We tossed the empty bottles of hair dye into the trash and then the girl pulled me close, streaking eyeliner across my eyes. I’d never worn makeup before, nothing other than a hint of pale pink rouge Momma swept across my cheeks every now and then. I looked at myself in the filmy mirror: the hair, the earring, the dark mysterious eyes.
The reflection that stared back was anything but mine.
“What’s your name?” she asked, slipping the eyeliner into my pocket, the pocket of that green coat that used to be hers. And then she took a pair of scissors to my hair. I didn’t object. I held very still, watching in the mirror as she snipped erratic strands from my head. “You know,” she confessed, tossing the wet clumps of hair to the bathroom tile, “I used to want to be a beautician.”
I stared at my reflection and thought it best that she was not. My mop was misshapen: longer on one side than the other, lanky bangs that hid my eyes.
“My mother was a beautician,” I said, then wondered what Momma would think of me now. Would she be disappointed in me, or would she see that I was doing what needed to be done? I was taking good care of Lily, just like I told her I would. “My name is Claire.”
“Claire?” she asked and I nodded my head. “Claire what?”
Her own reddish hair she’d dyed dirty blond. She took the scissors to her hair, too, and on the dingy floor the strands coalesced.
“Claire Dalloway.”
She tossed it all in the trash: the scissors, the safety pin, what she could collect of the hair from that floor. She opened her own bag and dumped its guts into the bin: a torn magazine, an ID, a half-eaten bag of Skittles, a phone. And then she reached inside the black garbage bag and snatched the Skittles, having changed her mind. The rest she left behind.
The girl was standing in the bathroom, hand on the door. Someone on the other side knocked, a heavy, thumping blow. “Hang on,” she snapped, and then, to me, “I’m Willow,” she said, “Willow Greer,” and I knew after she left that bathroom, I’d never lay eyes on her again.
“I’ll meet you at the bus,” she fudged, and with that, I hoisted the slipping baby onto a hip and watched my former self walk out the yellowing veneer door and into the gas station, past a line of waiting women who’d lost their patience.
She wasn’t on the bus when I returned.
HEIDI
She’ll have nothing to do with the bottle.
I try again and again to set the formula-filled bottle into Juliet’s mouth, but she’ll have nothing to do with it. I press my lips to her forehead; it’s cool. No fever. I change her diaper and attempt a pacifier, I spread diaper rash cream onto a healed rash, but nothing will do, nothing will soothe my child.
And it’s in the way that she nuzzles her nose into the black crepe dress that the answer comes to me, the answer, utterly simple: that one thing only a mother can provide.
I sit down in the rocking chair and, reaching behind me with a single arm, begin to unfasten the mismatched buttons up my back, sliding my arms out of the dress so that before Juliet, I am exposed. Nothing she hasn’t seen before, I think, recalling those nights in my mind that I sat down with Juliet, in the sleigh glider in the nursery with its pale pink walls and damask sheets, and pressed her to my breast so she could drink her fill, until her hunger eased and she drank herself asleep, her eyes slowly becoming too heavy to hold open, and there, in the nursery, with only the glow of the moon to keep us company, my Juliet would suckle until she drifted to sleep. I recall the way she would slurp insatiably at times, staring at me with her huge brown anime eyes as if I was the best thing in the world, her eyes filled to the brim with love and awe. Love and awe for me.
But Juliet, I’m noticing, eyeing the child before me, Juliet’s eyes are blue.
It’s no matter, I tell myself, knowing how babies’ eyes can change on a dime. Brown one minute, blue the next, and yet there’s something different about it, about those eyes, about the way they stare at me.
I place my breast beside Juliet’s mouth, and watch in admiration as she locates the nipple, and as she latches on, I find it all so familiar, the tingling sensation in my breast, the release of oxytocin that fills me with a sense of calm. I run a hand across my Juliet’s head and whisper, “There now, pretty baby,” as I watch for the rhythmic sucking and swallowing action, for the big brown eyes to stare at me with awe. Love. Wanting me and only me.