet and tell Heidi that I have to go and she says okay. We say our good-nights. I tell her I love her. She says “me, too,” as she always does, though we both know the verbiage is wrong. It’s just our thing.

As I return to the hotel room and spy Cassidy in her pencil skirt and three-inch heels, still perched on the edge of my bed, I can’t help but wonder: A satin slip? A ruffled babydoll?

HEIDI

I wake up with an image of Cassidy Knudsen in my mind, and wonder if I’ve been dreaming about her, or if she arrived, then and there, in the morning light, a consequence of our awkward exchange the previous night. I hear her voice over and over again, answering Chris’s phone, that lively “Hey there, Heidi,” that to me, sounded like nails on a chalkboard: sharp and shrill, infuriating.

On the commute to work, I try hard not to think about that girl and her baby. It’s not easy. On the train I try my hardest to focus on my sci-fi thriller and not stare expectantly out the dirty window, waiting for the army-green coat to appear. I spend my lunch with a colleague and not at the public library, though I long to go. To loiter in the literature aisles searching for the girl. I’m worried about the girl, about her baby, wondering where they sleep and what they eat. I’m contemplating how to help, whether to give her money, as I did the woman with the blackened teeth, hovering beside the library, or to refer this girl to a shelter, to one of the women’s shelters in the city. That, I decide, is what I need to do, to find the girl and deliver her to the shelter on Kedzie, where I know she and her baby will be safe. Then I can remove them from my mind.

I’m about to make a break for it—from a mundane lunch meeting with a mundane coworker—when my cell phone rings, a return call from my dear friend Jennifer. I excuse myself and retreat from the lunchroom to my office to take the call, forgetting for a fleeting moment about the girl and child.

“You saved me,” I say as I plop into my chair, hard and cold and certainly not ergonomic.

“From...” Jennifer prompts.

“Taedium vitae.”

“In English?”

“Boredom,” I say.

On my desk sits a framed photo of Jennifer and Taylor, myself and Zoe, one of those photo booth strips from about four years ago, when the girls, eight years old, with their sunny, smiling faces and animated eyes, were still tolerant of being seen in public with their mothers. The girls sit on our laps, Taylor with her big, sad eyes and downward sloping smile, beside Zoe; Jennifer and me, heads smashed together so we all fit in the frame.

Jennifer divorced years ago. I’ve never met her ex, but from the picture she paints, he was inflexible and sour, given to nasty mood swings that resulted in perpetual fights and innumerous nights on the living room sofa (for Jennifer, that is; her ex was too stubborn to give up the bed).

“Taylor isn’t going through puberty, is she?” I ask, just like that. Having a best friend is a wonderful thing. There needs be no proofreading, no refinement, of the comments that come from my head.

“What do you mean? Like her period?”

“Yeah.”

“Not yet. Thank God,” she says, and just like that, I feel some great sense of relief.

But then, because of my tendency to overanalyze, my Achilles’ heel if ever there was one, “Do you think they should be menstruating?” I ask, having discovered on various internet searches that it can start as soon as eight, as late as thirteen. But the websites I scour suggest that menarche begins about two years after girls start developing breasts. Zoe, at twelve, is as flat as a pancake. “They’re not behind schedule or anything, are they?”

Jennifer hears the concern in my voice. She works as a clinical dietitian at a local hospital. She’s my go-to for all things medical, as if working in a hospital provides her with a free medical degree. “It’s not a big deal, Heidi. They all mature at their own pace. There’s no schedule,” she assures me, and then she tells me that Zoe’s adolescence is something I cannot control. “Though I know you’ll try,” she goads, “because that’s just what you do.” The kind of blunt statement only a best friend can get away with. And I laugh, knowing it’s true.

And then the conversation shifts to the spring soccer season and what the girls think of their hot-pink uniforms, whether or not the Lucky Charms is an appropriate team name for a group of twelve-year-old girls, and the girls’ infatuation with their coach, a twentysomething college kid who didn’t make Loyola’s team. Coach Sam, who all the mothers think is dreamy. And there Jennifer and I are, gushing about his bushy brown hair, his dark, mysterious eyes, his soccer player build—the strength and agility, calf muscles like we’ve never seen—pushing all thoughts of Zoe’s emerging adolescence and that girl and her baby from my mind. The conversation drifts to boys, preteen boys, like Austin Bell, who all the girls adore. Including Zoe. Including Taylor. Jennifer admits to finding the words Mrs. Taylor Bell scribbled across her daughter’s notebook and I envision the pale skin of Zoe’s arm, the name Austin tattooed in pink, a heart over the i.

“In my day, it was Brian Bachmeier,” I admit, remembering the spiky locks that graced the boy’s head, the heterochromatic eyes, one blue, the other green. He moved to our junior high from San Diego, California, which was respect worthy in and of itself, but on top of it, the kid could dance, the Carlton and the jiggy, the tootsee roll. He was the envy of the other boys, the one the girls idolized.

I remember asking him to dance at my first boy-girl party. I remember he said no.

I think of Zoe. I think of Taylor. Maybe our girls aren’t so different after all.

There’s a knock on my door. I look up to see Dana, receptionist extraordinaire, beckoning me for a tutoring session with a twenty-three-year-old woman who was recently granted asylum from the country of Bhutan, a small South Asian country sandwiched between India and China. She’d been living in a refugee camp in nearby Nepal for much of her life, living in a bamboo hut with a dirt floor, surviving on food rations, until her father committed suicide and she sought shelter in the United States. She speaks Nepali.

I lay a hand over the receiver and whisper to Dana that I’ll be right there. “Work calls,” I tell Jennifer and we confirm the sleepover for Zoe and Taylor tonight at Jennifer’s home. Zoe is absolutely thrilled about it. So much so that she actually remembered to say goodbye this morning before she ran into school.

* * *

The day dawdles by at an excruciatingly slow speed. Outside the rain quiets, though the city skyline remains gray, the tops of skyscrapers lost in the ashen, obese clouds. When five o’clock rolls around, I say my goodbyes and ride the elevator down to the first floor. It’s rare that I leave the office at five o’clock, but on a night such as this—Zoe at a sleepover and Chris on a delayed flight that won’t arrive until after 10:00 p.m.—I take pleasure in having the condo all to myself, a simple delight that doesn’t happen too often. I’m relishing the idea of watching a chick flick all by myself, of lounging on the sofa in my warm, snuggly pajamas and devouring an entire bag of microwave popcorn all alone (and possibly following it up with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream!).

Above me the clouds are beginning to disintegrate, the sun trying hard to don a lovely sunset behind the fissures in the clouds. The air is cold, an unsettling forty degrees and blowing. I slip my hands in a pair of leather gloves and drape a hood over my head, hurrying, with all the other evening commuters to the “L” station. I force my body into the congested train, where we stand like sardines in a can, smashed together, chugging along the winding, choppy track.

