It wasn’t as if Momma left Lily and me home alone that much. But there were times, she said, that an adult’s got to do what an adult’s got to do. That’s what she said to me the morning she and Daddy climbed into the Bluebird and she stuck her head out the window as they pulled from the gravel drive, her long black hair getting caught up in the wind so that I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her voice anyway: Take good care of Lily, and something or other about love and you. I love you like a bee loves honey. I love you like peanut butter loves jelly. I love you like a fish loves water.

Momma told me to take good care of Lily. They were the last words she said to me, the last vision I have of her: her with her head stuck out the busted window of the junky old Datsun, the wind blurring her face with a mass of black hair. Take good care of Lily. And that’s what I intended to do.

But then, just like that, Lily was gone, too.

HEIDI

We bathe Ruby first. I draw the water so that it is tepid: warm enough, but not too warm for the baby’s frail skin. I’m about to leave the room, to give Willow privacy, when she turns to me and asks, with those tuckered-out eyes, her body enervated, ready to drop, the tone of her voice fraught with fatigue, “Will you help me? Please?” And I say of course, elated to feel the slippery child in my hands as Willow scoops handfuls of water over her body. With the baby in my hands, I find myself thinking of Juliet, knowing that the loss of Juliet wasn’t only about the loss of one baby; it was about the loss of all the babies. All the babies I was meant to have. There was a time I found myself thinking of little Juliet for hours on end, dreaming about her and what she may have looked like had I carried her full term. Would her hair be light and sparse like Zoe’s when she crawled out of my womb, or would it be dark and plentiful as Chris’s own mother said his was, hampering her with months of heartburn as the old wives’ tales claimed they do?

It had been quite some time since I allowed myself to think of little Juliet¸ to let her image creep into my head. But there she was, once again, taking up residence in my mind’s eye, reminding me of all the babies I would never have. Juliet, I nearly uttered allowed. Juliet Wood. She would have been eleven years old now, if life had gone according to plan. Eleven years old, with a parade of little ones following her out, every two years like clockwork. Sophia and Alexis, and baby Zach.

And then Ruby squeals and I return to the present, to the here and now. I watch as the bathwater seeps up the green sleeves of Willow’s coat, transforming the army green to black. I offered to take the coat from her before she sunk her arms into the water, but she said no. Her callow hands shake as she lathers the vanilla body wash onto her hands, and caresses the baby’s scalp and underarms, her rear end. Ruby’s bottom is encrusted with a scarlet diaper rash, as I knew it would be, a rash that is not limited to just the genital area, but under her arms and in the folds of skin elsewhere along her tiny body. Her bottom is besieged by a yeast infection, a white crust at the periphery of the red rash. I devise a grocery list in my mind: diaper rash cream, clotrimazole cream and, as the vanilla body wash seeps into the corners of the baby’s eyes and she lets out a shriek: No More Tears baby wash. Willow has no spare diapers and so, when the bath is through, I swathe Ruby in an organic harbor blue towel, and seal it shut with safety pins. Add to the checklist: diapers and wipes.

I am about to take Ruby from the room, to give Willow privacy for her own bath, when she stops me. I can see that she does not want the baby to leave. She doesn’t trust me. Not yet. And why should she, I think, when I am a complete stranger. Wasn’t I the one to stop the neonatal nurse from removing Zoe from my birthing room, on doctor’s orders that I rest?

Though I want nothing less than to make Ruby a fresh bottle, to sit with her in the living room until she falls to sleep, I lay a second towel on the porcelain floor and the baby on top of that, sucking like the dickens on her own adorable toes. I linger for a half a second or more, staring as she unearths the appendages from that harbor-blue towel, and like an agile gymnast, thrusts them into her mouth.

Willow locks the door behind me. I stand there, in the hall, hand on the wall, all the breath suctioned right out of me with a vacuum’s upholstery attachment thrust deep into my lungs.

From the kitchen, I see Chris sitting at the table, typing furiously on his laptop. The printer is plugged into the wall, an ugly black cord that stretches across the room.

A safety hazard.

But I don’t dare say this. His eyes meet mine and remind me, once again, of how he disagrees with my decision. He shakes his head, disgruntled, and his eyes revert to the LCD screen, to the microscopic numbers that fill the lines of the incomprehensible spreadsheets. Zoe’s pop music suffuses our home, making the walls shake, the framed photographs that line the hallway walls dance. I stare at the images of Zoe: smiling through gaping teeth, and then, years later, her nose ruddy with a cold. Crooked teeth, much bigger than the space that nature allowed for them, followed by braces. Zoe always adored picture day at her Catholic school, the one and only day of the year when uniforms were not required. When she was younger I had a say in what she wore for pictures, and so we relied on sateen dresses and woolen jumpers, with corsage headbands or tulle poufs in her hair. But as the years went by, and adolescence settled upon my once baby girl, a sudden change altered those photos, no longer awash with ruffles and bows, but now animal prints and graphic tops, hoodies and dark vests, each article of clothing as reclusive and moody as the individual inside them.

My knuckles come to rest on Zoe’s bedroom door.

“What?” she grunts from inside the room. When I let myself inside, she is sitting on the bed with her adored yellow notebook close at hand. The space heater is on, set to seventy-four degrees after a recent request that she not let her room feel like the fiery furnace of hell. And still, Zoe is wrapped in a blanket, sulking. On her arms: arm warmers, another recent fad that has me nonplussed. Zoe’s are black with sequins, given to her by a friend. Are your arms cold? I had asked blunderingly the day she arrived home from school with them secured to her hands.

Her eyes confirmed what she already knew to be true: her mother was an idiot.

Even I could hear the cowardice in my voice, fearful of rejection from my twelve-year-old daughter. “Do you have something Willow could wear? After she’s through with her bath?” I ask, hovering in the doorway like a scaredy-cat.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Zoe replies as she gropes for her phone and begins texting furtively with dexterous thumbs. I can only imagine what mean words she is sending to Taylor via cell phone towers.

“You can’t,” I say, springing across the canopy bed for the cell phone. I snatch it from my daughter’s hand, and see a series of text abbreviations of which I can’t make heads or tails. J2LYK.

Zoe cries out, “That’s mine,” as she lunges for the phone and tries to yank it from me, but I remind her that, “It’s not. Your father and I still pay the bill.” I stand firmly before the bed, holding the phone behind me. That was our agreement after all. Zoe could have a cell phone so long as Chris and I were allowed to peruse her text messages for any red flags.

But the look on her face is reminiscent of a child being slapped.

“Give it to me,” she orders, staring at me with those big brown anime eyes of hers, the disproportional eyes that always look sad. She holds her hand out expectantly, blue ink doodled across a forearm. Oh, how I want to give her the phone, to not have her be mad! I see the piping hot indignation leaching from my child and know her mind is bursting with hatred. Hatred toward me.