The train ride home is quiet. I depart the “L” at the Fullerton Station and walk down the steps onto the street. There is a homeless man leaning against the cast-iron fence beside the newspaper stands, eyes closed as if he’s fast asleep. Beside him sits a black garbage bag, stuffed full with all of his earthly possessions. He shivers in his sleep in the biting fifty-degree day.
My first thought: those big legs of his, long and gangly, lost in a pair of light blue hospital scrubs, are in my way. Like the other people moving down the street, I step over him with exaggerated strides. But then something makes me stop and turn, to see the redness of his cheeks and ears, the way he’s got one hand on that garbage bag in case someone tries to steal it in his sleep. I pull my wallet from a back pocket and search inside, forcing the sound of Heidi’s voice from my mind. I drop a ten-dollar bill beside the man, hoping the wind doesn’t carry it away before he opens his eyes.
It’d be just my luck if my good deed went unnoticed.
*
When I come into the condo, the TV is on. Sesame Street. Heidi’s got that baby laid out on its stomach in front of the TV, and she’s educating Willow about the fine art of tummy time, hoping the big furry monsters distract the baby long enough that she forgets how much she hates being on her stomach, floundering around like a fish out of water.
Zoe stands in the kitchen, eyeing her cell phone on the counter. She jumps when I come bumbling through the door, as if caught red-handed doing something wrong. She ebbs slowly away, one step at a time, before Heidi can see her proximity to the phone.
Heidi greets me with, “I thought you were going to be home sooner.” She barely raises her eyes from the baby, who she inundates with all sorts of shrill baby talk and overblown facial expressions, but for me, nothing.
It’s nearly seven o’clock.
“Can I speak to you, Heidi?” I ask as I hang a jacket on the hook by the door. Her eyes graze mine as she lifts that baby from the floor and hands her to the girl who handles her so maladroitly that for a split second I think the baby may fall. And then that stupid woolly mammoth is on the TV, Aloysius Snuffleupagus, and the girl stares, dumbstruck, and it occurs to me that Zoe hasn’t watched Sesame Street since she was about two years old.
Heidi follows me into the bedroom, her feet light as air on the hardwood floors. Mine, in contrast, are heavy, clobbering the floor as if I have something to prove. The cats scamper away, so I won’t step on their tails, and hide under the bed. While I change out of my work shirt and into a white and maroon sweatshirt—my old alma mater, of course, Go, Phoenix, go!—I tell her about the road show. About how I’ll be in New York for a day or two, followed by Denver for a few days. How I’m leaving in the morning.
I’m expecting a lashing—fingers wagging and eyes rolling—some dismissive comment about Cassidy Knudsen, a grilling about whether or not that floozy will accompany me on this trip...and yet, none of it comes.
She’s quiet for a split second, and then Heidi simply shrugs her shoulders and says, “Okay,” and goes so far as to heave the laundry basket downstairs to make sure I have plenty of clean undies for my trip.
I should be concerned. I know that. But not being reprimanded like a ten-year-old boy is pure bliss.
I pack. I warm up leftover pizza for dinner while Heidi gathers quarters and excuses herself to throw the laundry in the dryer. Zoe is in her bedroom, working on earth science, or so she claims. But I see her instead, on her bed, with that yellow notebook across her lap. The one where she keeps her intimate thoughts about how her father’s a doofus, her mother loony. Or maybe in that notebook she writes about Austin, or maybe Willow. How would I know? Maybe, just maybe, she’s a closet poet, filling the pages with limericks and odes.
In the room with Willow and me, there’s nothing but dead air.
And baby noises: coos and squeals and grunts and such.
I find myself staring at the palms of her hands for evidence of a tattoo, the butterfly with its black and yellow wings. I wonder: if she’d had it removed, would there be a scar? Bleached out skin? Leftover remnants of the tattoo?
But on her hands there is nothing, nada. And yet there are those earrings, the very same earrings as in the Twitter profile. How could that be?
I peek to make sure Willow isn’t paying attention, and then I check my Twitter account stealthily to see if @LostWithoutU ever responded to my Tweet. No such luck. But I have eight new followers, a fact that I let go to my head.
How would Willow ever reply, I wonder, if she doesn’t have access to a computer? Does she have access to a computer? I think about that nasty old suitcase she lugged into our home, the one perched in the corner of my office, the leather cracked and brittle, losing shape. Is there a laptop inside, some smartphone with Wi-Fi where she could respond to tweets? I’ve never seen her on it, never heard it ring.