lay a hand over the receiver and whisper to Dana that I’ll be right there. “Work calls,” I tell Jennifer and we confirm the sleepover for Zoe and Taylor tonight at Jennifer’s home. Zoe is absolutely thrilled about it. So much so that she actually remembered to say goodbye this morning before she ran into school.
* * *
The day dawdles by at an excruciatingly slow speed. Outside the rain quiets, though the city skyline remains gray, the tops of skyscrapers lost in the ashen, obese clouds. When five o’clock rolls around, I say my goodbyes and ride the elevator down to the first floor. It’s rare that I leave the office at five o’clock, but on a night such as this—Zoe at a sleepover and Chris on a delayed flight that won’t arrive until after 10:00 p.m.—I take pleasure in having the condo all to myself, a simple delight that doesn’t happen too often. I’m relishing the idea of watching a chick flick all by myself, of lounging on the sofa in my warm, snuggly pajamas and devouring an entire bag of microwave popcorn all alone (and possibly following it up with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream!).
Above me the clouds are beginning to disintegrate, the sun trying hard to don a lovely sunset behind the fissures in the clouds. The air is cold, an unsettling forty degrees and blowing. I slip my hands in a pair of leather gloves and drape a hood over my head, hurrying, with all the other evening commuters to the “L” station. I force my body into the congested train, where we stand like sardines in a can, smashed together, chugging along the winding, choppy track.
When I depart at the Fullerton Station, I make my way carefully down the wet steps. Beside me, a fellow commuter lights a cigarette and the scent of tobacco fills the air. There’s a nostalgic redolence to it: it reminds me of home. When I was a girl, living with my family outside of Cleveland in a 1970s Colonial home with the sponge-painted walls my mother adored, my father smoked Marlboro Reds, a half pack a day. He smoked in the garage, never in our home. Never in the car when he was with my brother and me. My mother simply wouldn’t allow it. He secreted the scent of tobacco from the pores of his skin. It was on his clothing, in his hair, on his hands. The garage was suffused with the smell; my mother claimed it oozed through the heavy metal door and into the kitchen, a thoroughly white kitchen—white cabinets, white countertops, a white refrigerator, a chunky farm table. In the morning, my father wouldn’t be out of bed five minutes before he was sneaking off to the garage with his coffee and Marlboro Reds. He’d come in, and I’d be at the table eating my Cocoa Puffs and he’d look at me with the most beguiling smile (I knew my mother had snagged a good one when she married my father) and tell me never to smoke, just like that, “Don’t ever smoke, Heidi. Never,” and he’d wash his hands and join me at the farm table for a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.
I’m thinking of my father as I make my way down the steps, my fingers instinctively reaching for the yellow gold wedding band that hangs on a chain around my neck. I trace the grooves and ridges of the ring, the words the beginning of forever etched on the inside.
And then, for a split second I’m nearly certain I see him, there, in the crowd, my father in his Carhartt overalls, one hand thrust in a back pocket, the other holding a Marlboro Red, looking straight at me when he smiles. A hammer dangles from its allotted loop on the pants, a baseball cap sits on his head—Cleveland Indians it says—atop a mess of brown hair, which my mother always begged him to trim.
“Daddy,” I nearly say aloud, but then the image disappears as quickly as it appeared, and I shake my head, remembering. It couldn’t be.
Or could it?
Of course it couldn’t, I decide. Of course.
And then I’m breathing in that familiar carcinogenic scent—wanting to smell it and yet not wanting to smell it—when I hear it: a baby’s wail. My feet have just hit the pavement when the sound grabs me by the throat and I spin instinctively, my eyes searching for the source.
And there I see her, sitting underneath the train tracks, shivering in the nippy air. She’s leaning against a brick wall beside newspaper stands and rank garbage cans, beside swollen puddles, sitting on the cold, wet concrete, rocking the baby against her chest. The baby is crying. There’s a frenzy to the way she rocks the baby, a mother with an inconsolable baby, moments away from becoming unhinged. Zoe was a colicky baby, prone to endless hours of intense crying. I can relate with the frustration and the overwhelming fatigue in the girl’s eyes. But what I can’t relate to is her presence on a city street, in the midst of twilight, on a cold spring night. I can’t relate to the desperate way she thrusts a waterlogged coffee cup (likely snatched from the neighboring garbage can) at passersby, begging for money, and the way people give her the once-over, dribbling spare change in her cup: a quarter here, a handful of pennies there, as if any amount of spare change has the ability to save this girl from her fate. I feel my breath leave me for a moment. This girl is a child and the baby is a baby. No one deserves such a fate, to be penniless and displaced, but certainly not a child. My mind leaps to the outrageous cost of infant formula and diapers, knowing that if this girl is supplying diapers for that baby, there is certainly no spare change left for her own provisions. For food and shelter, for the umbrella with the flamboyant golden daisies.
I’m rear-ended by a throng of commuters departing the “L.” I scoot out of the way, unable to join the clique of other wage earners, those retiring to warm, dry homes and home-cooked meals. I simply cannot. My feet are frozen to the pavement, my heart racing. The baby’s wail—piercing and miserable and utterly inconsolable—rattles my nerves. I watch the girl, watch the frenzied rocking, hear the tired words fall from her exhausted mouth as she holds out her cup. “Please, help.”
She’s asking, I tell myself. She’s asking for help.
And yet the do-nothings continue on their way home, rationalizing their lack of concern with the change they drop in her cup, change that would have otherwise found its way to the washing machine or some countertop or bookshelf, where it would sit purposelessly in a ceramic pink pig.
I feel myself tremble as I approach the girl. She lifts her chin as I draw near, and for a split second our eyes lock before she thrusts out her cup and looks away. Her eyes are worse for wear, jaded and pessimistic. I nearly balk for a moment because of the eyes. Icy and blue, a cornflower blue, with much too much eyeliner staining the surface of her bloated eyelids. I think about fleeing. I consider pulling a twenty dollar bill from my purse and setting it in her cup and being on my way. Twenty dollars is much more substantial than a handful of change. Twenty dollars can buy dinner for an entire week, if she’s thrifty. That’s what I tell myself in my moment of hesitation. But then, I realize, she’d likely spend it on Enfamil formula, placing the baby’s needs before her own. She’s rail thin, skinnier than Zoe, who is a string bean.
“Let me buy you dinner,” I declare, my voice much less bold than the spoken words. My voice is quiet, quivering, nearly suffocated by the sounds of the city: taxis passing by and blasting their horns at commuters who jaywalk across Fullerton; the automated message Attention customers. An outbound train, from the Loop, will be arriving shortly, followed by the imminent arrival of the brown line on the platform above us; the sound of the baby’s cry. People pass by, chatting and laughing loudly into cell phones; a forgotten rumble of thunder rolls through the darkening sky.
“No thanks,” she says. There’s a bitterness to her words. It would be easier for her if I dropped in my twenty and continued on my way. Easier now, in this moment maybe, but not when the hunger begins to eat away at her insides, when the baby’s inconsolable crying makes her snap. She stands and reaches for the leather suitcase, shuffling the baby in her arms.
“It helps,” I say, quickly, knowing she’s about to make a run for it, “to lay them on their stomachs sometimes. Like this.” I motion with my hands. “It helps with the colic.” She watches my hands go from upright to horizontal
