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?