When I depart at the Fullerton Station, I make my way carefully down the wet steps. Beside me, a fellow commuter lights a cigarette and the scent of tobacco fills the air. There’s a nostalgic redolence to it: it reminds me of home. When I was a girl, living with my family outside of Cleveland in a 1970s Colonial home with the sponge-painted walls my mother adored, my father smoked Marlboro Reds, a half pack a day. He smoked in the garage, never in our home. Never in the car when he was with my brother and me. My mother simply wouldn’t allow it. He secreted the scent of tobacco from the pores of his skin. It was on his clothing, in his hair, on his hands. The garage was suffused with the smell; my mother claimed it oozed through the heavy metal door and into the kitchen, a thoroughly white kitchen—white cabinets, white countertops, a white refrigerator, a chunky farm table. In the morning, my father wouldn’t be out of bed five minutes before he was sneaking off to the garage with his coffee and Marlboro Reds. He’d come in, and I’d be at the table eating my Cocoa Puffs and he’d look at me with the most beguiling smile (I knew my mother had snagged a good one when she married my father) and tell me never to smoke, just like that, “Don’t ever smoke, Heidi. Never,” and he’d wash his hands and join me at the farm table for a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

I’m thinking of my father as I make my way down the steps, my fingers instinctively reaching for the yellow gold wedding band that hangs on a chain around my neck. I trace the grooves and ridges of the ring, the words the beginning of forever etched on the inside.

And then, for a split second I’m nearly certain I see him, there, in the crowd, my father in his Carhartt overalls, one hand thrust in a back pocket, the other holding a Marlboro Red, looking straight at me when he smiles. A hammer dangles from its allotted loop on the pants, a baseball cap sits on his head—Cleveland Indians it says—atop a mess of brown hair, which my mother always begged him to trim.

“Daddy,” I nearly say aloud, but then the image disappears as quickly as it appeared, and I shake my head, remembering. It couldn’t be.

Or could it?

Of course it couldn’t, I decide. Of course.

And then I’m breathing in that familiar carcinogenic scent—wanting to smell it and yet not wanting to smell it—when I hear it: a baby’s wail. My feet have just hit the pavement when the sound grabs me by the throat and I spin instinctively, my eyes searching for the source.

And there I see her, sitting underneath the train tracks, shivering in the nippy air. She’s leaning against a brick wall beside newspaper stands and rank garbage cans, beside swollen puddles, sitting on the cold, wet concrete, rocking the baby against her chest. The baby is crying. There’s a frenzy to the way she rocks the baby, a mother with an inconsolable baby, moments away from becoming unhinged. Zoe was a colicky baby, prone to endless hours of intense crying. I can relate with the frustration and the overwhelming fatigue in the girl’s eyes. But what I can’t relate to is her presence on a city street, in the midst of twilight, on a cold spring night. I can’t relate to the desperate way she thrusts a waterlogged coffee cup (likely snatched from the neighboring garbage can) at passersby, begging for money, and the way people give her the once-over, dribbling spare change in her cup: a quarter here, a handful of pennies there, as if any amount of spare change has the ability to save this girl from her fate. I feel my breath leave me for a moment. This girl is a child and the baby is a baby. No one deserves such a fate, to be penniless and displaced, but certainly not a child. My mind leaps to the outrageous cost of infant formula and diapers, knowing that if this girl is supplying diapers for that baby, there is certainly no spare change left for her own provisions. For food and shelter, for the umbrella with the flamboyant golden daisies.

I’m rear-ended by a throng of commuters departing the “L.” I scoot out of the way, unable to join the clique of other wage earners, those retiring to warm, dry homes and home-cooked meals. I simply cannot. My feet are frozen to the pavement, my heart racing. The baby’s wail—piercing and miserable and utterly inconsolable—rattles my nerves. I watch the girl, watch the frenzied rocking, hear the tired words fall from her exhausted mouth as she holds out her cup. “Please, help.”

She’s asking, I tell myself. She’s asking for help.

And yet the do-nothings continue on their way home, rationalizing their lack of concern with the change they drop in her cup, change that would have otherwise found its way to the washing machine or some countertop or bookshelf, where it would sit purposelessly in a ceramic pink pig.

I feel myself tremble as I approach the girl. She lifts her chin as I draw near, and for a split second our eyes lock before she thrusts out her cup and looks away. Her eyes are worse for wear, jaded and pessimistic. I nearly balk for a moment because of the eyes. Icy and blue, a cornflower blue, with much too much eyeliner staining the surface of her bloated eyelids. I think about fleeing. I consider pulling a twenty dollar bill from my purse and setting it in her cup and being on my way. Twenty dollars is much more substantial than a handful of change. Twenty dollars can buy dinner for an entire week, if she’s thrifty. That’s what I tell myself in my moment of hesitation. But then, I realize, she’d likely spend it on Enfamil formula, placing the baby’s needs before her own. She’s rail thin, skinnier than Zoe, who is a string bean.

“Let me buy you dinner,” I declare, my voice much less bold than the spoken words. My voice is quiet, quivering, nearly suffocated by the sounds of the city: taxis passing by and blasting their horns at commuters who jaywalk across Fullerton; the automated message Attention customers. An outbound train, from the Loop, will be arriving shortly, followed by the imminent arrival of the brown line on the platform above us; the sound of the baby’s cry. People pass by, chatting and laughing loudly into cell phones; a forgotten rumble of thunder rolls through the darkening sky.

“No thanks,” she says. There’s a bitterness to her words. It would be easier for her if I dropped in my twenty and continued on my way. Easier now, in this moment maybe, but not when the hunger begins to eat away at her insides, when the baby’s inconsolable crying makes her snap. She stands and reaches for the leather suitcase, shuffling the baby in her arms.

“It helps,” I say, quickly, knowing she’s about to make a run for it, “to lay them on their stomachs sometimes. Like this.” I motion with my hands. “It helps with the colic.” She watches my hands go from upright to horizontal and she nods—to some extent—and I say, “I’m a mother, too,” and she sizes me up and down, wondering why I don’t just go. Like everyone else, drop in my change and go.

“There’s a shelter—” I begin.

“I don’t do shelters,” she interjects. I envision the interior of a homeless shelter: dozens upon dozens of cots lined in a row.

She’s incredibly tough on the exterior. Hardened and rebellious. I wonder if inside she feels the same. She wears the same torn jeans, the same army-green coat, the same lace-up boots. Her clothing is grungy, wet. Her crooked hair carries a slick look, greasy, having not been washed in some time. I wonder about the last time she enjoyed a warm shower, a good night’s sleep. The baby, too, from what I can see is far from clean.

I consider Zoe on her own, on the streets. Homeless. The vision, purely hypothetical, makes me want to cry. Zoe, with her saucy exterior and sensitive, defensive interior, begging for spare change beside the “L.” Prepubescent Zoe with a baby of her own in three or four inconsequential years.

“Please let me buy you dinner,” I say again. But the girl is turning and walking away, the baby slung over her shoulder awkwardly, fussing and thrusting her teensy body about. I’m consumed with desperation, with this need to do something. But the girl is moving away from me, swallowed up by rush hour traffic on Fullerton. “Wait,” I hear my voice say. “Please stop. Wait.” But she does not.

I drop my bag to the moistened sidewalk and do the only thing I can think to do: I shimmy out of my raincoat, fully waterproof and lined, and at the corner of Fullerton and Halstead—where she waits anxiously for a green light to cross the plugged street—I drape the coat over the baby. She delivers me a dirty look.

“What are you—” she starts, accusatorily, but I retreat a step or two so she can’t undo the one thing I can think of to do. The cold air rushes my bare arms where I stand in a short-sleeve tunic and useless, lightweight leggings.

“I’ll be at Stella’s,” I say as the light turns green, “in case you change your mind,” and I watch as she joins the mass exodus of people crossing Fullerton. Stella’s, with its All-American cuisine and pancakes twenty-four hours a day. Completely unimposing and modest. “On Halstead,” I call after her, and she pauses, in the middle of the street, and peers over her shoulder at me, her visage hazy in the glow of oncoming traffic. “On Halstead,” I say again, in case she didn’t hear.

