Pretty Baby. Mary Kubica

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