Or was that—the cancer—simply a figment of my imagination, and I wonder about that line on my abdomen, the very one Graham traced with a fingertip—the one he almost asked about until I pressed my fingers to my lips and whispered shhh—and wonder where it came from, that scar, whether or not it’s a scar at all.
And then a word settles in my mind, ugly and vile and I shake my head posthaste to get it out.
Abortion.
But no. I press the baby into me, knowing that can’t be true.
That doctor with the balding head said that she, my Juliet, had been discarded as medical waste. He said that medical waste is incinerated after leaving the hospital, and I was left with a vision that kept me awake for years on end, that filled my dreams with dread: baby Juliet in a two-thousand-degree kiln, being tossed around like cement in a cement mixer so that all sides of her were exposed to the heat, her tiny soul escaping as gas into the earth’s atmosphere.
I shake my head again, vehemently, and say out loud, “No.”
I peer down at the baby in my arms and think: Juliet is here. She is safe.
Perhaps it’s a birthmark, I think then, that scar on my abdomen, like the one on my baby’s leg. Do such things—birthmarks—pass from generation to generation? I think back to the day before, chatting with patrons on the “L” train en route to lunch with Chris in the Chicago Loop as they complimented my adorable baby, and said how much alike we looked, my baby and me, those words every mother in the world longs to hear. She has your eyes, one said, and another, She has your smile, and as they did, I traced a finger over the curve of the baby’s upper lip, that prominent V in the middle that is somehow said to resemble the bow of Cupid.
Just like Zoe’s. Just like mine.
“It runs in the family,” I’d said, of that resplendent smile my baby revealed at the appropriate time, as if she’d known all along that she was the topic of conversation, the one who everyone was staring at, ogling.
But she’s mine, I thought, pressing her close to me, refusing to think about Willow, pushing the name Ruby far from my mind. All mine.
And then there’s the buzz of the intercom, pulling me from my thoughts; it’s loud and incredibly rude as I set that fraudulent breast milk into my baby’s mouth, and whether it’s the milk itself or the blare of the intercom, I honestly can’t say, but the baby thrusts the bottle out with a tongue and again begins to scream.
I walk to the window and peer out, onto the street below, to see Jennifer, my best friend, Jennifer, standing by the plate-glass door with a cup of Starbucks coffee in each hand. Dressed in hospital scrubs and a jean jacket, her hair blowing in the incessant Chicago wind. I duck frantically down before she can see me, before she can see me standing by the bay window eyeing her, and hoping that she will leave. I cannot see Jennifer now. She will stare at my dress, the buttons mismatched, the dark makeup, laden with a decided desperation, now running its course down my cheek. The pink panties and nylons in a ball, the black heels once again pulled from their cardboard box in vain.
And she will want to know what happened. She will ask about Graham. She will ask about my baby.
And what will I say? How will I explain?
The intercom buzzes again and I rise to my knees, clutching a screaming baby in my arms, peering out of the bay window to see Jennifer, blocking the sun from her eyes with the back of a hand, peer upward to the window that she knows is mine, and I plunge again to the ground, uncertain as to whether or not she saw me there in the window, eyeing her from up above. I all but drop the baby on the ground, as the two of us hover, together, in the mere twenty-four inches of space beneath the windowsill. “Shh,” I beg the baby with a despair in my voice that mimics her own. “Hush. Please,” I say, as my knees begin to ache.
My phone is ringing, and I know without having to look at the display screen, that it is Jennifer, wondering where I am. She’s been told I’m sick, for sure, if and when she called the office to see if I was there. Dana, receptionist extraordinaire, told her of my unrelenting flu, and my best friend has come to deliver coffee—or perhaps an Earl Grey tea—to make me feel well. And here I am hiding from her, on my knees on the hardwood floor, begging the child to be still, to be quiet.
And then the phone settles and the intercom settles and, with the exception of the baby, all is quiet. I rise cautiously from my knees to see that Jennifer is gone, out of sight, here one minute, gone the next. I search down the block for the faded denim of a jean jacket, but spy only my neighbor, an older lady from down the hall toting an empty granny cart en route to the grocery store.
I exhale deeply—certain I’m off the hook—and plead with my baby to drink the bottle, as I set it warily on her tongue and will her to drink. “Please, honey,” I say, or attempt to say, before a knock at the door makes me jump right on out of my skin. The knock is light, and yet knowing and determined. Jennifer, I’m certain, who slipped through the plate-glass door with her Starbucks cups when old Mrs. Green left for the grocery store. Sneaky, sneaky, I think as I hear her calling me through the door.
“Heidi,” she says and then there’s that knock again—that damn tap, tap, tap—which speaks louder than any words possibly can. She knows I am here.
“Heidi,” she says again, as I begin to run through the home, with the baby in my arms, as far away from the door as I can possibly go. I imagine we’re being trailed by carbon monoxide and must find a place where we can breathe. Jennifer’s voice is diluted by the distance as I hover in the corner of Chris’s and my bedroom, tilting the blinds upward so those who come and go on the city street down below will not see—and yet I’m certain I hear her utter I saw you and I know you’re there from where she stands in the hall, tap, tap, tapping on the wooden pane of the door for my attention.
They will take my baby. They will take my baby from me. I beg, “Please, Juliet, please be quiet,” panic-stricken that she won’t take the bottle, that she won’t stop crying. That word—Juliet—it slips from my tongue, utterly wrong and yet so undeniably right. But the crying...the crying won’t stop. I’m with baby Zoe all over again, in the midst of an episode of colic, and she’s screaming, writhing in pain, but with Zoe, I don’t remember the need to hide, to crouch on my bedroom floor and hide.
How long we wait, I cannot say. One minute, one hour, I don’t know, but I jostle my baby silently and beg her to stop. The frequency of Jennifer’s tap, tap, tapping gets less and less until it altogether ceases; my phone rings and then stops, rings and then stops, the house phone, the cell phone.
I watch out the bedroom window with its upward slanting blinds as Jennifer appears, turning circles on the street below as if utterly confused. She peers up, at the bay window in our living room and stares, and it’s only as she departs down the street, tossing one of the Starbucks cups in a nearby garbage bin, that I emerge from the bedroom and seek out my phone, the one which, from the hallway, Jennifer most certainly heard ring. Three times, or so the phone tells me, three missed calls, an awaiting voice mail. A text message.
Where r u?
WILLOW
Louise Flores beckons me again. A guard arrives at the cell I share with Diva, demanding I put my hands through the portal so she can cuff them before she opens the door. I climb down from the top tier of the bunk bed and place my hands behind my back.
We walk through the prison together.
Today Ms. Flores wants to talk about the baby, Calla. I sit down across from her, on a spent seat with its inflexible back. “Why did you take the baby?” she asks, and I picture that night, standing in the darkened woods, staring through the treasure-trove of windows of the A-frame home.