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.