“How about you tell me,” the silver-haired lady says, though I know that somewhere in that pad of paper it says. About Momma’s old Datsun Bluebird. About the accident, a rollover accident, as someone said, out on I-80, just outside of Ogallala, about how eyewitnesses claimed they saw the car zigzag and swerve. About how Daddy lost control of the car, then likely overcorrected, sending the car in circles on the road. I imagine it, Momma’s old Bluebird doing summersaults down the interstate while Momma and Daddy hung on for dear life.
Lily and I were home at the time. Alone. We never had a sitter. Momma trusted me to take care of Lily, even when I was eight years old. I got pretty good at it: changing her diaper, putting her to bed. I cut her apples and carrots into teensy bites so that she wouldn’t choke—like Momma said—and always made sure the dead bolt was secure, that I didn’t answer the door for no one, not even Mrs. Grass from next door, who was forever trying to embezzle our milk and eggs. Lily and I would lie in front of the TV anytime Momma and Daddy were gone, watching Sesame Street because Sesame Street was her favorite show of all. She liked Snuffleupagus the best, Snuffy, the big old mammoth who always made her laugh. She’d lie on the living room floor beside me, on the shaggy green carpeting that reminded me a bit of Snuffy’s fur, pointing at that mammoth on the TV and laughing.
It wasn’t as if Momma left Lily and me home alone that much. But there were times, she said, that an adult’s got to do what an adult’s got to do. That’s what she said to me the morning she and Daddy climbed into the Bluebird and she stuck her head out the window as they pulled from the gravel drive, her long black hair getting caught up in the wind so that I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her voice anyway: Take good care of Lily, and something or other about love and you. I love you like a bee loves honey. I love you like peanut butter loves jelly. I love you like a fish loves water.
Momma told me to take good care of Lily. They were the last words she said to me, the last vision I have of her: her with her head stuck out the busted window of the junky old Datsun, the wind blurring her face with a mass of black hair. Take good care of Lily. And that’s what I intended to do.
But then, just like that, Lily was gone, too.
HEIDI
We bathe Ruby first. I draw the water so that it is tepid: warm enough, but not too warm for the baby’s frail skin. I’m about to leave the room, to give Willow privacy, when she turns to me and asks, with those tuckered-out eyes, her body enervated, ready to drop, the tone of her voice fraught with fatigue, “Will you help me? Please?” And I say of course, elated to feel the slippery child in my hands as Willow scoops handfuls of water over her body. With the baby in my hands, I find myself thinking of Juliet, knowing that the loss of Juliet wasn’t only about the loss of one baby; it was about the loss of all the babies. All the babies I was meant to have. There was a time I found myself thinking of little Juliet for hours on end, dreaming about her and what she may have looked like had I carried her full term. Would her hair be light and sparse like Zoe’s when she crawled out of my womb, or would it be dark and plentiful as Chris’s own mother said his was, hampering her with months of heartburn as the old wives’ tales claimed they do?
It had been quite some time since I allowed myself to think of little Juliet? to let her image creep into my head. But there she was, once again, taking up residence in my mind’s eye, reminding me of all the babies I would never have. Juliet, I nearly uttered allowed. Juliet Wood. She would have been eleven years old now, if life had gone according to plan. Eleven years old, with a parade of little ones following her out, every two years like clockwork. Sophia and Alexis, and baby Zach.
And then Ruby squeals and I return to the present, to the here and now. I watch as the bathwater seeps up the green sleeves of Willow’s coat, transforming the army green to black. I offered to take the coat from her before she sunk her arms into the water, but she said no. Her callow hands shake as she lathers the vanilla body wash onto her hands, and caresses the baby’s scalp and underarms, her rear end. Ruby’s bottom is encrusted with a scarlet diaper rash, as I knew it would be, a rash that is not limited to just the genital area, but under her arms and in the folds of skin elsewhere along her tiny body. Her bottom is besieged by a yeast infection, a white crust at the periphery of the red rash. I devise a grocery list in my mind: diaper rash cream, clotrimazole cream and, as the vanilla body wash seeps into the corners of the baby’s eyes and she lets out a shriek: No More Tears baby wash. Willow has no spare diapers and so, when the bath is through, I swathe Ruby in an organic harbor blue towel, and seal it shut with safety pins. Add to the checklist: diapers and wipes.