Zoe didn’t speak to me when we arrived home; she didn’t speak to Willow. She showered and climbed inside the bed, saying that she wanted to be alone. This, of course, didn’t surprise me in the least, and I could see in her vacant eyes, in the sulky expression that expropriated her face, that she hated me, as she hated most everything. I’d made it to that never-ending list that included math homework and beans and that nagging substitute teacher. That list of things she hated. Me.
But the baby. The baby on the other hand was full of smiles. Toothless smiles and mellifluous baby sounds that filled the room like bubbly lullabies. I clung to her greedily, not wanting to share. I prepared a bottle when she began to forage around in the pleats of my shirt for my breast, sneaking off into the kitchen without asking or telling Willow where it was that I was going, or asking whether or not it was okay to feed the baby because if I did, she might suggest she do it herself, and then I would have to relinquish the baby, relinquish the baby to her care, and that was something I found I simply could not do. And so I stood in the shadows of the kitchen, feeding Ruby, and tickling her sweet little toes, pressing a terry-cloth dish towel to her mouth to catch the drops of formula that escaped, sliding this way and that down her chin like a pair of pinking shears.
And then: “It’s time for her medicine, ma’am,” Willow declared, appearing suddenly in the kitchen, a bolt of lightning on an otherwise quiet night. I’d been caught, red-handed, with my hand in the cookie jar, or so they say.
Her words, themselves, were benign, and yet her eyes bore holes into me, there, in the kitchen; she didn’t have to say anything to make certain I knew I was in the wrong. I was fearful of Willow, all of a sudden, fearful that she would hurt me, fearful that she would hurt the child.
Her image, again, did an about-face before my very eyes: helpless young girl with an affinity for hot chocolate, teenage delinquent who’d managed to sneak her way into my home.
She stood there, in the kitchen, arms wide-open for the baby’s return. She was cloaked in yet another outdated article of Zoe’s clothing: jeans with a hole in the knee, a long-sleeve shirt that, on Willow, mutated into ? length, peppering the lower half of her arms in goose bumps, the hairs of her forearm standing on end. There were socks on her feet, a gaping hole in one of the big toes, and as I stared at that big toe, I found myself considering how naive I’d been, to bring Willow into my home.
What if Chris was right after all, right about Willow?
I hadn’t paused to consider the effect it would have on my own family’s well-being, for I was far too worried about Willow’s well-being to consider Zoe, to consider Chris.
What if Willow couldn’t be trusted?
My eyes flashed to the drawer where we keep the Swiss Army knife, hidden among a collection of junk—birthday candles, matches, flashlights that don’t work—and I found myself suddenly scared, suddenly wondering who this girl is, who she really truly is, and why she is in my home.
As she stood there, staring at me, she didn’t ask the obvious: what was I doing?
But she took the baby from my hands. Just like that. She just took her, leaving me helpless and short of breath. I stood in the kitchen, helping Willow dispense liquid antibiotics into the baby’s mouth, and then stood, horrified, as Willow turned away with the baby in her arms. The baby I had just been holding, feeding, and without her, without Ruby, I felt as if something was suddenly lacking from my life. I watched as Willow settled cross-legged onto my sofa and laid that baby in her lap, wrapping her up in the pink fleece blanket like a caterpillar in a cocoon.
I wanted to cry, staring at the all but empty bottle in my hand, the vacancy left in my arms. I found myself wanting, consumed by an impassioned need to hold that baby, my thoughts gripped by the image of Juliet, of Juliet being scraped from my uterus by a curette. It was hard to breathe, nearly impossible, as my thoughts dithered between a longing for that baby—for Ruby—and a longing for my Juliet, my Juliet who’d been discarded as medical waste.
How long this went on, I don’t know. I stood there, on the threshold between kitchen and living room, hyperventilating, the carbon dioxide escaping my blood at an alarming rate so that my lips, my fingers, the toes on my feet begin to tingle, and I clung hard—knuckles turning white—to the granite countertop so I wouldn’t faint or fall to the ground, imagining my body convulsing on the hardwood floors, envisioning Willow and Zoe standing by and doing nothing, simply watching Sesame Street or some sitcom on the TV, until I began to loathe them—the both of them—for this disregard, no matter how hypothetical it might be.
And now I stand in my master bath, Zoe tucked in bed with the ridiculous show on TV, as Willow utters her good-night. She’s made it all the way into the bedroom and stands, just shy of the bathroom door, watching as I hang my precious golden chain, my father’s wedding band, from a shabby chic hook on the wall, a filigree bird painted a distressed red.