I stand there at the corner, watching until I can no longer see the army-green coat for all the people, until I can no longer hear the baby’s cries. A woman bumps into me and at the same time we say, “Excuse me.” I cross my arms, feeling naked in the brisk air—more fall-like than spring-like—and, turning onto Halstead, hurry to Stella’s. I’m wondering if the girl will show, wondering whether or not she knows where Stella’s is, whether or not she even heard me.

I scurry into the familiar diner and the hostess who greets me says, “No coat tonight? You’ll freeze to death,” as her russet eyes look me up and down—my hair in a frenzy, my clothing insufficient for the weather. I clutch an overpriced quilted handbag, paisley and plum, as confirmation, perhaps, that I am not a vagrant. I have a home. As if the burden of being homeless isn’t enough—the lack of food and shelter, of clean clothing—there’s the horrible stigma attached to homelessness, the disgrace of being thought of as lazy, dirty, a junkie.

“Table for one?” the hostess—a striking woman with snow-white skin and almond-shaped eyes—asks, and I say, “Table for two,” forever hopeful, and she escorts me to a round, corner booth that faces out onto Halstead. I order a coffee with cream and sugar and keep watch out the window, as people trek past, city slickers on their commutes home from work, twenty-year-olds en route to a cluster of college bars on Lincoln, their laughter penetrating the drafty windows of the diner. I watch the eclectic city life meander past the window. I love to people watch. Sleek men in charcoal suits and thousand-dollar shoes beside grunge band wannabes in thrift-store clothing beside mothers with posh jogging strollers and old men hailing cabs. But I hardly notice any of them tonight. All I am looking for is the girl. I think that I see her time and again. I’m sure I catch smidgens of her colorless hair, darker when it’s soiled and wet; of the nylon of her ineffectual coat; an untied shoelace. I mistake briefcases for her leather suitcase; imagine that the squeal of tires on wet pavement is the baby crying.

I receive a text from Jennifer that she’s arrived home from work and the girls are doing just fine. I scan my emails to waste time: most are work related, some junk mail. I check the weather: when will the rain end? No end in sight. The waitress, a fortysomething woman with the most luscious red hair and waxen, winter skin, offers to take my order but I say, “No thanks. I’ll wait until my group arrives,” and she smiles gently and says, “Of course.” And yet, for lack of anything better to do, I skim through the menu and decide on the French toast, but also decide that if my group never shows, I’ll settle for coffee. If the girl and her baby don’t arrive by—I check my watch—seven o’clock, I will pay for the coffee with an ample tip for the waitress’s time and retreat home to my chick flick and popcorn, and my overwhelming concern for the girl and her baby.

I people watch. I watch patrons come and go. I watch them eat, drooling over generous portions of German pancakes and hamburgers with waffle fries. I absolutely hate to dine alone. The waitress returns and refills my coffee and asks if I’d like to continue waiting and I say that I would.

And so I wait. I must check my watch every two and a half minutes. Six thirty-eight. Six-forty. Six forty-three.

And then she appears. The girl and her baby.

WILLOW

“Heidi was the first one in a long time who was nice to me.”

That’s what I tell her, the lady with the long silver hair, too long for someone her age. Old ladies are supposed to have short hair. Grandma hair. Short, wrapped tightly with hair curlers, the way Momma would do Mrs. Dahl’s hair when I was a girl, with the hot-pink curlers she’d plug in to warm, then sit for a half hour or more, painstakingly wrapping the dark gray, brittle hair around the curlers, then plaster it with spray. We’d wait, in that tiny bathroom of ours (my job was to hand Momma the pins), listening to Mrs. Dahl go on and on about how they’d artificially inseminate the cattle on their farm. I was eight years old and so I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I sounded out the words they spelled, words like s-e-m-e-n and v-u-l-v-a.

“Then why’d you do it?” she asks. The lady with the long silver hair, combed straight. And big teeth. Like a horse’s.

“I didn’t want to hurt her,” I say. “Or her family.”

She sighs, leery of me from the moment she walked into the cold room. She hung back, by the door, just watching me with gray eyes from behind a pair of rectangular glasses. She’s got thin skin, like tissue paper, used tissue paper, crinkles everywhere. Her name, she says, is Louise Flores. And then she spells it for me, F-l-o-r-e-s, as if it’s something I might need to know.

“We’ll start at the beginning,” she says, sitting on the other chair. She sets things on the table between us: a recorder, a stopwatch, a pad of paper, a felt tip pen. I don’t like her one bit.

“She wanted to buy me dinner,” I say. I’ve been told that being up-front will go a long way with the silver-haired lady. Louise Flores. That’s what they said, the others who were here: the man with the chin strap and mustache, the cutthroat lady dressed in head-to-toe black.

“Mrs. Wood wanted to buy you dinner?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “Heidi.”

“Well, wasn’t that nice of her,” she says bitterly. Then writes something down in the pad of paper with the felt tip pen. “Ever hear the saying ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?”

When I stare off into space, ignoring her, she prods again, “Huh? Have you? Have you ever heard that saying: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?” And she’s staring at me with her gray eyes, where there’s a reflection of the one fluorescent light off the rectangular glasses.

“No,” I lie, letting my hair fall in my face so I can’t see her. What you can’t see, can’t hurt you. That’s one I know. “Never.”

“I see we’re off to a great start here,” Louise Flores says with an ugly sneer, and presses a red button on the recorder. Then: “I don’t want to talk about Mrs. Wood though. Not yet. I want to go back to the beginning. Back to Omaha,” she adds, though I know good and well Omaha isn’t the beginning.

“What’ll happen to her?” I ask instead. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I tell myself, honest to God, I didn’t.

“To whom?” she asks, though she knows good and well who I mean.

“Mrs. Wood,” I say flatly.

She falls backward, sloping into the angles of the chair. “Do you really, truly care? Or is this just an effort to waste time?” She stares at me, hawkeyed, like Joseph used to do. “I’m in no rush here, you see,” she adds, crossing her arms across herself, across a crisp white blouse. “I’ve got all the time in the world,” and yet there’s a bite to her voice that suggests she does not.

“What’ll happen to her?” I ask again. “To Heidi?”

I imagine the warmth of that nice home, the feel of the soft bed, as the baby and I lay together under the brown blanket that felt just like the soft fur of a bunny rabbit. There were pictures on the walls, there in that home, family pictures, the three of them, pressed close together, smiling. Happy. It always felt warm in there, a different kind of warm, one you felt from the inside out, not the outside in. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, not since Momma. Heidi was about the closest I’d gotten to Momma in eight whole years. She was kind.

The lady’s smirk is smug, her gray eyes lifeless, though her thin lips compress into a phony smile.

“As the saying goes, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” she says, and I imagine Mrs. Wood, in an orange jumpsuit like me, that kind smile washed off her face.

HEIDI

The girl stands there, on Halstead, before the door of the diner, peering through the glass. Not sure if she wants to come in. She’s come this far and yet she hasn’t quite made up her mind. I see through the glass that the baby is crying, still, though not disconsolate. More of a whimper. She has the baby swaddled in my raincoat, lying horizontally on her tummy as best she can manage with the leather suitcase in one hand. Good girl, I think. She was listening. She lays a hand on the door, and for an instant I’m no longer terrified that she won’t show, but suddenly terrified that she has. My heart scurries and a whole new quandary comes to mind: what will I say to her now that she’s here?

