“Ruby,” I repeated, as if tasting the word in my mouth. Savoring it. And then, “I like it. Yeah. Ruby,” I said again.

And she said, “Ruby,” ingraining the word in my mind.

The girl had a bruise the size of Mount Everest on her head, slashes across a wrist that she tried to cover by yanking down the sleeve of a green coat. She caught the bus in Denver, and by Omaha she was gone. I tried not to look at the bruise, but my eyes found it near impossible not to stray to the purple goose egg on her head. “What?” she asked nonchalantly. “This?” She swept her hair down, to cover the bruise. “Let’s just say my boyfriend’s an ass,” she said, and then asked me, “What brings a girl like you out on the road in the middle of the night? With,” she adds, pinching the baby’s tiny nose, “a babe.”

We got to talking, that girl and me. She had a low-key approach that I liked, a way of holding my eyes when she talked. “Let’s just say we needed a change of scenery,” I said and with that, we stopped asking about where we were going and where we’d been because we both knew the other had come from someplace ugly.

We had a stopover in Kearney, Nebraska, during which time the girl poured a bottle of reddish hair dye over my head and I did the same to her. It didn’t sit long enough, and so, instead of ginger hair, as depicted on the box, I remained snot colored, tinged with red. The girl shimmied out of a pair of torn jeans and a sweater. “Here,” she said, thrusting the clothing into my already jam-packed hands. “Switch.”

I slipped the baby into her tattooed hands, a half butterfly on each palm that, when pressed together, made it complete. “A tiger swallowtail,” she said when I asked. In the stall of the bathroom—the walls covered with ink: Benny loves Jane and Rita is a gay—I took off the pants Matthew had given me and pulled the sweatshirt up over my head. I left on the undershirt, the one dotted with Joseph’s blood. This, I couldn’t dare let her see. I slipped on that girl’s clothing: the jeans and sweater, a hooded coat the color of green olives and leather boots with frayed brown shoelaces. When I emerged from the stall, she was holding the baby in a single arm, a safety pin in her right hand.

“What’s that for?” I asked, watching as she removed a course of earrings from her ear: an angel’s wings, a cross, red lips.

“It’ll only hurt for a second,” she replied and with that I held the baby while she thrust that pin through my ear and set the earring inside the swollen lobes. I screamed, squeezing the baby unintentionally, and Ruby, she screamed, too.

We tossed the empty bottles of hair dye into the trash and then the girl pulled me close, streaking eyeliner across my eyes. I’d never worn makeup before, nothing other than a hint of pale pink rouge Momma swept across my cheeks every now and then. I looked at myself in the filmy mirror: the hair, the earring, the dark mysterious eyes.

The reflection that stared back was anything but mine.

“What’s your name?” she asked, slipping the eyeliner into my pocket, the pocket of that green coat that used to be hers. And then she took a pair of scissors to my hair. I didn’t object. I held very still, watching in the mirror as she snipped erratic strands from my head. “You know,” she confessed, tossing the wet clumps of hair to the bathroom tile, “I used to want to be a beautician.”

I stared at my reflection and thought it best that she was not. My mop was misshapen: longer on one side than the other, lanky bangs that hid my eyes.

“My mother was a beautician,” I said, then wondered what Momma would think of me now. Would she be disappointed in me, or would she see that I was doing what needed to be done? I was taking good care of Lily, just like I told her I would. “My name is Claire.”

“Claire?” she asked and I nodded my head. “Claire what?”

Her own reddish hair she’d dyed dirty blond. She took the scissors to her hair, too, and on the dingy floor the strands coalesced.

“Claire Dalloway.”

She tossed it all in the trash: the scissors, the safety pin, what she could collect of the hair from that floor. She opened her own bag and dumped its guts into the bin: a torn magazine, an ID, a half-eaten bag of Skittles, a phone. And then she reached inside the black garbage bag and snatched the Skittles, having changed her mind. The rest she left behind.

The girl was standing in the bathroom, hand on the door. Someone on the other side knocked, a heavy, thumping blow. “Hang on,” she snapped, and then, to me, “I’m Willow,” she said, “Willow Greer,” and I knew after she left that bathroom, I’d never lay eyes on her again.

“I’ll meet you at the bus,” she fudged, and with that, I hoisted the slipping baby onto a hip and watched my former self walk out the yellowing veneer door and into the gas station, past a line of waiting women who’d lost their patience.

She wasn’t on the bus when I returned.

HEIDI

She’ll have nothing to do with the bottle.

I try again and again to set the formula-filled bottle into Juliet’s mouth, but she’ll have nothing to do with it. I press my lips to her forehead; it’s cool. No fever. I change her diaper and attempt a pacifier, I spread diaper rash cream onto a healed rash, but nothing will do, nothing will soothe my child.

And it’s in the way that she nuzzles her nose into the black crepe dress that the answer comes to me, the answer, utterly simple: that one thing only a mother can provide.

I sit down in the rocking chair and, reaching behind me with a single arm, begin to unfasten the mismatched buttons up my back, sliding my arms out of the dress so that before Juliet, I am exposed. Nothing she hasn’t seen before, I think, recalling those nights in my mind that I sat down with Juliet, in the sleigh glider in the nursery with its pale pink walls and damask sheets, and pressed her to my breast so she could drink her fill, until her hunger eased and she drank herself asleep, her eyes slowly becoming too heavy to hold open, and there, in the nursery, with only the glow of the moon to keep us company, my Juliet would suckle until she drifted to sleep. I recall the way she would slurp insatiably at times, staring at me with her huge brown anime eyes as if I was the best thing in the world, her eyes filled to the brim with love and awe. Love and awe for me.

But Juliet, I’m noticing, eyeing the child before me, Juliet’s eyes are blue.

It’s no matter, I tell myself, knowing how babies’ eyes can change on a dime. Brown one minute, blue the next, and yet there’s something different about it, about those eyes, about the way they stare at me.

I place my breast beside Juliet’s mouth, and watch in admiration as she locates the nipple, and as she latches on, I find it all so familiar, the tingling sensation in my breast, the release of oxytocin that fills me with a sense of calm. I run a hand across my Juliet’s head and whisper, “There now, pretty baby,” as I watch for the rhythmic sucking and swallowing action, for the big brown eyes to stare at me with awe. Love. Wanting me and only me.

But instead there is exasperation in those eyes, those blue eyes that look at me untrustingly, as if I’ve pulled a fast one on her, before she begins to cry. I slide a finger between her mouth and my breast, and attempt to reposition her, certain that she hasn’t latched on correctly. I try cradling her in either arm, and offer milk from either breast; and then, when this doesn’t work, I move Juliet and myself to the couch, where I lie on my back, with her sprawled across my chest: biological nurturing, or so it’s called, the way nature prescribed. Just as my lactation consultant, Angela, suggested I do when Zoe had trouble nursing.

I think of my lactation consultant, of Angela, of how I will phone her for advice if this doesn’t work. And Angela will come as she always used to do, and she will help position Juliet so that she will eat; she will once again explain to me breast compression to increase milk flow, and before I know it Juliet will suckle as she used to do.