Whoever said motherhood was easy...

I long for those days when Zoe and I would rock before an open window, on the long forgotten sleigh glider, the one with the deep tufted seat I had to roll myself out of and the antique scrolled arms. I’d rock her until she fell asleep, and then I would cradle her for hours, swaying back and forth until the lullaby music petered out and the white hot sun fell below the horizon.

Out Zoe’s bedroom window, I stare at the city’s skyline, lost in the fleecy clouds. Being on the fifth floor of our own building, our view skirts right over the top of smaller neighboring buildings and south, to the Loop. It was the reason Chris and I were smitten with the condo some fourteen years ago when we decided to buy it. The view. The Loop out our south-facing windows, a nibble of Lake Michigan to the east. We didn’t bother making a low-ball offer; we paid asking price, too terrified someone would snatch it from our hungry hands.

“We can’t tell anyone about Willow,” I say calmly. “Not yet anyway.”

“So I’m just supposed to lie to my best friend?” she asks exasperatedly. What I think is: yes.

But what I say is a cop-out, a carbon copy of my first response. “We just can’t tell anyone, Zoe. Not yet.”

“Why not? Is she in witness protection or something?” she asks like only a twelve-year-old can.

But I disregard this query and ask again, “Do you have something she can wear after her shower?” Zoe arises from her bed melodramatically and moves to the closet with resentment. I see from behind that her pants hang too loose on her, her rear end all but lost in the fabric. “She won’t be here for long,” I hear myself say, and then, “We should take you shopping for some new clothes soon,” a poor attempt at entente.

And Zoe, chock-full of sarcasm and chagrin, says of Willow, “I know. She’s just one of your clients.”

“Not exactly,” I say, seeing how Zoe would make a quick connection between Willow and my clients, the stories I tote home from work of the homeless, illiterate people I attend to all day. “She needs our help, Zoe.” I am ever hopeful that I can appeal to her civic duty better than I can that of Chris. When Zoe was younger, we trudged through snow to deliver outgrown winter coats to the homeless at a women and children’s shelter; collected toys and books for the patients at the children’s hospital, those suffering from leukemia and lymphoma and other cancers I couldn’t bear to imagine a child having. I reminded Zoe of others who were far less fortunate and how it was our obligation to help.

Zoe yanks a pair of hot-pink drawstring pants from her closet and a striped shirt, plum and light gray. As she tosses them into my waiting hands, she mutters, “I don’t like these anyway,” and I’m left wondering if she forgot about the less fortunate, or if this—sarcasm and chagrin—is all she has to give. “They’re ugly,” she says.

“This is only temporary,” I murmur as I retreat from the room. In the hall, Chris’s eyes rise from the laptop and again he shakes his head.

I lay the clean clothing on the sofa bed and hover in my bedroom until Willow emerges from a steamy bathroom swathed in her own harbor-blue towel, Ruby clutched in her wet hands. She tiptoes into the office, and closes the door.

The lock clicks shut.

I let myself into the bathroom and collect a pile of clothing from the floor, heaping it into an empty hamper with the laundry detergent, dryer sheets and stain remover on top. In the kitchen, I remove a change purse of quarters from a drawer and tell Chris that I’ll be back, before descending six flights of stairs for the community laundry room tucked away in the basement. Before I go, Chris eyes me and asks, “And what do you expect me to do with her?”

“Five minutes,” I say, “that’s all,” an inadequate response to his question, and then I hurry from the room before he can say no.

I find the laundry room empty. It’s a small space with an outdated inlaid parquet floor, five washing machines and an equal number of dryers, each of which eats more quarters than they put to good use. I lay Ruby’s “Little Sister” jumpsuit atop the washing machine and saturate the stains with stain remover, followed by the pink fleece blanket that smells of sweat and sewer gas. I reach into the hamper and pull Willow’s clothing from the pile: the army-green jacket that I zip shut before snapping the buttons, a pair of jeans that I fear will turn the white jumpsuit blue. I set them aside to wash in their own machine. And then I yank a once-white undershirt from beneath a sweater.

And I freeze.

I check twice, half-certain that it’s the poor lighting in the laundry room that makes me think I see blood spatters across the undershirt. Something red, of that I’m certain, but I do my best to convince myself that the flecks are ketchup. Barbecue sauce. The juice of a maraschino cherry. I smell the shirt for whispers of tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, but I come up with nothing but body odor. Body odor and blood. My eyes scan the other articles of clothing for a second time: the frayed jeans, the raveling sweater, Ruby’s jumpsuit. They’re each caked in their own filth, but none other than the undershirt carry the distinct carmine color of dried blood. I fumble for the stain remover and begin squirting the life out of it, but then stop—suddenly—knowing that little can be done about dried blood. I wad the undershirt into a discreet ball and on the way upstairs to our fifth-floor condo I drop it in the garbage shoot.

I envision that undershirt with whatever secrets it may hold, tumbling down five flights and into the Dumpster perched beside the service entrance.

Of this, Chris can never know.

WILLOW

Momma used to say she had a sister, Annabeth, but if such a sister existed, she never came forward to claim Lily and me.

“How is it that you came to live with Joseph and Miriam?” asks Louise Flores, the ASA—assistant state’s attorney, she told me when I asked. The clock on the wall reads 2:37 p.m. I lay my head on the cold steel table of the interrogation room and close my eyes. “Claire,” the stark woman prods, laying a hand on my arm to shake me awake. Roughly. She’ll have nothing to do with this, nothing to do with my “shenanigans,” she says. I yank my arm away and hide them, both of them, under the table where she can’t reach.

“I’m hungry,” I say. I can’t quite remember the last time I ate, but I remember sifting through a garbage Dumpster sometime before the cops caught me, finding a half-eaten hot dog, cold and covered in pickles and relish and mustard, the mustard thick and gluey, lipstick marks on the bun. But of course, that’s not where the police found me. They found me smack-dab on Michigan Avenue, staring through the window of the Gucci store.

“We’ll eat when we’re through,” she says. She’s got old-lady hands, wrinkled and veiny. A tight gold wedding band that cuts into the skin. Surplus skin that hangs from the bottom of her arms, her chin.

I pull my head from the table and look at her, into those gray eyes behind the rectangular glasses and say again, “I’m hungry.” And then I put my head back on the table and close my eyes.

There’s a hesitation. Then she tells the man in the corner to get me something to eat. She drops some coins on the steel table. I wait until he’s gone and then I say, “I’m thirsty, too.”

I won’t lift my head until the food arrives, I decide. But already she’s asking questions, questions which I readily ignore. “How did you end up with Joseph and Miriam?” and “Tell me about Joseph. He is a professor, is he not?”

Joseph is a professor. Was a professor. It’s the reason that when he and Miriam showed up, claiming to be the second cousin twice removed (or something to that effect) on my daddy’s side, my caseworker thought it was a lucky break. Joseph and Miriam lived with their two boys, Matthew and Isaac, in a home in Elkhorn, Nebraska, which sat right outside of Omaha, the largest city in all of Nebraska, so that the two were practically holding hands. Their home was nice, much nicer than our prefab home back in Ogallala, with two floors and three bedrooms and big old windows that stared out at the hills that surrounded that home. We lived in a neighborhood with a park and a baseball field, though I didn’t ever see any of those things, but I heard about them, heard about them from the neighborhood kids I watched out those big old windows, riding their bikes up and down the street and calling for someone or other to grab their bat ’cause they were going to play ball.