A young man in a hurry sweeps up from behind and nearly plows her over to get inside Stella’s. She staggers, retreating from the door, and I think that she’s changed her mind. This young man with his persnickety face, with too much pomade slicked in his hair, has made her change her mind. The man steps inside the warmth of the restaurant, holding the door open for the wavering girl. She eyes him, and then her eyes scan Halstead, trying to decide. Stay or go. Stay or go. After a moment of her hesitation, he briskly asks, which I hear vaguely over the clamor of a crowded restaurant, over dishes clinking and a multitude of voices, “You coming or not?” though the look on his face makes clear he might just let the door slam shut on her face and that of the baby.

I swallow hard and wait for her response. Stay or go. Stay or go.

She decides she’ll stay.

She steps inside the diner and the hostess with the russet eyes scans her up and down. The army-green coat and torn jeans, the musty smell that schlepps along with those living on the street, the baby, awed suddenly by the lights on the ceiling, the warmth of the diner, the noise that is distracting to me but somehow pacifying to her.

“Table for one?” the hostess asks the girl unenthusiastically, and I quickly stand from my corner booth and wave.

“She’s with me,” I mouth, and perhaps then the hostess makes the connection: my bare arms, a second warm, creamy coat swathing the baby. The hostess points in my direction. The girl makes her way through laminate tables, past obese bodies that spill out of banquet chairs, past waiters and waitresses carrying trays full of food.

“You came,” I say as she pauses before the corner booth. The baby turns, at the sound of my voice. It’s the first time I’ve seen the baby so close, under the canned lights that line the drop ceiling. The baby offers a toothless smile, lets out a dove-like coo.

“I found this,” the girl says, pulling out a familiar green card, which I recognize instantly as my library card, “in the pocket. Of your coat.”

“Oh,” I say, not bothering to hide my surprise. How silly of me to give away my coat without checking the pockets, and I remember jamming it inside en route from the public library to work the other day, a sci-fi thriller in my hands. She came to return my library card.

“Thank you,” I say. I take it from her outstretched hand, feeling the overwhelming need to touch that baby. To stroke her doughy cheek, or sweep the few strands of gentle snowy hair. “You’ll join me for dinner,” I say. I turn the library card over in my hands, and then stick it inside the quilted purse.

She doesn’t respond. She stands before the booth, her eyes—mistrusting, weary—looking down, away from me. “What difference does it make to you?” she asks, without looking at me. Her hands are dirty.

“I just want to help.”

She sets the suitcase on the ground, between her feet, and adjusts the floundering baby. The baby, as they tend to do without warning, is becoming agitated, possibly hungry, no longer interested in the recessed ceiling lights.

“It’s not what the world holds for you. It’s what you bring to it,” she nearly whispers, and I find myself staring, dumbly, until she says, “Anne of Green Gables.”

Anne of Green Gables. She’s quoting Anne of Green Gables. Of course, I think, imagining her and the baby on the floor of the library the other day, reading aloud from the L. M. Montgomery classic. Which makes me wonder what other classic children’s books she’s read. The Wind and the Willows? The Secret Garden?

“What’s your name?” I ask. She doesn’t tell me her name. Not at first anyway. “I’m Heidi,” I say, opting to go first. It seems only right. I, I remind myself, am the adult. “Heidi Wood. I have a daughter. Zoe. Who’s twelve.”

The mention of Zoe must help. She sits after a moment, readjusting the baby against her chest. She and the baby slide awkwardly into the corner booth and she pulls a dirty, formula-encrusted bottle from a coat pocket and fills it with ice water from the table. She sets the bottle into the baby’s mouth. The water is too cold, lacking in the nutrients of formula or breast milk. The baby quibbles for a moment, and then makes do. This is not the first time the baby has gotten by on water alone. Anything to fill the void in her tiny tummy.

“Willow.”

“That’s your name?” I ask and she hesitates, then nods. Willow.

Chris and I chose Zoe’s name because we liked it. The alternatives—Juliet, Sophia, Alexis—were all, we believed, to be used in time. For boys, we thought of Zach, to complement Zoe, and of course, Chris threw his own name into the hat. We talked, many times, about how we would trade in our vintage condo for a single family home farther north, Lakeview, or west, Roscoe Village, than our current home, where the mortgage would be slightly less, though the commutes to school and work exponentially longer. I found myself shopping for white, slatted bunk beds when we picked out Zoe’s crib; I foresaw rows of shabby chic comforters and dollhouse bookcases and an abundance of toys scattered across the floor. I thought of homeschooling as an alternative to the pricey private school that Zoe now attends, a much more practical alternative to the forty thousand dollars a year we would spend on tuition for all of our imaginary children.

The doctor used the word hysterectomy. I lay in bed at night when I should be asleep, considering that word, what it means. To the doctor, to Chris, it was a term, a medical procedure. To me it was carnage, plain and simple. The annihilation of Juliet and Zach, Sophia and Alexis. The end of that vision of shabby chic comforters and homeschooling.

But of course, by then Juliet was already gone, a simple D&C procedure that was anything but simple. There was no way to know whether or not she was a girl—that’s what the doctor said, what Chris restated time and again, that there was no way to know—and yet I knew, I knew with certainty it was Juliet who was discarded as medical waste, right along with my uterus, my cervix, parts of my vagina.

I found myself, still, stockpiling baby clothes that I found in boutiques in the city—lavender petti rompers and organic animal print bodysuits—hidden in bins that I purposely mislabeled Heidi: Work and stored in our bedroom closet, knowing full well Chris would never reconnoiter what he thought to be austere literacy statistics and college textbooks on ESL.

“It’s a beautiful name,” I say. “And your baby?”

“Ruby,” the girl says undecidedly.

“Lovely,” I say, and it is. “How old?”

There’s a pause, and then she says, as if not quite sure, “Four months.”

“Have you had a chance to look over the menu?” the redheaded waitress asks, appearing from out of nowhere, it seems. The girl, Willow, starts and looks to me to answer. The menu lies before her, untouched.

“I think we need some time,” I say, but suggest a mug of hot chocolate for Willow, who shivers on the other side of the vinyl booth from the cold. I secure my hands around my own mug, cooler now, but still retaining some heat of the coffee which the waitress now refills for a third time.

“Whipped cream?” the woman asks, and Willow looks to me for approval. Funny, I think, how in that split second she becomes a child, just at the very mention of whipped cream. She strikes me as an optical illusion, like the famous Rubin’s vase: depending on how one looks it at, one of two scenes appear, two profiles, placed face-to-face, or the vase which lies perched between them. They flip-flop before your eyes. Profiles, vase. Profiles, vase. Strong, independent young woman with a baby; helpless young girl with an affinity for hot chocolate and whipped cream.

“Of course,” I declare, perhaps too fervidly. Moments later the waitress returns with the heavenly drink, a warm white mug and saucer, with a plentiful mound of frothy snow on top, speckled with chocolate shavings. Willow reaches for a spoon and dips the tip into the whipped cream, and licks it off, savoring the taste, as if she hasn’t tasted hot chocolate in years.

How is it that someone like her comes to be living on the streets? To be living alone, no caregiver, no guardian. Of course asking the question seems entirely inappropriate, a sure way to send her running. I watch as she appraises the whipped cream, and then goes at it, full tilt, ladling spoonfuls into her mouth until it is gone, until it spills from the corners of her mouth and the baby watches her with covetous eyes, no longer enrapt with the ice-cold water, but with this bubbling white substance oozing from her mother’s mouth.

