I am about to take Ruby from the room, to give Willow privacy for her own bath, when she stops me. I can see that she does not want the baby to leave. She doesn’t trust me. Not yet. And why should she, I think, when I am a complete stranger. Wasn’t I the one to stop the neonatal nurse from removing Zoe from my birthing room, on doctor’s orders that I rest?
Though I want nothing less than to make Ruby a fresh bottle, to sit with her in the living room until she falls to sleep, I lay a second towel on the porcelain floor and the baby on top of that, sucking like the dickens on her own adorable toes. I linger for a half a second or more, staring as she unearths the appendages from that harbor-blue towel, and like an agile gymnast, thrusts them into her mouth.
Willow locks the door behind me. I stand there, in the hall, hand on the wall, all the breath suctioned right out of me with a vacuum’s upholstery attachment thrust deep into my lungs.
From the kitchen, I see Chris sitting at the table, typing furiously on his laptop. The printer is plugged into the wall, an ugly black cord that stretches across the room.
A safety hazard.
But I don’t dare say this. His eyes meet mine and remind me, once again, of how he disagrees with my decision. He shakes his head, disgruntled, and his eyes revert to the LCD screen, to the microscopic numbers that fill the lines of the incomprehensible spreadsheets. Zoe’s pop music suffuses our home, making the walls shake, the framed photographs that line the hallway walls dance. I stare at the images of Zoe: smiling through gaping teeth, and then, years later, her nose ruddy with a cold. Crooked teeth, much bigger than the space that nature allowed for them, followed by braces. Zoe always adored picture day at her Catholic school, the one and only day of the year when uniforms were not required. When she was younger I had a say in what she wore for pictures, and so we relied on sateen dresses and woolen jumpers, with corsage headbands or tulle poufs in her hair. But as the years went by, and adolescence settled upon my once baby girl, a sudden change altered those photos, no longer awash with ruffles and bows, but now animal prints and graphic tops, hoodies and dark vests, each article of clothing as reclusive and moody as the individual inside them.
My knuckles come to rest on Zoe’s bedroom door.
“What?” she grunts from inside the room. When I let myself inside, she is sitting on the bed with her adored yellow notebook close at hand. The space heater is on, set to seventy-four degrees after a recent request that she not let her room feel like the fiery furnace of hell. And still, Zoe is wrapped in a blanket, sulking. On her arms: arm warmers, another recent fad that has me nonplussed. Zoe’s are black with sequins, given to her by a friend. Are your arms cold? I had asked blunderingly the day she arrived home from school with them secured to her hands.
Her eyes confirmed what she already knew to be true: her mother was an idiot.
Even I could hear the cowardice in my voice, fearful of rejection from my twelve-year-old daughter. “Do you have something Willow could wear? After she’s through with her bath?” I ask, hovering in the doorway like a scaredy-cat.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Zoe replies as she gropes for her phone and begins texting furtively with dexterous thumbs. I can only imagine what mean words she is sending to Taylor via cell phone towers.
“You can’t,” I say, springing across the canopy bed for the cell phone. I snatch it from my daughter’s hand, and see a series of text abbreviations of which I can’t make heads or tails. J2LYK.
Zoe cries out, “That’s mine,” as she lunges for the phone and tries to yank it from me, but I remind her that, “It’s not. Your father and I still pay the bill.” I stand firmly before the bed, holding the phone behind me. That was our agreement after all. Zoe could have a cell phone so long as Chris and I were allowed to peruse her text messages for any red flags.
But the look on her face is reminiscent of a child being slapped.
“Give it to me,” she orders, staring at me with those big brown anime eyes of hers, the disproportional eyes that always look sad. She holds her hand out expectantly, blue ink doodled across a forearm. Oh, how I want to give her the phone, to not have her be mad! I see the piping hot indignation leaching from my child and know her mind is bursting with hatred. Hatred toward me.
Whoever said motherhood was easy...