if Taylor is—” I grimace and force out the word “—menstruating.” I know how women are. A little camaraderie can fix anything. If Taylor’s going through puberty, too, and Heidi and Jennifer can call and text each other about emergent pubic hair and training bras, then all will be fine.
“I will,” she says decisively. “That’s a good idea. I’ll ask Jennifer.” Heidi’s voice quiets, the worried thoughts that consume her mind buttoned up for the time. I imagine her shutting down the laptop, setting it on my side of the bed: a snuggle buddy for the night. “Chris,” she says.
“What?”
But she reconsiders. “Never mind.”
“What is it?” I ask again. A couple walks down the hall, hand in hand. I pull my legs into me to let them pass. The woman, with a very grandiose tone says, “Pardon me, sir,” and I nod in reply. They must be sixty-five years old, still holding hands. I watch them, in their matching khaki pants and spring coats, and remember that Heidi and I rarely hold hands. We’re like the wheels of a car: in sync but also independent.
“It’s nothing.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” she says. “We’ll talk about it when you get home,” and for the first time she decides that she’s tired. Her voice sounds tired. I see her drifting farther and farther under the covers, a stuffy duvet that makes me sweat even in the dead of winter. I envision the bedroom lights off, the TV off, Heidi’s glasses on the end table beside our bed, as is always the routine.
An image pops into my head, unsought and unwanted, and I force it out quickly, like a cannonball from a cannon. What does Cassidy Knudsen wear when she sleeps?
“Okay,” I say. From inside my hotel room, someone knocks on the door. I’m wanted. I rise to my feet and tell Heidi that I have to go and she says okay. We say our good-nights. I tell her I love her. She says “me, too,” as she always does, though we both know the verbiage is wrong. It’s just our thing.
As I return to the hotel room and spy Cassidy in her pencil skirt and three-inch heels, still perched on the edge of my bed, I can’t help but wonder: A satin slip? A ruffled babydoll?
I wake up with an image of Cassidy Knudsen in my mind, and wonder if I’ve been dreaming about her, or if she arrived, then and there, in the morning light, a consequence of our awkward exchange the previous night. I hear her voice over and over again, answering Chris’s phone, that lively “Hey there, Heidi,” that to me, sounded like nails on a chalkboard: sharp and shrill, infuriating.
On the commute to work, I try hard not to think about that girl and her baby. It’s not easy. On the train I try my hardest to focus on my sci-fi thriller and not stare expectantly out the dirty window, waiting for the army-green coat to appear. I spend my lunch with a colleague and not at the public library, though I long to go. To loiter in the literature aisles searching for the girl. I’m worried about the girl, about her baby, wondering where they sleep and what they eat. I’m contemplating how to help, whether to give her money, as I did the woman with the blackened teeth, hovering beside the library, or to refer this girl to a shelter, to one of the women’s shelters in the city. That, I decide, is what I need to do, to find the girl and deliver her to the shelter on Kedzie, where I know she and her baby will be safe. Then I can remove them from my mind.
I’m about to make a break for it—from a mundane lunch meeting with a mundane coworker—when my cell phone rings, a return call from my dear friend Jennifer. I excuse myself and retreat from the lunchroom to my office to take the call, forgetting for a fleeting moment about the girl and child.
“You saved me,” I say as I plop into my chair, hard and cold and certainly not ergonomic.
“From...” Jennifer prompts.
“Taedium vitae.”
“In English?”
“Boredom,” I say.
On my desk sits a framed photo of Jennifer and Taylor, myself and Zoe, one of those photo booth strips from about four years ago, when the girls, eight years old, with their sunny, smiling faces and animated eyes, were still tolerant of being seen in public with their mothers. The girls sit on our laps, Taylor with her big, sad eyes and downward sloping smile, beside Zoe; Jennifer and me, heads smashed together so we all fit in the frame.
Jennifer divorced years ago. I’ve never met her ex, but from the picture she paints, he was inflexible and sour, given to nasty mood swings that resulted in perpetual fights and innumerous nights on the living room sofa (for Jennifer, that is; her ex was too stubborn to give up the bed).
“Taylor isn’t going through puberty, is she?” I ask, just like that. Having a best friend is a wonderful thing. There needs be no proofreading, no refinement, of the comments that come from my head.
“What do you mean? Like her period?”
“Yeah.”
“Not yet. Thank God,” she says, and just like that, I feel some great sense of relief.
But then, because of my tendency to overanalyze, my Achilles’ heel if ever there was one, “Do you think they should be menstruating?” I ask, having discovered on various internet searches that it can start as soon as eight, as late as thirteen. But the websites I scour suggest that menarche begins about two years after girls start developing breasts. Zoe, at twelve, is as flat as a pancake. “They’re not behind schedule or anything, are they?”
Jennifer hears the concern in my voice. She works as a clinical dietitian at a local hospital. She’s my go-to for all things medical, as if working in a hospital provides her with a free medical degree. “It’s not a big deal, Heidi. They all mature at their own pace. There’s no schedule,” she assures me, and then she tells me that Zoe’s adolescence is something I cannot control. “Though I know you’ll try,” she goads, “because that’s just what you do.” The kind of blunt statement only a best friend can get away with. And I laugh, knowing it’s true.
And then the conversation shifts to the spring soccer season and what the girls think of their hot-pink uniforms, whether or not the Lucky Charms is an appropriate team name for a group of twelve-year-old girls, and the girls’ infatuation with their coach, a twentysomething college kid who didn’t make Loyola’s team. Coach Sam, who all the mothers think is dreamy. And there Jennifer and I are, gushing about his bushy brown hair, his dark, mysterious eyes, his soccer player build—the strength and agility, calf muscles like we’ve never seen—pushing all thoughts of Zoe’s emerging adolescence and that girl and her baby from my mind. The conversation drifts to boys, preteen boys, like Austin Bell, who all the girls adore. Including Zoe. Including Taylor. Jennifer admits to finding the words Mrs. Taylor Bell scribbled across her daughter’s notebook and I envision the pale skin of Zoe’s arm, the name Austin tattooed in pink, a heart over the i.
“In my day, it was Brian Bachmeier,” I admit, remembering the spiky locks that graced the boy’s head, the heterochromatic eyes, one blue, the other green. He moved to our junior high from San Diego, California, which was respect worthy in and of itself, but on top of it, the kid could dance, the Carlton and the jiggy, the tootsee roll. He was the envy of the other boys, the one the girls idolized.
I