She raises the mug to her lips and drinks too fast, wincing at a burned tongue. With my spoon, I scoop an ice cube from a water glass and sink it into the hot chocolate. “There,” I say. “That will speed things along.” She hesitates, then tries again, and this time, she doesn’t burn her tongue.

There’s a bruise hidden above her left eye. An ochre color, as if it is healing. Her fingernails, as she grabs for the menu and decides what she’ll have to eat, are long and craggy, with an abundance of dirt wedged between the skin and nail. There are four earring holes placed in either ear, including the cartilage at the top of the ear that’s pierced with a black stud. Running the length of the earlobe are a set of silver angel’s wings, a gothic cross and ruby red lips, in that order. The red lips on the left lobe are missing. I picture them, lying on the filthy city sidewalk beneath the Fullerton Station, being squashed by passersby, or in the middle of the street, getting run over by cabs. Her bangs hang long, over her eyes. When she wants to look at me, she brushes them away, but then lets them enshroud her eyes once again, like a wedding veil. The skin, on her hands, her face, is chapped and red, creating fissures in the dermis, her hands riddled with dry blood. Her lips are cracked. The baby, too, Ruby, has hints of eczema, crusty red patches along her otherwise milky skin. I reach into my purse and produce a travel-size lotion and, sliding it across the table, say, “My hands get dry in the winter. The cold air. This helps.” And as she sets her hand on the lotion, I add, “For Ruby, too. Her cheeks,” and she shoves the bangs away and nods, and without hesitation, applies the cream to the baby’s cheeks. Ruby cringes at the coldness of the lotion, her noncommittal slate-blue eyes watching her mother curiously, with a bit of resentment mixed in.

“How old are you?” I ask, and I know that her immediate, premeditated answer is a lie.

“Eighteen,” she says, without looking at me. Every other question I’ve asked was met with hesitation. It’s the immediacy of her answer that makes me certain it’s a lie. That and the naïveté of her eyes when the optical illusion does an about-face, and she is again a helpless girl. A helpless girl like Zoe.

Children legally become adults at the age of eighteen. They become independent beings. Parents lose their rights over their children; they also lose financial responsibility. There are many things an eighteen-year-old can do legally that a seventeen-year-old cannot, such as living alone on the city streets. If Willow is only seventeen, or fifteen or sixteen for that matter, then certain questions are called to mind: where are her parents and why is she not living with them? Is she a runaway? The consequence of child abandonment? My eyes revert to the ochre bruise and I wonder if it’s a product of child abuse. If she was seventeen, she could be forced to return home, if such a home exists, or forced into the foster care system.

But I let these suspicions fall by the wayside and take the girl’s word at face value: she’s eighteen.

“There are shelters specifically for women and children.”

“I don’t do shelters.”

“I work with young women. Like yourself. Women from other countries. Refugees. I help them, sometimes, to get settled.”

The waitress returns to take our order. I order the French toast and Willow says she’ll have the same. I realize then that she would have had whatever I was having. She didn’t want to be presumptuous, to order a half-pound burger when I was having a salad, or breakfast when I was having dinner. The waitress removes the menus from our table and disappears behind a swinging aluminum door.

“There are some wonderful holistic shelters out there. They offer a safe haven, medical care, psychological care, education. There are caseworkers to help you get on your feet. Help you put together a resume, find childcare for Ruby. I can make some calls,” I offer, but I see that her eyes are cinched on an elderly man sitting at a booth alone, neatly slicing a deli sandwich in half.

“I don’t need any help,” she says, piqued. Then she’s silent.

“Okay,” I acquiesce, knowing if I continue down the same path, she’ll take the baby and the leather suitcase and leave. “Okay,” I repeat, quieter this time. A concession. I stop meddling and she will stay. So she stays and devours her dinner in near silence and I watch as the baby becomes slowly lethargic and drifts to sleep on the girl’s lap. I watch as the girl tears apart the French toast with the side of a fork, and drenches each and every piece in a pool of maple syrup before plunging it into her voracious mouth. I eat slowly, watching the syrup drip down her chin, watching as she wipes it away with the sleeve of the army-green coat.

When is the last time she’s had a square meal?

This is only one of the infinite questions I have for her. How old is she, really? Where is she from? How did she become homeless? How long has she been living alone on the streets? Where is Ruby’s father? How did she acquire the ochre bruise? How often does she visit the library? Does she always haunt the literature aisles, or just whatever suits her fancy on the given day? I nearly mention the librarian with the kind smile—a contrived comment for the purpose of small talk—but I stop myself in time. Of course the girl has no idea I saw her at the library, that I tarried in the neighboring aisle, spying as she read aloud from Anne of Green Gables.

And so we eat in silence. In place of small talk, there are the sounds that accompany eating: mastication and swallowing, more maple syrup spurting from the plastic bottle, a fork dropping to the floor. She reaches down and picks it up, and plunges it into the French toast like a torture victim who’s been denied food for days. Weeks. More.

When the meal is through she sets her hand on the suitcase and rises from the booth. “You’re leaving?” I ask. There’s a pang in my voice. I hear it. She hears it.

“Yes,” she says. Ruby wakes briefly from the movement and then returns to the Land of Nod.

“But wait,” I say, and there is that desperation I felt on the street: her, drifting away, and me, unable to stop her. I flounder for my purse and find a single twenty-dollar bill, not enough to cover the cost of dinner. I will need to wait for the waitress to bring the bill, will need to pay for the meal with a credit card. “Let me take you to the drugstore,” I beg. “We’ll buy you some things. Formula,” I say. “Diapers.” Hydrocortisone for those inflamed cheeks. Cereal bars for Willow. Diaper rash cream. Toothpaste. Toothbrush. Shampoo. Hair brush. Vitamins. Bottles of purified water. Gloves. An umbrella. And then it sounds harebrained, even in my own mind, for how could she tote all of those so-called necessities up and down the city streets.

She eyes the twenty in my open wallet and I yank it out, without a second thought, and extend it to her. “You’ll go to the drugstore,” I say. “Buy what you need. For yourself. For the baby.” She hesitates for a brief second, and then yanks the bill from my hand. She nods, which I take to mean yes and thank you.

“Wait,” I say, before she slips away. Without thinking, I place a hand on the nylon coat and stop her before she goes. The nylon feels strange to my touch, foreign. When the frosty blue eyes turn to me, I withdraw the hand in haste, and beg, “Please. Wait. Just one second,” as I unearth a business card from my bag. A simple black business card with my name and phone numbers—cell and work—in white, in an easy-to-read Comic Sans font. I force it into her hand. “In case—” I begin, but a waiter rushes past in haste, a tray full of food perched on a palm above his head, and sing-songs, “Excuse me, ladies,” and the girl retreats from him, retreats from me and withers slowly away, backward, like buttercup roses in a cylinder vase, shriveling up and fading away.

And there I stand, all alone, in the middle of Stella’s, thinking, Please. Wait. Though by now the girl has vanished from the diner and the redheaded waitress, apathetic to my distress, passes by and hands me the check.

* * *

I take the long way home, anesthetized to the cold, to the fine mist in the air. I go the long way, stopping by the used bookstore on Lincoln to pick up a copy of Anne of Green Gables.

I pay two dollars for the book because there are pages falling out, random, forgotten treasures tucked inside the aging pages: a bookmark with tassels, an old photograph of a little girl in white knee highs beside her grandfather in blue plaid pants. There’s an inscription in the book, and a date: To Mom 1989.

