*
We sit on the “L”, side by side, and as we drive off, north this time, the baby becomes mesmerized with the motion of the train, the bright sunlight, the buildings that shoot past so fast that their colors and shapes begin to blur, redbrick bleeding into reinforced concrete and steel frames. I sit close enough to Willow that our legs touch and as they do, she pulls away instinctively though on the crowded train there’s no where else to go. Willow finds proximity with others to be disturbing, painful almost, in the way that she grimaces and recoils, as if my standing or sitting too close is as painful as a slap across the face. She’d prefer people to stay at an arm’s length, literally, in that extrapersonal space, that space which she can’t touch and, perhaps more importantly, can’t be touched.
She doesn’t like to be touched. She winces at the slightest touch of a hand. She avoids eye contact as best she can.
Is this the behavior of someone who’s been maltreated, I wonder, staring out the corner of my eye at the erratic hair she lets disguise her face, or the one who’s mistreated others? Are the dark, shadowy eyes—and the way they leer at Chris and Zoe, at me—an effect of abuse, or an indication of her own dishonorable behavior? I watch as others watch the girl beside me, the one with a baby on her lap, the one whose eyes wander off into space, her mind teleporting her to some distant realm outside this crowded train, while I secretly stroke the toes of the baby, with a single finger so Willow will not see.
Are they seeing something I’ve failed to see?
Are they plagued with some thought—some reservation—that never crossed my mind? Or perhaps it did cross my mind, that reservation about Willow, and I chose to ignore it, as I chose to ignore the blood on the undershirt, to take her words at face value and not consider that it could be more. A bloody nose, she’d said.
And yet, in the time she’d been with us, her nose had yet to bleed.
We take the train to a walk-in clinic in Lakeview. The baby’s fever still lingers, lying in wait for the most inopportune times to rear its ugly head. Tylenol soothes her, yes, and yet it’s only a temporary fix; we have yet to get at the root cause of the temperature, the discomfort that makes her miserable for hours on end.
Zoe’s pediatrician was out of the question; I knew that much. There might be questions. But a walk-in clinic where I could pay cash—that was much better. Much better indeed.
We depart the “L” and walk the block or two to the clinic, a corner unit on a busy intersection that is loud at this time of day: cars screaming past, sawhorses and caution tape blocking parts of the sidewalk that the April rain has turned into lakes. People step into the street to get around it, stepping into oncoming traffic so that some driver lays on their horn and beeps.
Willow has the baby tucked into her coat, the army-green coat with tufts of pink fleece poking out, a reminder of the day I first laid eyes on the duo, hovering at the Fullerton Station in the rain. I offer to carry the baby but Willow glances at me and says no. “No, thank you,” is what she says, but all I hear is no. A denial, a rejection. My face flames red, embarrassed.
And so I wait until we’re in the vestibule, Willow and me, that quiet space between glass doors, to take the baby abruptly from her hands—so sudden she doesn’t have time to react—she is unable to react because the eyes on the other side of the glass may see—and say, “We’ll say she’s mine. It’s more believable this way. Fewer questions,” and I push through the second glass door and into the lobby of the clinic without waiting for her to respond.
Willow lags behind, a half step or more, watching me, the flare of her icy blue eyes burning a hole in my shirt.
WILLOW
“I’d never been out of the house,” I say. “That was the very first time.”
I tell Ms. Flores how Matthew appeared after Joseph and Isaac had gone for the day, how he had an old pair of gym shoes with him, with laces he had to help me tie, how he told me to put them on because where we were going, I couldn’t go barefoot.
I didn’t know where he got the shoes. I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask where he got the sweatshirt, a thin hooded sweatshirt the color of tangerines that he helped me put on.
“Where are we going?” I asked him, the first of three times.
“You’ll see,” he said and we walked right out the front door of that Omaha home.
“You’re telling me you hadn’t been out of that house in what—six years?” Ms. Flores asks, doubtfully. She sinks a tea bag into a steaming mug of water, moving it up and down, up and down like a yo-yo because she hasn’t got the patience to wait for the tea to steep.