“What’s your name?” I ask. She doesn’t tell me her name. Not at first anyway. “I’m Heidi,” I say, opting to go first. It seems only right. I, I remind myself, am the adult. “Heidi Wood. I have a daughter. Zoe. Who’s twelve.”
The mention of Zoe must help. She sits after a moment, readjusting the baby against her chest. She and the baby slide awkwardly into the corner booth and she pulls a dirty, formula-encrusted bottle from a coat pocket and fills it with ice water from the table. She sets the bottle into the baby’s mouth. The water is too cold, lacking in the nutrients of formula or breast milk. The baby quibbles for a moment, and then makes do. This is not the first time the baby has gotten by on water alone. Anything to fill the void in her tiny tummy.
“Willow.”
“That’s your name?” I ask and she hesitates, then nods. Willow.
Chris and I chose Zoe’s name because we liked it. The alternatives—Juliet, Sophia, Alexis—were all, we believed, to be used in time. For boys, we thought of Zach, to complement Zoe, and of course, Chris threw his own name into the hat. We talked, many times, about how we would trade in our vintage condo for a single family home farther north, Lakeview, or west, Roscoe Village, than our current home, where the mortgage would be slightly less, though the commutes to school and work exponentially longer. I found myself shopping for white, slatted bunk beds when we picked out Zoe’s crib; I foresaw rows of shabby chic comforters and dollhouse bookcases and an abundance of toys scattered across the floor. I thought of homeschooling as an alternative to the pricey private school that Zoe now attends, a much more practical alternative to the forty thousand dollars a year we would spend on tuition for all of our imaginary children.
The doctor used the word hysterectomy. I lay in bed at night when I should be asleep, considering that word, what it means. To the doctor, to Chris, it was a term, a medical procedure. To me it was carnage, plain and simple. The annihilation of Juliet and Zach, Sophia and Alexis. The end of that vision of shabby chic comforters and homeschooling.
But of course, by then Juliet was already gone, a simple D&C procedure that was anything but simple. There was no way to know whether or not she was a girl—that’s what the doctor said, what Chris restated time and again, that there was no way to know—and yet I knew, I knew with certainty it was Juliet who was discarded as medical waste, right along with my uterus, my cervix, parts of my vagina.
I found myself, still, stockpiling baby clothes that I found in boutiques in the city—lavender petti rompers and organic animal print bodysuits—hidden in bins that I purposely mislabeled Heidi: Work and stored in our bedroom closet, knowing full well Chris would never reconnoiter what he thought to be austere literacy statistics and college textbooks on ESL.
“It’s a beautiful name,” I say. “And your baby?”
“Ruby,” the girl says undecidedly.
“Lovely,” I say, and it is. “How old?”
There’s a pause, and then she says, as if not quite sure, “Four months.”
“Have you had a chance to look over the menu?” the redheaded waitress asks, appearing from out of nowhere, it seems. The girl, Willow, starts and looks to me to answer. The menu lies before her, untouched.
“I think we need some time,” I say, but suggest a mug of hot chocolate for Willow, who shivers on the other side of the vinyl booth from the cold. I secure my hands around my own mug, cooler now, but still retaining some heat of the coffee which the waitress now refills for a third time.
“Whipped cream?” the woman asks, and Willow looks to me for approval. Funny, I think, how in that split second she becomes a child, just at the very mention of whipped cream. She strikes me as an optical illusion, like the famous Rubin’s vase: depending on how one looks it at, one of two scenes appear, two profiles, placed face-to-face, or the vase which lies perched between them. They flip-flop before your eyes. Profiles, vase. Profiles, vase. Strong, independent young woman with a baby; helpless young girl with an affinity for hot chocolate and whipped cream.
“Of course,” I declare, perhaps too fervidly. Moments later the waitress returns with the heavenly drink, a warm white mug and saucer, with a plentiful mound of frothy snow on top, speckled with chocolate shavings. Willow reaches for a spoon and dips the tip into the whipped cream, and licks it off, savoring the taste, as if she hasn’t tasted hot chocolate in years.
How is it that someone like her comes to be living on the streets? To be living alone, no caregiver, no guardian. Of course asking the question seems entirely inappropriate, a sure way to send her running. I watch as she appraises the whipped cream, and then goes at it, full tilt, ladling spoonfuls into her mouth until it is gone, until it spills from the corners of her mouth and the baby watches her with covetous eyes, no longer enrapt with the ice-cold water, but with this bubbling white substance oozing from her mother’s mouth.
She raises the mug to her lips and drinks too fast, wincing at a burned tongue. With my spoon, I scoop an ice cube from a water glass and sink it into the hot chocolate. “There,” I say. “That will speed things along.” She hesitates, then tries again, and this time, she doesn’t burn her tongue.
There’s a bruise hidden above her left eye. An ochre color, as if it is healing. Her fingernails, as she grabs for the menu and decides what she’ll have to eat, are long and craggy, with an abundance of dirt wedged between the skin and nail. There are four earring holes placed in either ear, including the cartilage at the top of the ear that’s pierced with a black stud. Running the length of the earlobe are a set of silver angel’s wings, a gothic cross and ruby red lips, in that order. The red lips on the left lobe are missing. I picture them, lying on the filthy city sidewalk beneath the Fullerton Station, being squashed by passersby, or in the middle of the street, getting run over by cabs. Her bangs hang long, over her eyes. When she wants to look at me, she brushes them away, but then lets them enshroud her eyes once again, like a wedding veil. The skin, on her hands, her face, is chapped and red, creating fissures in the dermis, her hands riddled with dry blood. Her lips are cracked. The baby, too, Ruby, has hints of eczema, crusty red patches along her otherwise milky skin. I reach into my purse and produce a travel-size lotion and, sliding it across the table, say, “My hands get dry in the winter. The cold air. This helps.” And as she sets her hand on the lotion, I add, “For Ruby, too. Her cheeks,” and she shoves the bangs away and nods, and without hesitation, applies the cream to the baby’s cheeks. Ruby cringes at the coldness of the lotion, her noncommittal slate-blue eyes watching her mother curiously, with a bit of resentment mixed in.
“How old are you?” I ask, and I know that her immediate, premeditated answer is a lie.
“Eighteen,” she says, without looking at me. Every other question I’ve asked was met with hesitation. It’s the immediacy of her answer that makes me certain it’s a lie. That and the naïveté of her eyes when the optical illusion does an about-face, and she is again a helpless girl. A helpless girl like Zoe.
Children legally become adults at the age of eighteen. They become independent beings. Parents lose their rights over their children; they also lose financial responsibility. There are many things an eighteen-year-old can do legally that a seventeen-year-old cannot, such as living alone on the city streets. If Willow is only seventeen, or fifteen or sixteen for that matter, then certain questions are called to mind: where are her parents and why is she not living with them? Is she a runaway? The consequence of child abandonment? My eyes revert to the ochre bruise and I wonder if it’s a product of child abuse. If she was seventeen, she could be forced to return home, if such a home exists, or forced into the foster care system.
But I let these suspicions fall by the wayside and take the girl’s word at face value: she’s eighteen.
“There are shelters specifically for women and children.”
“I don’t do shelters.”
“I work with young women. Like yourself. Women from other countries. Refugees. I help them, sometimes, to get settled.”
The waitress