I find my neighbor Graham in the hallway on my way upstairs, about to drop an empty bottle of wine down the garbage chute. “That’s recyclable,” I remind him, hearing a pestering quality to my voice that drives Chris mad.

But Graham just laughs. He’s left his condo door wide-open, a blonde beauty queen on the sofa with a fresh glass of Chablis. We exchange a look, and I force a smile, one that she doesn’t return.

“Caught by the recycle police, again,” he says, withdrawing the bottle from the chute. There are recycle bins by the freight entrance of our building, a long walk for someone who doesn’t think much of the environment. But I do. I stop myself before reminding Graham that it takes some one million years for a glass bottle to decompose.

There’s an overwhelming need to tell someone about my night at Stella’s, knowing that Chris won’t do. Not even Jennifer will do—she is much too logical, too left-brained for this kind of insanity. I need someone who’s ruled by the right brain like me, someone driven by feelings and emotions, by their imagination and beliefs, someone inspired by fantasy.

Someone like Graham.

But from the open condo door, I hear the sound of acoustic guitar on his stereo, the beauty queen beckoning him by name. He tucks the empty wine bottle beneath an arm and tells me he has to go. “Of course,” I say, and watch as he closes the door behind himself and I find myself staring at a square boxwood wreath, listening to a squeal from his date.

Inside my own home, I forget all about my movie and tuck myself into bed with Anne of Green Gables. When Chris finally returns home from his trip, I hide the book quickly underneath the bed, behind a flounced charcoal bed skirt where only cats and dust bunnies dwell, and pretend to be asleep.

He crawls into bed beside me and kisses me long and slow, though his lips are laced with the image of Cassidy Knudsen.

WILLOW

My momma was the most beautiful lady in the world. Long black threads of hair, a thin face with high cheekbones, perfectly arched eyebrows and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. I love you like a squirrel loves nuts, she’d say to me, or I love you like a mouse loves cheese. We’d spend half a day trying to think of the silliest ones we could: I love you like a fat boy loves cake. And we’d die laughing. It was our thing.

We lived in a rural Nebraska home, in a tiny little unincorporated town just outside of Ogallala. Momma and Daddy, Lily and me. Ogallala came long before Omaha, just like Momma and Daddy came long before Joseph and Miriam. It was another whole world to be exact, another whole me.

Momma used to tell me all the time about the day she and Daddy got married. She said that by the time they said “I do,” she was already pregnant with me, which didn’t matter none to her or Daddy, but her own momma and daddy didn’t like it one bit. Turned out they didn’t like Daddy much, either, and so one day, when Momma was nineteen years old, she and Daddy drove out to a chapel in Des Moines, and they got hitched. Momma told me about it, about their wedding in a cozy little church on the side of the road, as we sat on the front step of our tiny prefabricated home, painting our toes candy-apple red while Lily slept the afternoon away. I was eight years old. Momma told me about the chapel, about her walking down the aisle in a strapless, tea-length vintage wedding dress the color of snow; she told me about her veil, a birdcage veil she called it, and I imagined canaries perched on the top of her head. She told me about the man who did their wedding, some man named Reverend Love, and even at that age, at eight years old, I had a hard time believing that was his real name. Reverend Love. I remember the way Momma said his name, that very day we sat on the front step of our prefab home, staring down the boring old street at some boys playing kickball on their lawn, the way she elongated the word love until we both about died laughing.

But she said that Daddy was handsome as all get out, dressed up in a shirt and tie, a sport coat he’d borrowed from a friend. I tried hard to imagine that, ’cause I didn’t think I’d ever seen my daddy in a shirt and tie before in my whole entire life. There were no photos from their wedding, ’cause Momma and Daddy didn’t own a camera back then, but they had a piece of paper that said they were married, and that was even more important to them than some picture. Momma showed it to me, that paper. Certificate of Marriage, it said, and there, at the bottom, the words Reverend Love.

And then, some six months later, I was born. Momma told me about that day, the day I arrived. She told me how I took my sweet time coming out of her, how I was in no rush. She told me how Daddy held on tight to me, there at the hospital, as if he thought I was gonna break. I didn’t meet my grandparents when I was born, not then, not ever. Momma’s momma and daddy didn’t want a thing to do with us, and Daddy’s, well, Daddy’s were dead. We visited them every now and then, over at the cemetery on Fifth Street, leaving browning dandelions beside the headstones that read Ernest and Evelyn Dalloway.

My momma was convinced by her own momma that she was Audrey Hepburn, the reason she was named Holly, as in Holly Golightly. She’d pull her long black hair back into a beehive hairdo and prance around our home with a Breakfast at Tiffany’s style cigarette holder though Momma didn’t smoke. She’d walk around our home in old polka-dot shift dresses on any old day of the week and plagiarize Audrey Hepburn quotes, as if they were her own, and I’d sit there, on the couch, and just stare.

It never surprised me one bit that Daddy wanted to marry her. I’d never seen anyone as beautiful as Momma was.

I asked Momma more than once to tell me how she met my daddy. It was a story she never tired of telling. She told me how she met Daddy in town, at some saloon where he was tending bar, about how some oaf of a man was trying to get friendly with her and how Daddy didn’t like it one bit, how he didn’t like the way that man talked to her, didn’t like the way he kept holding her hand after Momma had told him to quit. Her knight in shining armor, she said. Momma always said that marrying Daddy was the best decision of her life, though as it was, her marrying Daddy made her own parents all but disappear. Poof, she said, holding her hands up in the air like some kind of magician, like magic.

Daddy, being a truck driver, was gone more than he wasn’t. Daddy was an OTR driver, which meant “over the road.” He spent his days traveling from sea to shining sea, hauling some sort of freight or hazmat across the country. We missed him more than anything when he was gone, Momma especially, but when he came home, he made up for it, as he showered Momma with slobbering kisses and touched her in places that made her blush. She would get all dressed up for his return, curling her hair, and painting her lips berry bliss. He always had something for Lily and me, something he’d picked up from Vermont or Georgia or wherever it was he was traveling—a key chain or a postcard, a mini Statue of Liberty. It was like Christmas morning when Daddy was home, like summer vacation. And he brought stuff for Momma, too, but that stuff he wouldn’t show her, not until Lily and I had gone to bed, but I could hear them at night when they thought I was asleep; I could hear them in their bedroom, laughing.

We didn’t have a whole lot of money, there in that prefab home just outside Ogallala, but Momma, she sure loved to shop. Of course we didn’t have the money for the kind of stuff she wanted to buy, so instead she took Lily and me to the fancy stores just so she could try on dresses and stare at herself in the mirror. This was one of those things we did when Daddy was away, though Momma said, “don’t ever tell Daddy,” ’cause she didn’t want him to feel bad. But Momma talked a lot about one day. One day she was gonna have that salon of her own instead of cutting hair in that bathroom that belonged to Lily and me. One day we were going to get a bigger house that hadn’t been premade. One day she was going to take us to some place called the Magnificent Mile in a city known as Chicago. Momma told me about it, about this Magnificent Mile. She talked about it as if it was a fairy tale, and I wasn’t really sure if it was real or not. But Momma was sure. She talked about stores with names like Gucci and Prada, and what she would buy in those stores if she could. One day. She had a list of those things, what she wanted to see before she died. The Eiffel Tower, Audrey Hepburn’s gravesite in some small town in Switzerland, the Magnificent Mile. We didn’t have a lot. Even at eight years old, I knew that, though there wasn’t ever a time I wished for more. I was happy there in that prefab home near Ogallala, and even though Momma talked all the time about her one days, I didn’t ever want a thing to change. Momma used to say, “We don’t have much, but at least we have each other.”

