CHRIS
That baby is whimpering in the background when I finally get a chance to talk to Heidi. I ask Heidi what’s wrong, but all she says is, “Waiting for the Tylenol to kick in,” and there’s a vibration in her voice, a jostling effect as if she’s bouncing that baby up and down, up and down, to try to amend the situation. To get that baby to shut up.
“Fever?” I ask, typing away on my laptop. The securities offered hereby are highly speculative... I’m barely listening as Heidi tells me that the fever isn’t so bad—she rattles off some number I couldn’t recount if my life depended on it—and then goes on to tell me about their doctor appointment at the clinic in Lakeview.
“DCFS,” I remind her.
One quick, easy phone call that could make this all go away.
But all she says is, “Not now, Chris,” and then she’s quiet. She doesn’t want to hear my nagging about the girl and how I think it’s utterly insane that she’s still cohabitating with us, in a space too small for three, much less five. Or that this whole fiasco might land us both in jail.
The shares are being offered without...
She tells me about bringing the baby to the family practitioner at the clinic in Lakeview. How they said the baby belonged to Heidi, in an effort to avoid any suspicious inquiry, and I thought of that, imagining Heidi, at her age, with an infant child. It wasn’t so much that Heidi was too old to have a baby, but that we’d moved so far past that, past diapers and baby bottles and all that crap.
Apparently it didn’t matter so much who the baby belonged to anyway because all the doctor was concerned with was the baby’s angry fever as they stood in the office, desperate for some elixir, for some potion to remedy the baby.
I can hear in her voice that she’s tired. An image fills my mind: Heidi’s hair is a mess; she probably hasn’t showered all day. It’s likely stringy, like spaghetti noodles, as happens to Heidi when she hasn’t given it a good shampoo. There are bags under her haggard brown eyes, big, fat ones to boot, swollen and sore. She’s clumsy, I can tell, as in the midst of our conversation a can of pop misses the edge of the countertop and drops to the ground.
There’s a crash as I envision sticky brown liquid seeping into the hardwood floors.
“Shit,” she snaps, Heidi who never swears. I picture her dropping to all fours to wipe up the mess with a paper towel. Her hair falls in her face and she blows it away. She’s a damn mess, desperately in need of a shower and a good night’s sleep. Her eyes are erratic, a million thoughts running amok in her mind.
The situation has taken its toll on my wife.
Heidi says that she had lathered enough cream onto the baby’s bottom over the past few days that the doctor hardly mentioned the healing red rash. After ruling out all other causes of fever, the doctor used a catheter to get a urine sample and diagnosed the baby with a urinary tract infection.
“How’d she get that?” I ask Heidi, grimacing at the thought of that burning sensation every time the baby peed, of the catheter shooting up the urethra and into her tiny bladder.
“Poor hygiene,” she says simply, and I’m reminded of the baby sitting in that shitty diaper for God knows how long. The bacteria in the feces climbing back up into the bladder and kidneys. Festering.
The baby’s on antibiotics now, her mother under doctor’s orders to wipe from front to back. The very thing Heidi badgered me about when Zoe was still in diapers. I imagine Willow sitting on the sofa now, staring at the TV in a daze, as she’s prone to do. She’s not eighteen, I remind myself, picturing some kid that still needs to be reminded to wash her hands. To eat her vegetables. To make her bed. To wipe her baby’s rump from front to back.
I’m still waiting to hear back from Martin Miller, PI. I’m thinking long and hard of ways to hurry this along, some kind of information I can give him, though my own internet searches have hit a dead end. I considered a picture, but highly doubt Willow Greer would let me snap a photo of her, or that Heidi would give me the A-okay. I consider that old suitcase, brown and worn, the one she tucks beneath the sofa bed when she isn’t in the room, as if we might forget it’s there. I thought about snooping inside to see if I could find something, some kind of clue, a driver’s license or state ID, a cell phone with a contact number.
And then Martin suggested fingerprints, suggested snagging some glass or the remote control, something she touched that would validate an identity she couldn’t fake. He walked me through it, how to preserve Willow Greer’s fingerprints so he could send them to his lab.
But all that will have to wait until after my trip.