“What the hell are you thinking?” I seeth at her as we drift down the narrow hall. “Bringing that girl into our home.” The printer is heavy; I lose balance and stumble into the wall. Heidi doesn’t offer to help.
“She had nowhere to go, Chris,” she insists, standing before me in that heinous lilac robe, her hair flattened by the rain. Her eyes are aroused, bizarrely similar to the night I came home from work, some twelve years ago, and there she was in the midst of our dining room, candles everywhere, perched in the nude. A bottle of wine open on the table: Château Saint-Pierre, and her impeccable body sitting cross-legged beside it, sipping from a handcrafted wineglass. The ten-dollar ones that we saved for special occasions.
“How long is she staying?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“A day, a week? What Heidi?” I ask, my voice escalating. “Which is it?”
“The baby has a fever.”
“So take it to the doctor,” I insist.
But Heidi is shaking her head no. “She doesn’t want to,” she says.
I trudge through the hall, set my now-traveling office on the kitchen table. I throw my hands up in the air, miffed. “Who the hell cares what she wants, Heidi? She is a little girl. A runaway, probably. We’re harboring a runaway. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble we could get into for harboring a runaway?” I ask as I find the phone book in a kitchen drawer and start flipping through the thin pages for the nonemergency police number. Or is this an emergency? Strange girl in my home. Sounds like trespassing to me.
“She’s eighteen,” Heidi insists.
“How do you know she’s eighteen?”
“She told me,” she replies foolishly.
“She’s not eighteen,” I assure my wife. “You need to report her to the authorities,” I demand.
“We can’t do that, Chris,” she says, stealing the heavy book from my hands. She snaps it shut, pages getting crimped between the yellow covers. “How do you know she wasn’t abused? Molested? Even if she is a runaway, she must have a good reason for leaving home.”
“Then call DCFS. Let them sort it out. This is not your concern.”
But of course it is. Every neglected, mistreated, overlooked, ignored, abandoned, forgotten, emaciated, abused, derelict creature on God’s green earth is Heidi’s concern.
This, I know without a shred of doubt, is an argument I cannot win.
“How do you know she’s not going to kill us?” I ask instead. Good question, I think. I see us on the morning news: Family Slain in Lincoln Park Condo.
And there she is, that girl, standing in the office door, watching us from down the hall. Her eyes, a capricious blue, though bloodshot and tired. Her hair slung across her face, her mouth refusing to smile. A bruise perched on her forehead as if implying what Heidi said is true. “I could ask the same about you,” she mutters, her eyes moving up the ecru wall and settling on the popcorn ceiling above before she says, “When I am afraid, I put my trust in you,” and I’m 100 percent sure Peter Funt is about to come barreling through the front door with a cameraman in tow when I ask stupidly, “In me?” my mouth having plummeted halfway to the ground below.
“In the Lord,” the girl says, and Heidi gives me this look like I’m some godless heathen.
Heidi glowers at me, and then spins on her heels, and, heading down the hall, declares, “Why don’t I draw you a warm bath, Willow? You can soak awhile and I’ll hold Ruby. It will feel so good to get on some clean clothes. Some dry clothes. I bet you wear the same size as Zoe. I’m sure she’d be happy to share.”
Bullshit, I think. Zoe doesn’t want to share the same oxygen as the girl, much less her clothes. Zoe flips on a stereo from the alcoves of her bedroom and blaring boy band music fills our home.
I watch as Heidi scoops the baby from Willow’s hands, and leads them both into the bathroom.
When the door closes, I ransack the cabinets for Lysol spray.
WILLOW
My memories of Momma are slim to none these days. There are no photos left to remember her long black hair, her swarthy skin, her pretty blue eyes. Joseph made sure of that. He said I couldn’t keep living in the past as he stood there, in that bedroom that was mine, the one with the patchwork quilt, the drafty windows so that in the winter it was never warm—and in the summer it was always hot—the flowery golden wallpaper that peeled from every seam, from every corner of the room. But there are glimpses of her that rattle in my mind from time to time. Glimpses of Momma. Her profile in the bathroom mirror while she cut Mrs. Dahl’s hair. The sound of her giggling at something on TV. Watching her lie on a beaten-up plastic lounge chair in the parched lawn sunbathing, and me, in the grass beside her, digging dirty fingers down in the earth for worms. Baking in the kitchen from the worn Julia Child cookbooks we got at the public library, and Momma, standing there with a half bottle of Dijon mustard spilled down the front of a white shirt. Laughing.
I watched as Joseph tore what pictures I had of Momma right in two before my very eyes. And then into a million tiny slivers so that even if I tried to piece them back together, it would never be just right. He made me pick up the scraps from the floor. Made me march them down the steps and into the overflowing trash while the boys watched on and then he sent me to my room. As if the mess had been my doing. “I don’t want to hear a word from you. You hear?” Joseph ordered, all six-foot-six of him, with that full pumpkin colored beard of his, with his serious, hawkish eyes. And he added, “Beg God for His forgiveness.”
As if loving Momma was a sin.
After that the memories I had of Momma were scattered, so that I never knew if those visions were true or not, and I’d find myself second-guessing it all—the sound of her laugh, for instance, or the way her fingers felt when they ran through my mucous-colored hair. I’d lie in that bed of mine, covered up with the quilt, and rack my brain to come up with some tiny crumb of Momma to get me through the night. The shape of her nose, whether or not she had freckles, what it sounded like when she said my name.
“How did your parents die?” she asks me. Louise Flores. She slips a navy suit jacket from her haggard body and folds it precisely in two, like a greeting card, then sets it on the table beside the recorder and stopwatch.
“I’m sure you know, ma’am,” I say. There’s an officer in the corner, a sentry keeping watch, though he tries hard to pretend he’s not here. She said I didn’t have to answer her questions, not yet anyway. I could wait for Ms. Amber Adler, she said, or my attorney. But I pictured Ms. Adler’s disappointed eyes when she came in the room and knew it was best to fess up soon. Before she arrived.
“How about you tell me,” the silver-haired lady says, though I know that somewhere in that pad of paper it says. About Momma’s old Datsun Bluebird. About the accident, a rollover accident, as someone said, out on I-80, just outside of Ogallala, about how eyewitnesses claimed they saw the car zigzag and swerve. About how Daddy lost control of the car, then likely overcorrected, sending the car in circles on the road. I imagine it, Momma’s old Bluebird doing summersaults down the interstate while Momma and Daddy hung on for dear life.
Lily and I were home at the time. Alone. We never had a sitter. Momma trusted me to take care of Lily, even when I was eight years old. I got pretty good at it: changing her diaper, putting her to bed. I cut her apples and carrots into teensy bites so that she wouldn’t choke—like Momma said—and always made sure the dead bolt was secure, that I didn’t answer the door for no one, not even Mrs. Grass from next door, who was forever trying to embezzle our milk and eggs. Lily and I would lie in front of the TV anytime Momma and Daddy were gone, watching Sesame Street because Sesame Street was her favorite show of all. She liked Snuffleupagus the best, Snuffy, the big old mammoth who always made her laugh. She’d lie on the living room floor beside me, on the shaggy green carpeting that reminded me a bit of Snuffy’s fur, pointing at that mammoth on the TV and laughing.