And then one day, we didn’t even have that much.

CHRIS

Heidi has this need to make everything right. She recycles to a fault. Cans and bottles, the newspaper, batteries, remnants of aluminum foil. She returns hangers to the dry cleaner; rips me a new one when I come home with a plastic shopping bag instead of remembering to bring a reusable one from home. I hear her words, haunting me in my dreams, her metallic tone parroting: That’s recyclable, in the off moments I attempt to slip an envelope or a scrap of paper into the garbage can of all things. Our milk comes in glass bottles which are reusable and insanely expensive.

In our home, trespassing spiders are never killed but rather, relocated to the balcony or, in the case of inclement weather, to the basement storage units where they can reproduce among cardboard boxes and unused bikes. Smashing them with a shoe or flushing them down the toilet would be simply inhumane.

It’s the reason we have two cats. Because she found them as kittens under the Dumpster behind the building. What was left of their mother lay nearby in a bloody tangle, the rest of her serving as fodder for a stray dog. One day Heidi carried them into our condo, each one of them only a pound or two, dirty, covered in shit and garbage, their bones showing through sporadic fur, and declared, “We’re keeping them.” And as is the case with most things in our marriage, she didn’t ask. She told me. We’re keeping them.

I named them One and Two because Odette and Sabine (yes, both girls; I am indeed the only Tom in this household of Queens), as Heidi suggested, sounded plain dumb. Feral cats don’t deserve human names, I told her. Especially not fancy French ones. One is a calico, chatte d’Espagne, as Heidi says. Two is all black with longish hair and neon eyes. Bad luck. Evil. The thing hates me.

And so it came as no surprise to me on Saturday morning when I rolled out of bed that there she was, standing in the middle of our living room, displaying her saddest “orphaned kitten” eyes. She’d just finished up a phone call and was going on and on about the poor girl at the Fullerton Station. It was nearly ten in the morning, but from the darkness out the window, you might have guessed it was five, maybe six o’clock What I had in mind for the day, after an exhausting trip to San Francisco, was sitting in the leather recliner, watching endless hours of professional basketball. But there was Heidi, clearly up at the crack of dawn, clearly having digested too much caffeine. She was in her robe and slippers, clutching her cell phone in the palm of a hand, and I knew there was more to this story than she was letting on. This wasn’t just about a homeless girl she’d seen. There must be a hundred thousand homeless people in Chicago. Heidi notices them, don’t get me wrong. She notices each and every one of them. But they don’t keep her awake at night.

“That’s why God made homeless shelters,” I say. Outside, there is rain. Again. The TV stations are flooded with reporters standing on roads and highways that are underwater. Dangerous and impassable, they say. Even the major expressways—portions of the Eisenhower and the Kennedy—are closed down. Apparently we’ve entered a state of emergency. The news cameras pause on a yellow street sign: Turn Around, Don’t Drown, it says. Words to live by. A dripping reporter in a golden poncho stands in the Loop getting whammed by rain (as if seeing the rain on TV rather than listening to the way it pelts the windows and roofs of our homes will drive home the point) warning that even a few inches of rapidly flowing water can carry a car away. “If you don’t need to travel this morning,” she says, giving a concerned look as if she actually gives a shit about our safety, “then, please, stay home.”

“She doesn’t do homeless shelters,” Heidi replies in a knowing way, and it’s then that I understand. Heidi didn’t just see this girl. There was an exchange. A conversation.

What she’s told me thus far, or what I’ve dragged out of her involuntarily, is that she saw a young homeless girl beside the Fullerton Station, begging for change. A young girl with a baby. I arose from bed and came into the living room—my mind on one thing: TV—to find she’d just finished up a call on her cell, and when I asked who she was talking to, she said, “No one.”

But I could tell it wasn’t no one. It was clear to me that it was someone, someone that mattered to Heidi. But she didn’t want me to know. This is what happens to men who travel all the time, I thought. Their wives cheat on them. They rise from bed first thing in the morning to carry on clandestine conversations with their lovers while their husbands are catching some much-needed sleep. I spied my wife: guilty, frenzied eyes, suddenly not as chaste as I knew Heidi to be, and asked, “Was it a guy?”

I thought of Heidi, last night, of the way she pulled away from me in bed. Was he here? I wondered. Before me? I didn’t get home until after eleven, to find Zoe AWOL, Heidi in bed, and I remembered when Zoe was little, the way she and Heidi would create welcome-home banners and plaster them with stickers, drawings, photos and whatever other frilly little embellishments they could find, for when I came home, and now, five or six years later: nothing. Only the cats were waiting for me beside the front door, their annoying squawks not a warm welcome but rather an ultimatum: Feed us or else... The tiny stainless-steel bowls that Heidi never forgets to fill were empty.

“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 perfect. 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 store,” 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.

She takes a drink of the coffee and flinches from the heat. “Huh?”

“Maybe I could wash out the bottle? Start again with fresh formula?”

Formula is horribly expensive. I remember. I used to cringe each and every time Zoe didn’t suck her baby bottles dry. When Zoe was born, I was a staunch believer in breastfeeding. The first seven months of her life, I relied on nothing but breast milk. I planned to do so for a year. But then things changed. Initially the doctor and I discounted the pain as an effect of childbirth. We went on as if all was normal.

But all was far from normal.

By then, I was pregnant again, pregnant with Juliet, though of course, there was no way to know at that point if she was a girl.

It had been less than six weeks since Juliet was conceived when the bleeding first began. By this time in her life, her heart was pumping blood and her facial features were taking form; arms and legs were about to emerge as tiny buds from her tiny body. I didn’t have a miscarriage; no, that, of course would have been too easy, too simple, for her to just die.

Instead, I made the decision to end my Juliet’s life.

Willow gives me a look that is hard to read. Wary and dubious, but also too tired to care. A handful of girls—college aged, in sweatshirts and flannel pants—pass by, huddled close together, arm in arm, under golf umbrellas and hoods, giggling, recalling hazy, drunken memories of last night. I overhear words: jungle, juice, pink, panty, droppers. I look down at my own attire and recall the purple robe.

“Whatever,” she says again, her eyes following the coeds until they round the corner, their laughter still audible in the slumberous city.

And so I hand the quivering child back to Willow and, releasing my umbrella, scurry to the nearest Walgreens where I pick up a bottle of water from the shelf and acetaminophen drops. Something to bring that temperature down.

When I return to our little alcove, I dump the used formula on the street, watching as it races into the nearest storm drain, then rinse out the bottle and start anew. Willow hands me the coveted formula powder and I mix up a bottle, and she returns Ruby to my arms. I plunge the bottle into the baby’s expectant mouth—full of hope that this will quiet the hysterical child—but she thrusts it out with a horrified look, as if I’d slipped formula laced with arsenic into her mouth.

And then she begins to scream.

“Shh...shh,” I beg, bouncing her up and down and I remind myself—already tired, already frustrated—that Willow did this all night. All night long. Alone. Cold. Hungry. And I wonder: Scared? Lightning flashes in the not-so-far distance, and I count in my head: One. Two. Three. Thunder crashes, loud and angry, full of wrath. Willow staggers, searching the heavens for the source of the jarring noise and I see in the way her eyes dilate that she’s scared. Scared of thunder, like a child. “It’s okay,” I hear myself say aloud to Willow, and instantly I’m transported back in time to Zoe’s preschool bedroom, cradling her body in my arms while she nuzzled her head into me. “It’s okay,” I say to her, “it’s only thunder. It won’t hurt you one bit. Not one bit at all,” and I see Willow staring at me, though the look in her blue eyes is impossible to read.

