I dismiss that scar, telling myself it simply isn’t true, reminding myself of the baby, sound asleep on the pink fleece blanket next door.
Graham says nothing as his warm hands come to rest on my waistline and he leads me to the bed, setting me down on a gray duvet that slips halfway to the bedroom floor, beside pillows that have yet to be replaced since morning. I stare past him, at a ceiling fan—brushed nickel with cherry blades—blowing papers one by one from a dresser and onto the floor, Graham’s latest work in progress, though he’s so caught up in the moment he fails to notice, fails to notice how the breeze of the ceiling fan spawns gooseflesh upon my bare arms, my legs, my chest.
He stands at the end of the bed, slipping an undershirt up over his head and as he does so, as I lean in to run my hands down the oblique and abdominal muscles that line his torso, the faint, fair hair, the alcove of a belly button, the antique brass button that affixes his jeans, I hear it.
I hear the baby cry.
Louder than the blare of a car horn, an unexpected peal of thunder, the roar of a steam engine.
I stand up quickly, gathering my clothing from the bedroom, the living room floor; Graham, deaf to the baby’s cry, begs me not to leave. “Heidi,” he says, his voice placating in a way that I bet makes it impossible for women to say no. “What’s wrong?” His eyes stare at me, at my eyes, as I step into the dress, clinging to the nylons, the panties in my hand. I secure the buttons up my back—mismatched and irregular.
“It’s just—” I say, feeling flushed, unable to let go of the sensation of Graham’s hands, his eyes, on my body, staring at me in a way Chris no longer stares. “I forgot there was something. Something I needed to do.”
I hear the crying when I am still in Graham’s doorway, loud, wretched crying, and I begin to run, the frantic clamor of kitten heels pounding on a wooden floor, as Graham calls to me by name.
“Heidi.”
But he doesn’t follow.
When I come into my home, there she is, the baby, sprawled across a pink blanket, on the floor.
Sound asleep.
It is not what I imagined.
What I expected to find was the blanket folded over her like the edges of an omelet, a handful of fleece stuffed in her angry hand. Her skin cardinal red, her cry thorny, like goose grass, rasping, scratchy, as if she’s been crying for days, weeks, more.
Instead, she is silent, save for the delicate inhalation and exhalation of air. She lies inert on the pink blanket, her features calm and composed while I stand there in the doorway, gasping for breath.
She is asleep, I tell myself, finding it utterly impossible, for I was certain—as certain as I live and breathe—that I heard a baby cry.
I run to the child and sweep her tiny figure from the floor, up into my arms, waking her from her daze.
“There now,” I croon quietly into her ear. “Mommy is here. Mommy won’t ever leave you again.”
WILLOW
Matthew had given me near everything I could possibly need inside that suitcase: money, and lots of it, some food: candy bars and granola bars and cookies. I didn’t know for sure how he happened upon the money. I settled into the bus, clutching it close to me, the only possession in the world that was mine. As the bus crisscrossed rural Nebraska, the sun making its ascent into the late-winter sky, I laid it upon my rickety lap and opened the clasp to reveal a book like all those he’d slipped into my bedroom when I was a kid: The Fifty States. I skimmed through it, seeing that he’d left messages for me in messy black ink, smudged between the slippery pages of the thick book. Beside Alaska: Too cold. Nebraska: No way. Illinois: Maybe. A guidebook to my future: that was Matthew’s intent.
Montana: A good place to hide.
I wondered if that was what I needed to do: find a place to hide. Would someone be looking for me? Joseph, maybe, or maybe the police. No, I reminded myself. Not Joseph. Joseph was dead.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep didn’t come easily. All I could see were Matthew’s deranged eyes as he tore into my room, the watery blood—colorless in the darkness of the room—on the knife. I heard Joseph’s scream over and over again, a ringing in my ears, and tried hard not to imagine what had happened when I left, to wonder where Matthew was right then and there, and whether or not he was okay.
I had this suspicion that everyone was looking at me, that everyone knew. I sunk low into the seat and tried to hide, refusing to make eye contact with anyone, refusing to force out a stale hello, even to the man who sat on the other side of the aisle, in his own teal chair, in a black suit and clerical collar, leafing through a worn copy of the Bible.
Especially not the man on the other side of the aisle.