“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.