I could hardly suggest she bring the remote control, baby bottles, the old suitcase.
And then I hurry to meet Martin Miller before I board the next plane.
WILLOW
On one of her prearranged visits, Ms. Adler arrived with a letter from the Zeegers, as usual, though this one was completely different. She appeared on the front stoop, stomping the snow off her big fleecy boots before coming into the home. Joseph took her coat from her and laid it over the arm of a chair, and we all went into the kitchen where, as usual, we sat around the wooden table and a doped-up Miriam served us cookies and tea.
This letter though, wasn’t about my Lily and how well she was doing in school and how big she was growing up to be. No this letter was completely different. This letter made the blood in my veins run cold, the air in the room too thin to breathe. I grasped that letter in my shaking hands and read aloud—as Joseph made me do so he wouldn’t be left in the dark—about how ten months before, Big Lily found herself suddenly, curiously pregnant, and how Rose (Lily) had become a big sister in December. The letter gushed with the minutia of the baby’s pale eyes and delicate hair, her gentle demeanor, the musical sound of her coo. This, Big Lily explained, was what she and Paul had always dreamed of: to have a baby of their own. Her name was Calla, as in the Calla Lily, half of a whole, and my Lily—no longer a Lily but now a Rose—was excluded. Left out. Not the baby she and Paul had always dreamed of.
“But how?” I whined. “She wasn’t... I thought...” I set the letter on the table and swallowed hard against a bulge in my throat. I would not let Joseph see me cry, or Isaac who stood, back to the wall, a smirk on his ugly face.
The caseworker was all smiles. “How wonderful,” she said, and, “What a wonderful surprise. Imagine Rose—a sister,” as if Rose hadn’t been a sister all along. My sister. Mine. “Sometimes,” she explained to me, her voice dumbed down like I was some idiot, “this happens. I suppose they were never truly infertile. Just—” her voice wavered off for a split second before she added “—unlucky.”
Unlucky to have Little Lily in their life rather than the baby they’d always dreamed of.
There was no mention of my Lily in that letter, other than the simple blurb that she was a big sister. The rest of the note oozed with details of Calla’s life: how she slept peacefully throughout the night, how for Lily, giving birth to her own flesh and blood had been sublime. There was a photo attached: Big Lily and Calla, my Lily hovering in the background like an afterthought. Her hair was a mess, red sauce dribbled down the front of a plain white shirt.
But Calla was pristine, in the softest-looking mauve one piece, a denim headband with bow on her head.
There was no letter from my Lily included. No third-grade school picture, no stationery with the red bird and tree, no distorted name printed across the front: Rose Zeeger.
My Lily had been replaced.
It plagued me for days. I stayed awake night after night wondering what would happen to my Lily. Would the Zeegers overlook her for the rest of her life, not good enough now that they had their own flesh and blood? Would they decide that two children were one too many, and would Lily be sent back to that group home to await a lousy foster home like the one I was living in? Would she stay in that group home forever, or until she turned eighteen, and was sent out into the world to fend for herself, to live like a waif on some Colorado or Nebraska street? I could only imagine. I conjured up visions of the Zeegers ignoring her, forcing her to wear that stained white shirt for the rest of her life. The very name haunted me in the middle of the night: Calla. Calla.
I hated it. I hated her.
Calla had ruined my Lily’s life.
The days went on. I spent every waking hour reading and rereading that letter from Big Lily, staring at that photo of Big Lily and the baby, my Lily pushed so far into the background she almost fell out of the picture.
This photo, unlike all the others, Joseph let me keep. In fact, he taped it up to that flowery wallpaper lest I forget that this baby, that Calla, was plundering my Lily’s happy childhood.
But what could I do?
HEIDI
I spend the night in the rocking chair, hardly able to take my eyes off the sweet baby. When Zoe awakes and asks where Willow is, her cross eyes scanning the closed office door as she slides down the hall with a half-asleep gait, I say, in a hushed tone, “Still sleeping,” though I know good and well that isn’t true.