“Yes, Zoe, I heard you, but I asked you a question, as well. How did you get home?”
There’s a huff. A retreat into the kitchen to ransack cabinets for something to eat, slamming this one and that. And then, “Coach paid for a cab. He couldn’t stay there all night, waiting, you know? Like the other night. He has a life.” A pause, followed by, “You owe him fourteen dollars.” She yanks a bottle of water from the refrigerator door and states, “Ms. Marcue says she’s been trying to call you. She says you haven’t returned her calls.” Then, with a box of Saltine crackers and the water, Zoe heads out of the room. She’s gone about five feet when she pauses, stops dead in her tracks beside the closed office door and asks, “Why haven’t you returned her calls?”
“I’ve been busy, Zoe. You know that,” I respond, knowing that in Zoe’s preteen mind she can’t make sense of it, how caring for an infant could classify as busy. Busy is doodling on a forearm and texting friends, eluding homework and salivating over the handsome Coach Sam. Busy is not the inexhaustible hours it takes to raise a child.
“Well, are you going to call her back?” she asks. Her French braids hang long, their tail ends wrapping around the sides of her neck. She looks older to me than twelve, when she isn’t smiling and I can’t see the braces that remind me she’s still a child. I’m aware, for the first time in forever, of the sudden arrival of breasts. Were they there all along, and I simply failed to notice? Or has she turned into a young woman overnight?
“Yes,” I say, “of course.”
“When?” she interrogates.
“Soon. I will call her soon.”
“That baby’s not yours, you know,” she says out of nowhere, noticing the tender way I cradle Ruby in my arms, the way I massage her head.
“Why would you say such a thing?” I ask, my voice quiet, hurt.
“It’s like you think she’s yours or something. It’s weird,” and then, “Where’s Willow?” she asks drily, as if her words didn’t just blindside me, didn’t just punch me in the gut, and I say, sullenly, winded by the abuse, “She wasn’t feeling well. She went to bed early,” stating it in a hushed tone so that Zoe will believe.
“The flu,” I say, “it’s going around.”
But Zoe, thinking perhaps about my fraudulent phone calls to Dana, receptionist extraordinaire, rolls her eyes and says cynically, “Yeah, right,” and then she leaves, down the hall and into her bedroom, banging the door closed.
And I return to Ruby, on my lap, rocking until blackness takes over the sky, until there is nothing left to see out that window but a smattering of stars and the electrified buildings here, there and everywhere.
WILLOW
I started seeing more and more of Matthew. Most often we went to the library where we sneaked down one aisle or another to read books, sometimes, and to kiss. We went as early as we could, after Joseph and Isaac had left that Omaha home, because if we waited too long there would be kids from schools filling the study tables at the ends of the aisles, loud and obnoxious, even up by the engineering books where no one else cared to go. But when we got there earlier in the day, around noon, the library was almost silent, kids at school, adults working, and we could move about that aisle as if we were the only souls in the whole entire world. Even the librarians stayed away—since no one ever checked out the engineering books, there were never any books to shelve. Only once did some librarian stop us and ask, with a tone more curious than disapproving, “No school today?” And though I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart forgetting to beat—absolutely certain she was gonna send me back to Joseph—it was Matthew who said, like he’d had this answer all ready to go for a long, long time, “We’re homeschooled,” and that librarian nodded her head and said, “How nice,” and walked away. I didn’t even know what that meant anyway: homeschool. But Matthew did.
And that was the end of it. No one ever asked what we were doing there again: two kids out of school in the middle of the day.