“She doesn’t like me,” Willow guesses. Nope, I think, she doesn’t.
But Heidi says, “No. She just...” She fights for an appropriate answer and comes up near empty. “She hates everything,” she says instead, as if somehow everything does not encompass this strange new addition to our home.
“You can stay in here,” Heidi says as she leads the girl down the hall and into my office where we keep a classy leather sofa bed for when guests come to stay. Except that this is not a guest. I watch from the doorway as Heidi hands the baby back to the girl, then removes stacks of my work from the sofa and sets them on the desk with a thump.
“Heidi,” I say, but she ignores me, too busy removing the cushions from the sofa and tossing them to the floor.
“What you need,” she’s saying to the girl, who stands, grappling with the infant and a sopping suitcase in her hands, standing as uncomfortably in the room as I feel, “is a good night’s sleep. A square meal. Do you like chicken?” she asks, the girl’s wavering nod barely visible before Heidi says, “We’ll have chicken tetrazzini. Or better yet, chicken potpie. Comfort food. Do you like chicken potpie?”
And there’s only one thought running through my mind: I thought we were vegetarians. Where has Heidi been hiding the chicken all this time?
In her haste, Heidi knocks a dozen or more Excel spreadsheets and my fancy financial calculator to the floor. I push my way inside, losing patience, and collect the spreadsheets one by one. The girl reaches over and picks the calculator up off the floor, running her fingers over the numbers and buttons before returning it nervously to me. “Thanks,” I mutter, and then, “Heidi,” I say again, but this time she pushes past me—leaving the girl and me alone in the room for all of twenty seconds—in search of a set of chambray sheets from the linen closet. I snatch my laptop as the girl watches me, unplug the printer from the wall and carry the both of them, with great difficulty, from the room, tripping over the printer’s electrical cord as I do. I bypass Heidi in the doorway and snap this time, “Heidi,” and when her brown eyes pay me the time of day, I growl, “I need to speak with you. Now,” and she sets the sheets on the pull-out bed and follows me—piqued, as if I’m the one being bullheaded and impetuous—from the room.
“What the hell are you thinking?” I seeth at her as we drift down the narrow hall. “Bringing that girl into our home.” The printer is heavy; I lose balance and stumble into the wall. Heidi doesn’t offer to help.
“She had nowhere to go, Chris,” she insists, standing before me in that heinous lilac robe, her hair flattened by the rain. Her eyes are aroused, bizarrely similar to the night I came home from work, some twelve years ago, and there she was in the midst of our dining room, candles everywhere, perched in the nude. A bottle of wine open on the table: Chateau Saint-Pierre, and her impeccable body sitting cross-legged beside it, sipping from a handcrafted wineglass. The ten-dollar ones that we saved for special occasions.
“How long is she staying?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“A day, a week? What Heidi?” I ask, my voice escalating. “Which is it?”
“The baby has a fever.”
“So take it to the doctor,” I insist.
But Heidi is shaking her head no. “She doesn’t want to,” she says.
I trudge through the hall, set my now-traveling office on the kitchen table. I throw my hands up in the air, miffed. “Who the hell cares what she wants, Heidi? She is a little girl. A runaway, probably. We’re harboring a runaway. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble we could get into for harboring a runaway?” I ask as I find the phone book in a kitchen drawer and start flipping through the thin pages for the nonemergency police number. Or is this an emergency? Strange girl in my home. Sounds like trespassing to me.
“She’s eighteen,” Heidi insists.
“How do you know she’s eighteen?”
“She told me,” she replies foolishly.
“She’s not eighteen,” I assure my wife. “You need to report her to the authorities,” I demand.
“We can’t do that, Chris,” she says, stealing the heavy book from my hands. She snaps it shut, pages getting crimped between the yellow covers. “How do you know she wasn’t abused? Molested? Even if she is a runaway, she must have a good reason for leaving home.”
“Then call DCFS. Let them sort it out. This is not your concern.”
But of course it is. Every neglected, mistreated, overlooked, ignored, abandoned, forgotten, emaciated, abused, derelict creature on God’s green earth is Heidi’s concern.
This, I know without a shred of doubt, is an argument I cannot win.