But I insist, “You do. You took it. From the bathroom hook. You took my father’s ring.”
“Ma’am,” she pleads, and it’s pathetic almost, the tone of her voice, heartbreaking, really, if it wasn’t such a sham. She retreats a step and I follow, quickly, the abruptness of the movement, of my movement, a single step but no more, making her flinch, a wince escaping from somewhere deep within.
My hand gropes for the Swiss Army knife in the pocket of the purple robe, clutching tightly as I utter the simple word, “Go.”
I feel it tremble in my hand, that knife. And I think to myself, Don’t make me...
She’s shaking her head, swiftly from side to side, the sepia hair falling into her bulging eyes, her lips parting to mouth a single word: No. And then she’s begging me to let her stay, begging me not to make her go. Outside it’s begun to rain, again, raindrops tap, tap, tapping at the bay window, though it’s a drizzle and not quite a storm, not yet at least.
Though there’s no telling what the night will bring.
“Go,” I say again. “Go now. Before I call the police,” and I take a step for the phone sitting on the kitchen countertop.
“Please, don’t,” she begs, and then, “Please don’t make me go,” and she’s staring out the window, at the rain.
“You took the ring,” I insist. “Give me the ring.”
“Please, ma’am,” she says, and then, “Heidi,” as if trying to reach me on a more personal level, and yet it strikes me as inappropriate, presumptuous even. The audacity of it reminds me of her impudence, her overconfidence; the rest is just a pretense, a work of fiction. A pathetic display used to slink into my home and steal from me. I wonder what else she took: the Polish pottery, my grandmother’s pearls, Chris’s class ring.
“Mrs. Wood,” I state.
“I don’t have the ring, Mrs. Wood. I swear to you. I don’t have the ring.”
“Then you sold it,” I maintain. “Where did you sell it, Willow? The pawnshop?”
There’s one in Lincoln Park, I picture it clear as day, a storefront on Clark with the sign: We Buy Gold. I think of myself, that afternoon, lying down for a brief nap. Did she pawn the ring while I was asleep? But no, I hung the chain on the hook tonight, before I kissed Zoe good-night and dimmed the lights, cleaned the kitchen and settled down with my laptop to work. Or not work. To pretend to work.
Or maybe that was last night, I think, feeling suddenly lost and confused, not knowing which day it is, or which way is up.
But knowing with certainty that she took the ring.
“How much did you get for it?” I ask then, all of a sudden, and when she doesn’t respond, I ask it again, “How much did you get for my father’s wedding ring?” wondering—five hundred, a thousand?—all the while stroking the smooth edge of the Swiss Army knife with my hand, running my thumb along the blade until it most certainly bleeds. I don’t feel it, the blood, but I visualize it, a drop, maybe two, that seeps onto the purple robe.
And then she’s gathering her things from around the home—baby bottles and formula; she’s collecting the torn jeans and leather lace-up boots, the army-green coat, the vintage suitcase from the office down the hall—and dragging them to the front door, where she drops them in a heap, turning to me sullenly, the phony despair replaced with a stoic expression in her eyes.
But when she moves to lift the baby from the floor, I intercede.
Over my dead body, is what I’m thinking, but what I say is, “You can’t take care of her. You know that as well as I do. She would have died from that infection if it wasn’t for me.”
An untreated urinary tract infection could lead to sepsis.
Without treatment, a person could die.
But those weren’t my words; those came from the doctor at the clinic, didn’t they? It was the doctor who told us that, wanting to know how long this had been going on, the baby’s persistent irritability and that untamed fever.
“A week, maybe two,” Willow had said regretfully, but I’d mocked her candor and said, “Just a few days, dear, not a week,” knowing what the doctor would think of us if we had let the infection go on for weeks, had allowed the fever to carry on that long. I’d rolled my eyes at the doctor then, there in the tawdry office and said of Willow, “She has such a poor sense of time. Teenagers, you know? One day, one week, it makes no difference to them,” and the doctor, perhaps the mother of a teen or a preteen herself, had nodded her head and agreed.
The lying, these days, it’s just so easy a thing to do. It comes naturally, automatically, until I can no longer tell what’s fact, what’s fiction.