Before I know it, Zoe stands, hovering before the front door, her backpack thrown over a shoulder. She has her coat on, partway zipped, and an umbrella dangling by its cord from her wrist. “You ready to go?” she asks and I peer down at my own attire: at the robe and a pair of sheepskin slippers still warming my feet.
“Mom,” Zoe snaps this time, having just discovered that I’m still in my pajamas. I make no effort to move, fearful of waking Ruby from her nap. I feel my mouth open, a shh emerging so that Zoe’s voice will not rouse the baby from sleep.
Zoe, in a huff, frowns, her eyes bouncing between a clock on the wall and me, her body antsy. Her posture sags, her shoulders slump forward, the small of her back arched. Her backpack falls from her shoulder and into the crook of an elbow before she thrusts it back up and sighs.
I whisper, “I’m not going to work,” just like that. “You’ll have to walk yourself to school,” I say, expecting her to leap up and down with joy, for this is the one thing she’s been begging for years to do. To walk herself to school, alone, as her best friend Taylor is allowed to do.
But instead of joy, her mouth drops open and she says to me with disdain, “What do you mean you’re not going to work? You always go to work,” a fact altogether true, for the times that I’ve called in sick for work—even when a young Zoe was home sick with the flu—were few and far between. Often times it was Chris I begged to stay home from work, or when he was unable, his parents beckoned from their west suburban home, or, in moments of desperation, Graham.
But the weight of Ruby, sound asleep on my lap, reminds me that I cannot leave.
My finger, nestled in the flabby clutches of her hand, assures me I cannot go.
“I have plenty of vacation time accrued,” I say in a hushed tone, and then remind Zoe about the paper lunch sack awaiting her on the kitchen counter with ants on a log inside, a recent fad now that she’s watching her weight. I wonder if I watched my weight when I was twelve, doubtful, imagining that that, too, came later, sixteen or seventeen perhaps. She gropes for the bag, the paper crinkling loudly in the palm of her hand. Ruby stirs on my lap and opens her eyes ever so slightly, before stretching her arms high above her head and falling back to sleep.
“Have a good day,” I whisper to Zoe before she leaves, and she responds with a noncommittal, “Whatever,” before disappearing into the hall, leaving the door wide-open so that I have to ask Willow to close it please.
I’m hopeful that Zoe will remember to keep Willow a secret, that she will remember that she’s not to mention our guest to her classmates at school, to her teachers. Harboring a runaway for more than 48 hours is deemed a crime, a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison, years of probation, a hefty fine.
But knowing this and believing this are two different things. I find it hard to believe that I could ever be caught, or that the police would enforce such a penalty when what I am doing is helping this girl. I wonder where the police were when someone thwacked Willow so hard that the ochre bruise formed on her head, or when some lecherous man laid himself atop her body. Was she alone when Ruby was born, tucked down some dark alley at night, beneath rusting fire escapes and dripping air conditioner units, beside rat infested Dumpsters, leaned up against some brick wall covered with graffiti, the sounds of the city invalidating the sounds of her screams.
There’s an image I carry in my mind, that image of Willow, down a darkened alley, giving birth to a baby. As I sit on the leather armchair with Ruby sound asleep in my lap—Willow perched by the window in silence, watching pedestrians come and go—I count back four months in my head: March, February, January, December. Ruby would have been born sometime in December. Add to my image: dirty, slushy snow; the biting cold, freezing the blood as it oozed from the birthing canal.
In my image, Willow is replaced by Zoe: a daughter, someone’s daughter.
Where is her mother?
Why wasn’t her mother there to protect her from this ghastly fate?
I find myself staring at Willow, at the hair that hangs in her face, covering eyes that are slowly catching up on sleep, skin that is beginning to soften from the cold, spring air. She isn’t a tall girl, per se, about six inches shorter than me, so that I can see the top of her head, the place where tawny roots grow in from her scalp, uninterrupted by the imitation red.
I reach out and, without thinking, lay my fingers briefly on her infected earring holes, the skin red and crusty, the lobe beginning to bulge. She withdraws quickly from my touch, blanching as if I’d slapped her with the back of a hand.