He could incriminate me, my Chris, who likes to point fingers and dodge blame. He could say that I was the one to lock myself in the bedroom with Juliet, but he does not.
He could say he was worried I would hurt the baby, our baby, and I would laugh, wouldn’t I? I would laugh. A cynical, mocking laugh, though he knows as well as I that I was standing there, on the edge of a fire escape, about to lose my balance when Chris forced himself into the bedroom.
But he didn’t tell the police about this when they arrived; no he did not.
He sits on the edge of my bed and reaches for my hand. And there I am, drowning, sinking farther and farther beneath the ocean’s current, the waves washing over me while I scream silently, involuntarily drawing breaths, my throat in spasms, choking on mouthfuls of salt water that fill my lungs.
“We’re going to figure this out, Heidi,” he says to me, then as he runs his fingers along my hand and up an arm, unaware of the way I gag and retch there on the bed, suffocating. I become submerged beneath the water while Chris and Zoe, the both of them, stand on the shore and watch.
The nurse steps from the room, saying to Chris, “Just five minutes, and then she needs to rest,” before allowing the door to drift closed until it is just Chris and me. I hear her words, muffled, from afar, and then the water again, a large breaking wave that pulls me under the sea.
And I see Chris, then, I see that he has spotted me from a distance and he dives into the water making his way ever so slowly to me.
“Zoe needs you,” he says, and then, after a pause, “I need you,” offering a life belt, something for me to hold on to as I flounder in rapid waters, trying desperately to swim.
WILLOW
It wasn’t long before the police found me, over on Michigan Avenue, staring through the windows of the Prada store. I was mesmerized; I couldn’t move. Staring through the big ol’ window of that shop, I couldn’t think of anything else but seeing Momma in those fancy-schmancy dresses, the ones that hung in the sparkly store window, from headless mannequins. How Momma would have loved those dresses!
The police hung on to me for a little while, but they didn’t keep me for long. Turned out that, once again, I was a kid no one wanted.
I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a group home settled right in between Omaha and Lincoln, so that sometimes we’d drive on over to the Platte River and hike, through the woodlands that overlooked that broad river that was usually filled up with mud. There were twelve of us girls in that group home, living with a husband and wife we called Nan and Joe. We all had chores that varied from week to week, like cleaning the kitchen or doing the wash. Nan cooked dinner for us each night, and each night we sat down around the table to eat, all of us at one big table like some kind of mismatching family.
It was a lot like that home I found myself living in after Momma and Daddy died except that this time, I wanted to be there.
There were other folks who came and went, like Ms. Adler, and some nice lady named Kathy who wanted to talk again and again about the things that Joseph did to me. She made me say over and over again that this was not my fault, until one day, she said, I’d actually start believing those very words, believing that what Joseph did to me, it was wrong. Believing that what happened to my Lily, her getting adopted by the Zeeger family and all, that was not my fault. Momma was not mad at me.
In fact, she told me once, looking at me with a pair of emerald-green eyes, “Your Momma would be proud.”
But still, there were nights when I lay down in bed, and I heard him—heard Joseph—sneaking into my room. I heard the squeal of the door, the grumble of floorboards beneath his feet, the sound of his huffing and puffing right on into my ear; I felt his damp, calloused hands yank the clothing from my body, heard his words crippling me, paralyzing me so that I couldn’t scream. An eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures, he said, hissing the words right on into my ear until I’d wake up, in a sweat, searching everywhere in that room for Joseph, in the closet and under the beds, sure that he was somewhere.
Every single squeak and creak, every time someone or other got up to use the restroom, I was sure it was Joseph, coming for me, coming to slide his hot beastly body in bed beside me, and it would take nearly forever for me to remember: Joseph was dead.