How long we wait, I cannot say. One minute, one hour, I don’t know, but I jostle my baby silently and beg her to stop. The frequency of Jennifer’s tap, tap, tapping gets less and less until it altogether ceases; my phone rings and then stops, rings and then stops, the house phone, the cell phone.
I watch out the bedroom window with its upward slanting blinds as Jennifer appears, turning circles on the street below as if utterly confused. She peers up, at the bay window in our living room and stares, and it’s only as she departs down the street, tossing one of the Starbucks cups in a nearby garbage bin, that I emerge from the bedroom and seek out my phone, the one which, from the hallway, Jennifer most certainly heard ring. Three times, or so the phone tells me, three missed calls, an awaiting voice mail. A text message.
Where r u?
WILLOW
Louise Flores beckons me again. A guard arrives at the cell I share with Diva, demanding I put my hands through the portal so she can cuff them before she opens the door. I climb down from the top tier of the bunk bed and place my hands behind my back.
We walk through the prison together.
Today Ms. Flores wants to talk about the baby, Calla. I sit down across from her, on a spent seat with its inflexible back. “Why did you take the baby?” she asks, and I picture that night, standing in the darkened woods, staring through the treasure-trove of windows of the A-frame home.
After visiting the old prefab home in Ogallala, I found my way back to the Conoco where I begged and pleaded with the ticket lady to trade my obsolete ticket in for a new one. I’d missed the bus to Fort Collins, of course. For twenty bucks she said she would. Grudgingly. It was dark by then. The next bus wouldn’t arrive until the middle of the night: 3:05 a.m.
But I hadn’t gone to the Conoco right away. After I’d stopped sniveling in that stranger’s yard, I made my way over to the cemetery off Fifth Street and laid down on the lawn, right between Momma and Daddy.
And then I got myself together and did what needed to be done.
Every single light in the A-frame must’ve been turned on. I saw everything as if I was in that house with them all, a fly on the wall. I saw Paul Zeeger in an upstairs room, slipping off a tie. Big Lily, cradling that gosh darn baby in her arms, rocking her back and forth in a subliminal sway, her hand sweeping across the baby’s stupid head. The dog, at her feet, began a happy dance, and when Big Lily meandered to the back door to let it outside, I hid behind an enormous tree. “Go, Tyson,” she said with a slight kick to his behind, “Hurry up,” and then she closed the door, and that dog, with its amazing snout, sought me out in the trees and licked me. I pushed it away, whispered Go! in whatever firm voice I could muster, letting my eyes run their course through the home. The fireplace was on, a TV in the Zeeger bedroom (where Paul now lay, spread out across the bed) tuned in to the news.
And then there was Lily, Little Lily, my Lily, in a bedroom, all alone, braiding the hair of a baby doll. She sat on the edge of a purple bed with that doll pressed between her legs, winding the strands around her fingers. My Lily wasn’t a baby anymore. In fact, she was older than I’d been when Momma and Daddy died.
And she was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Just like Momma had been.
“Why didn’t you just take Rose?” Ms. Flores asks as she breaks off a bite of muffin and sets it in her mouth, letting it slowly dissolve. “Rose was your sister after all.”
“Lily,” I snap. “Her name is Lily,” I say, imagining the way she tired of braiding the doll’s hair—maybe she didn’t know how to do it, or maybe she was just tired of playing with the doll, I don’t know—but I saw the way she spun that doll around and stared into her acrylic eyes for a split second before she flung it across the room. The doll’s head smashed into the purple wall and fell like a brick from the sky. At the same time, Paul and Big Lily jumped, but it was Big Lily—beckoned by the sound of my Lily’s cry—who placed the baby in a cradle and climbed the steps to my Lily’s room.
Lily hated Baby Calla. That’s what I told myself. And she was taking it out on that doll. I watched as she rose from the bed in a horse-print nightgown and plaid slippers and walked to where that toy lay facedown on the ground and kicked it with a vengeance.
Ms. Flores stares at me and then gives in. Sort of. “Fine,” she says. “Lily. Rose. Whatever. Answer the question, Claire. Why didn’t you take your sister instead of the baby?”
The truth was that my Lily had a grand life. Before. Before Paul and Big Lily decided to replace her with the baby they always dreamed of. There wasn’t a thing I could give my Lily. My only possessions in the entire world were stuffed inside a suitcase Matthew had given me: dollar bills that were quickly dwindling away, a couple of books, the photograph of Momma.
“I couldn’t take care of Lily,” I tell Ms. Flores, “if I took her from that home.”
“But you could take care of the baby? You could take care of Calla?”