I’m absolutely soaking wet, as are Willow and Ruby, and the woman in the shop has the audacity to knock curtly on the glass door and tell us to go away. No loitering, her lips say.

“What now?” I ask myself aloud, and Willow responds in a hushed voice, more to herself than me: “Tomorrow is a new day,” she says, “with no mistakes in it yet.”

“Anne of Green Gables?” I ask and she says, “Yes.”

“Your favorite?” I ask, and she says that it is.

I’m slow to move, to draw Willow and her leather suitcase from the safety of the indigo awning and into the rain. “I bought a copy of Anne of Green Gables,” I confess. “On the way home last night. I’ve never read it before. I always wanted to read it. With my daughter, with Zoe. But she grew up too fast for it,” I say. It was as if I merely blinked, and the baby girl I once read board books to was suddenly too old to share a book with me, with her mother, because then, what would her friends at school think? It would be embarrassing if they knew, or so Zoe assumes.

A thought crosses my mind, as it often does in moments like this: if I had to do it all over, what would I do differently? If Zoe could be a baby again, a toddler, how would I be different? How would Zoe be different? Would things have been different with Juliet?

But of course, the question is entirely null and void, seeing as how there would be no more children for Chris and me.

“Did you and your mother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, wondering if she will humor me with this tidbit of personal information.

Hesitantly, she answers, “Matthew.”

“Matthew?” I repeat, worried that her confession will end there, with that one word.

But to my surprise she continues, the dark bangs shrouding her eyes as she watches a robin hunt for worms on the street. The first sign of spring. There are tiny buds on the trees that line the city streets, crocus shoots poking through holes in the sodden ground. “Matthew, my...” And she hesitates—there’s a distinct hesitation before she says, “my brother,” and outwardly I nod, but inwardly my heart leaps. One piece of the puzzle. Willow has a brother named Matthew. Willow has a brother, at all. A brother who read Anne of Green Gables.

“Your brother read Anne of Green Gables?” I ask, trying to ignore the peculiarity of it, of Willow reading a book such as Anne of Green Gables with her brother, a book that a mother and daughter should share. I want to ask her about her mother. About why she didn’t read the book with her mother. But instead, I say nothing.

“Yes.”

I see a wistfulness come over her when she mentions her brother. Matthew. A tinge of sadness, a mournful sigh.

I wonder about this Matthew and where he may be.

And then Ruby’s bloodcurdling scream makes me remember the acetaminophen. I tread lightly. “I think Ruby is running a fever,” I say. “I bought some Tylenol at the store. It might help.” I hand Willow the box so that she can see it is, in fact, Tylenol, that I’m not trying to drug her baby.

Willow looks at me with concern in her eyes and her voice becomes that of a child. “She’s sick?” she asks, her own naïveté showing through.

“I don’t know.”

But I see that the baby is a drooling, boogery mess. Willow concedes to the Tylenol and I read the directions for the dosage. Willow holds Ruby while I squeeze the berry flavor medicine into her mouth, and we watch as Ruby goes silent, and then smacks her lips together. It’s yummy, the Tylenol. And then we wait for the medicine to kick in, for Ruby to stop crying. We wait and think. Think and wait. Wait and think. Think and wait.

What will I do when Ruby does, if ever, stop crying? Say goodbye and return home? Leave Ruby and Willow here, in the rain?

With the diarrhea soaked diaper, a red, swollen, boiled and blistered diaper rash on her genitalia and buttocks (as I imagine there to be, hiding beneath the diaper). That, alone, would make me scream.

“When’s the last time she saw a doctor?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” says Willow.

“You don’t know?” I ask, taken by surprise.

“I don’t remember,” she corrects.

“We could take her to the doctor.”

“No.”

“I could pay. For the bill. Medicine.”

“No.”

“Then a shelter. Protection from the elements. A good night’s sleep.”

“I don’t do shelters,” she says again—a replay of last night in the diner—the tone of her voice hammering the message home. I. Do. Not. Do. Shelters. I can’t blame her. I, myself, would think long and hard before checking into a homeless shelter. Shelters themselves can be dangerous places, brimming with desperate men and women, turned by circumstance into violent predators. There are communicable diseases in shelters: tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV, and, sometimes, the homeless are not allowed to bring their personal possessions inside. Which means, abandoning Willow’s vintage suitcase and whatever treasures it may hold. There are drugs in shelters, drug addicts, drug dealers, there are infestations of lice and bed bugs, there are people who will steal the shoes from your feet while you sleep. In the coldest months, people wait in line for hours to be assured a bed in a shelter. And even then, there may or may not be space.

“Willow,” I say. There’s so much I want to say. The “L” comes soaring in on the tracks above us, drowning out the sound of my voice. I hesitate, wait for it to pass and then say, “You can’t stay out here forever. There are things Ruby needs. Things you need.”

She looks at me with those cornflower eyes, her skin drab, remnants of eye makeup intensifying the baggage beneath her eyes. “You think I want to live on the streets?” she asks. And then says to me, “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

CHRIS

The front door opens and there they stand like two drowned rats. There’s a baby in Heidi’s arms, a scent far worse than cumin wafting from the girl. I rub at my eyes, certain I’m hallucinating, certain my Heidi would never bring a homeless girl into our home, into the home where her own daughter lives and breathes. The girl is a ragamuffin, a street urchin. She’s barely older than Zoe. She won’t make eye contact with me, not when Heidi tells me her name is Willow or when I say lackadaisically (I don’t want to appear too stupid when the cameramen appear to inform me that I’m on the next installment of Candid Camera) that mine is Chris.

Heidi announces, “She’s going to stay with us tonight,” just like that. Like those damn kittens, and I’m too stupefied to say yes or no, not that anyone bothered to ask my opinion. Heidi shepherds the girl into our home, and suggests she remove the soused boots from her feet, and as she does so, about a gallon of water pours from their insides and onto the floor. Beneath those boots, her feet are bare. No socks, her feet macerated and covered in blisters. I wince, and Heidi and the girl’s eyes follow mine down to the bare feet. I know Heidi’s thinking about how to remedy the girl’s ailing feet, but I’m just hoping whatever she’s got isn’t contagious.

Zoe appears from her bedroom, the words “what the...” dropping from a gaping mouth. I’m guessing our daughter isn’t overly familiar with the f word that follows that statement, so I nearly say it aloud for her. What the fuck are you thinking, Heidi? But already Heidi is showing the girl into our home, introducing her to our daughter, who stares dumbly at this waif and then looks to me for an explanation. I can only shrug.

The girl’s eyes get lost on the TV, on some basketball game: Chicago Bulls versus the Pistons, and I hear myself ask—for lack of anything better to say—“You like basketball?” and she flatly answers, “No,” and yet she’s staring at that TV as though she’s never seen an electrical appliance before in her life. When she talks, I catch a scent of bacteria fermenting in her mouth: halitosis. I wonder when she last brushed her teeth. They’ve probably got that “fuzzy sweater” thing going on. There’s an ungodly smell coming from her and when I move to the window and open it a crack, Heidi shoots me an evil eye, to which I reply, “What? It’s stuffy in here,” and hope the rain stays at bay long enough to air out the stench.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.