HEIDI
I press my baby into me and sink into the rocking chair, vowing never, ever, ever to leave her again. She’s begun to cry now, her cry angry and infuriated as she seizes strands of my hair in the palm of her hand and pulls, hard, howling without cease, the kind of cry that forces the breath from her lungs, and she finds herself gasping, suddenly, for air. I rise from the chair and begin to tread throughout the room, aware of the murmur of Nina Simone that seeps through the wall from Graham’s home: I Put a Spell on You, playing louder now than ever before.
Or is that simply my imagination?
Is he trying to drown out the sound of my baby’s indignant cry? Or send me a message? I envision Graham, at that moment, still unclad, wondering why it was I had to leave when I’d only just arrived.
And then, I think, what would he do, there in his home, with his undershirt discarded, his jeans unzipped; would he phone a lady friend to fill the space where I’d just been? I try not to think about it, to think about some beautiful blonde woman taking my place on the edge of the unmade bed, and Graham, blind to the change, aware only of some woman’s hands on him. I will the image out of my mind: me on Graham’s bed, his body hovering above mine. I think what I would have done, how far I would have gone had it not been for the baby.
But no, I remind myself. The baby was asleep. Or was she? I wonder, finding myself suddenly oh-so confused, mindful of the cry—desperate and helpless, completely forlorn—that I heard from Graham’s room. That cry plays over and over again in my mind, a soundtrack to accompany the scene: Graham slipping an undershirt up over his head, the oblique and abdominal muscles, the faint, fair hair, the brass button of his jeans.
And then: that cry.
The baby did cry, I tell myself. She was not asleep.
I move the baby back and forth, up and down in a gentle seesaw motion, anything to calm her down. She’s angry with me for leaving. I say it over and over again, “I’m so sorry. Mommy will never, ever leave you again,” and I smother her with kisses in a weak attempt at an apology.
I am not a good mother, I tell myself. A good mother wouldn’t have left her alone and walked out of the room. A moment of weakness, I think, remembering all too well the condom abandoned in the pocket of Chris’s trousers, and the thought of it, the thought of that shiny blue wrapper, sends me into a rapid descent: heartbeat unsettled, hands that feel like sludge.
In the kitchen, I prepare a bottle, knowing, as I always do, as the baby nuzzles her nose into the black crepe dress, that she is hungry. I set the formula into the bottle, add water and shake: a counterfeit reproduction of the sustenance her mother is meant to provide. I try to remember why it was that I decided to bottle feed my baby, why I did not breast feed. Or did I breast feed? And I find that, standing there, in the kitchen, I cannot remember. Cancer, I tell myself, but then: cancer?
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.