Pretty Baby. Mary Kubica
Taylor and her mother. I’m still in my boxers when Zoe lets herself inside, and there, hovering in the doorway, is the throng of them, mouths agape, dripping wet like a bunch of wet dogs, staring at me, in my boxer shorts, at the traces of dark hair on my chest. My hair is waxy, standing every which way, an old man smell stuck to me like glue.
“Zoe,” I say, jumping from the recliner, nearly spilling my coffee as I do.
“Dad.” Mortification fills Zoe’s eyes. Her father, half naked, in the same room with her best friend. I wrap a faux fur blanket around myself and try to laugh it off.
“I didn’t know when you’d be home,” I say. But of course, that isn’t a good enough excuse. Not for Zoe anyway.
This, I’m certain, is only the first of many times I will humiliate my daughter. I watch as Zoe grabs Taylor by the hand and they disappear down the hall. I hear the door to Zoe’s bedroom creep shut and imagine Zoe’s words: My dad is such a loser. “Heidi home, Chris?” Jennifer asks, her eyes looking everywhere but me.
“Nope,” I say. I wonder if Jennifer knows about the girl. The girl with the baby. Probably. When it comes to Heidi’s life, Jennifer knows most everything. I grip the blanket tighter and wonder what Heidi tells Jennifer about me. I’m absolutely certain that when I’m being an asshole, Jennifer’s the first to know about it. About my smoking-hot coworker or the fact that I’m traveling again.
“You know when she’ll be home?”
“I don’t.”
I watch as Jennifer fidgets with the strap of her purse. She could be a pretty woman, if she’d get out of her scrubs and put on some real clothes for a change. The woman works in a hospital, and I’m half-certain the only clothes hanging in her closet are scrubs in every color of the gosh darn rainbow and clogs. Medical clogs. They look comfortable, I’ll give her that, and yet whatever happened to jeans? A sweatshirt? Yoga pants?
“Anything I can help with?” I ask, a polite but dumb offering. Jennifer, a bitter divorcée, hates me simply because I am a man. A half wit, no less, lounging around the house in my underwear in the middle of the day.
She shakes her head. “Just girl stuff,” she says, and then, “Thanks anyway.”
And then she retrieves Taylor, and when they leave, Zoe turns to me, glaring disapproval in her preteen eyes and says, “Really, Dad. Boxer shorts? It’s eleven o’clock,” and retreats to her bedroom and slams the door.
Great, I think. Just perfect. Heidi’s off chasing down homeless girls, but I’m the one who’s weird.
I don’t know if she drinks coffee or not, but I bring her a café mocha nonetheless, topped with extra whipped cream for good measure, the perfect pick-me-up for anyone who’s having a bad day. I get a scone to go with it, cinnamon chip, plus the “very berry” coffee cake, in case she doesn’t like cinnamon or scones. And then I scurry down the quiet, Saturday morning streets, elbows out, in a defensive position, ready to tackle anyone who gets in my way.
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