“You called them,” I say, my quivering voice holding Chris responsible for this entire mess. For the fact that they’ve taken Juliet, my Juliet. “You called the police,” I scream at him and I begin to curse, attempting in vain to rise from the bed and lunge at him, but finding instead that I’m tethered to it, my hands still bound to the bed in cuffs.
“Is that necessary?” Chris asks of a nurse who passes through the room attending to the various tubing and needles that are injected into the veins of my arms. Injected by aliens in face masks and bouffant caps. “Is that really necessary,” but the nurse says drily, “It’s for her own protection,” and I know what she says to him then, what she whispers to Chris then, about how she heard I ran headlong across a room and into the brick wall, as evidenced by a purple bruise now forming on the top of my head.
“She’s agitated,” the nurse says to Chris then, as if I can’t hear, as if I’m not in the very same room. “She’s due for more medication soon.”
And I wonder what kind of medication, and whether or not they will hold me down, on the bed, and administer the medication with a syringe, once again. Or whether I’ll be allowed to take pills, oblong pills in the palm of a hand, and I think again of the Ambien.
No, I tell myself. Antihistamines. Pain relievers. Not Ambien.
I would never give Zoe sleeping pills.
But I find that I don’t know.
“You did this to me,” I cry quietly, but Chris holds his hands up in the air, a look of innocence glued to his weary face. He’s disheveled, the tidy appearance that usually describes his trim brown hair, his bright brown eyes and winsome smile now clouded over with fatigue, concern and something more, something I can’t put my finger on.
He could incriminate me, my Chris, who likes to point fingers and dodge blame. He could say that I was the one to lock myself in the bedroom with Juliet, but he does not.
He could say he was worried I would hurt the baby, our baby, and I would laugh, wouldn’t I? I would laugh. A cynical, mocking laugh, though he knows as well as I that I was standing there, on the edge of a fire escape, about to lose my balance when Chris forced himself into the bedroom.
But he didn’t tell the police about this when they arrived; no he did not.
He sits on the edge of my bed and reaches for my hand. And there I am, drowning, sinking farther and farther beneath the ocean’s current, the waves washing over me while I scream silently, involuntarily drawing breaths, my throat in spasms, choking on mouthfuls of salt water that fill my lungs.
“We’re going to figure this out, Heidi,” he says to me, then as he runs his fingers along my hand and up an arm, unaware of the way I gag and retch there on the bed, suffocating. I become submerged beneath the water while Chris and Zoe, the both of them, stand on the shore and watch.
The nurse steps from the room, saying to Chris, “Just five minutes, and then she needs to rest,” before allowing the door to drift closed until it is just Chris and me. I hear her words, muffled, from afar, and then the water again, a large breaking wave that pulls me under the sea.
And I see Chris, then, I see that he has spotted me from a distance and he dives into the water making his way ever so slowly to me.
“Zoe needs you,” he says, and then, after a pause, “I need you,” offering a life belt, something for me to hold on to as I flounder in rapid waters, trying desperately to swim.
WILLOW
It wasn’t long before the police found me, over on Michigan Avenue, staring through the windows of the Prada store. I was mesmerized; I couldn’t move. Staring through the big ol’ window of that shop, I couldn’t think of anything else but seeing Momma in those fancy-schmancy dresses, the ones that hung in the sparkly store window, from headless mannequins. How Momma would have loved those dresses!
The police hung on to me for a little while, but they didn’t keep me for long. Turned out that, once again, I was a kid no one wanted.
I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a group home settled right in between Omaha and Lincoln, so that sometimes we’d drive on over to the Platte River and hike, through the woodlands that overlooked that broad river that was usually filled up with mud. There were twelve of us girls in that group home, living with a husband and wife we called Nan and Joe. We all had chores that varied from week to week, like cleaning the kitchen or doing the wash. Nan cooked dinner for us each night, and each night we sat down around the table to eat, all of us at one big table like some kind of mismatching family.
It was a lot like that home I found myself living in after Momma and Daddy died except that this time, I wanted to be there.
There were other folks who came and went, like Ms. Adler, and some nice lady named Kathy who wanted to talk again and again about the things that Joseph did to me. She made me say over and over again that this was not my fault, until one day, she said, I’d actually start believing those very words, believing that what Joseph did to me, it was wrong. Believing that what happened to my Lily, her getting adopted by the Zeeger family and all, that was not my fault. Momma was not mad at me.
In fact, she told me once, looking at me with a pair of emerald-green eyes, “Your Momma would be proud.”
But still, there were nights when I lay down in bed, and I heard him—heard Joseph—sneaking into my room. I heard the squeal of the door, the grumble of floorboards beneath his feet, the sound of his huffing and puffing right on into my ear; I felt his damp, calloused hands yank the clothing from my body, heard his words crippling me, paralyzing me so that I couldn’t scream. An eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures, he said, hissing the words right on into my ear until I’d wake up, in a sweat, searching everywhere in that room for Joseph, in the closet and under the beds, sure that he was somewhere.
Every single squeak and creak, every time someone or other got up to use the restroom, I was sure it was Joseph, coming for me, coming to slide his hot beastly body in bed beside me, and it would take nearly forever for me to remember: Joseph was dead.
I must’ve made myself say it a hundred times a day—Joseph is dead—until one day maybe I’d start believing those words, too.
There were cupcakes for my birthday, chocolate ones with chocolate icing, just like Momma used to make. In the days leading up to my birthday, Paul and Lily Zeeger drove from their home in Fort Collins with Rose and Calla in tow. I wasn’t allowed to see Calla anymore, wasn’t allowed to touch her, and so she and Paul, they stood outside, on the front lawn of that group home, waiting for Big Lily and Little Lily, waiting for Rose. But I could see her through the window, how Calla had grown so big. How she was walking. From time to time Paul tried to scoop her up into his arms, but she pushed him away because by then, Calla was over a year old and didn’t want to be held. I watched as she wobbled around the lawn and once or twice or three times, fell to her hands and knees on the dirt and then popped right on up again like an old game of Whac-A-Mole. But there Paul was every time, ready to wipe the dirt off her knees and see if she was okay. I could see it now, though I couldn’t see it before: Paul was a good daddy.
Big Lily gazed at me from across the living room and said, “If only I’d have known...” and just like that, her voice drifted off and tears settled in her pretty eyes. “Your letters...” she said, and then, “I thought you were happy.”
Mrs. Wood longed for babies. She deserved her more than me. And she’d care for her, for Calla, for Ruby, better than I ever could. I knew that for sure. I knew that my being there, in that home with them, was problematic for Mr. and Mrs. Wood. I heard them talking about it all the time, Mr. Wood talking about police and jail and getting arrested. And I didn’t want to cause any trouble, not for them, for Mrs. Wood, who had been so kind.