One nurse stood guard of them all, a shepherd in the pasture keeping watch over her sheep. What I wouldn’t give to be that nurse, to be tasked with caring for the infinite number of newborn babies that rotated in and out of the nursery each day.
I wondered if she ever had a weakness for any one of these babies. A fondness. Was there ever one colicky child who caught her eye, the runt of a litter of multiples she wanted to bring home as her own?
From down the hallway a door opened and I saw the main hospital on the other side, areas other than the labor and delivery ward. A common hallway. The hospital’s information booth. The doorway was twenty steps away at best, and there was nothing but two unlocked doors to prevent Carter and me from leaving. There was no alarm, at least none that I could see. There was no system to buzz people in and out. It was an open door, an invitation.
How easily Carter and I could just leave.
I looked around; the nursery nurse had her back in my direction, attention now focused on one little baby who was trying to wake up. Behind me, there was only a single woman at the nurses’ station, a middle-aged lady on the phone. Other than that, the ward was quiet and still, all patient doors pulled closed, mothers on the other side in the throes of labor or fast asleep.
I peered to the doorway again, those swinging double doors just twenty steps away from where I stood. I didn’t think about the rest, about what I would tell Aaron or what Miranda might do when she awoke and realized Carter was gone. My heart beat quickly as desire and instinct told me to do it and to do it quickly, to move with purpose, to not draw attention to myself. In my arms, I held the very thing Aaron and I had been trying for for months. A baby.
Miranda didn’t want him anyway. I was doing her a favor, I reasoned.
How easily this baby could be mine.
I thought of only one thing in that moment as I stood frozen, staring through glass at the plentiful sleeping babies.
How easy it would be to just go.
I didn’t do it, of course, but it would be remiss to say the idea never crossed my mind.
jessie
I pedal toward Roscoe Village. As I do, I stare over my shoulder, back into the Loop at the peaks of skyscrapers that rise into the sky like distant mountain summits. I watch as the urban streets become residential.
Once in Roscoe Village, I duck into a burger joint on Addison. My stomach is empty by now, the morning’s sugar high having given way to a glucose crash, one which makes me irritable and edgy. I’ve had nothing to eat but a donut all day—a donut and coffee—though since Mom’s death, my hip bones protrude from my waistline and the bones of my rib cage are startlingly transparent.
I’m not not eating on purpose. I’ve just had no desire to eat.
I order a hamburger and take it to the counter to eat. There, I stare out the window at the world as it passes by without me. A bus goes by, the 152 heading east. A plastic bag floats through the air, surfing the airstream. Middle school kids amble by in private school uniforms—starchy plaid split-neck jumpers; burgundy sweater-vests; pressed pants—with backpacks so heavy they nearly tip over from the weight of them. An older woman stands beside the bus stop. The 152 gathers her up and goes, disappearing in a puff of smoke.
I eat part of my burger, wrapping the rest up for the trash. As I’m about to go, a voice stops me. I turn to see a woman standing beside me in jeans and a cardigan, a pair of white gym shoes on her feet. Her graying hair is wound back into a bun.
“Jessie? Jessie Sloane? Is that you?”
But before I can say one way or another if it’s me, she decides for me. “It is you,” she declares as she tells me that she remembers me when I was yea high, her hand pegged at about thirty-seven inches in the air. And then she embraces me, this strange woman wrapping her thickset arms around my neck and declaring again, “It is you.”
Except that I don’t know who she is. Not until she tells me.
And even then, I still don’t know.
“It’s me,” she says. “Mrs. Zulpo. Eleanor Zulpo. Your mother used to clean my home when you were a girl. In Lincoln Park,” she tells me, tacking on details as if it might help me remember. “Tree-lined street, beautiful box beam ceilings, rooms flooded with natural light,” she says, though she and her husband don’t live there anymore, not since the housing market crash when she had to give up her home. When they had to downsize. That’s what she tells me.
I draw a blank. I don’t remember.
Like me, Mom used to clean homes. Mostly upscale places that we could never afford. She taught me everything I know. My first foray into the family business came when I was about twelve years old and would get down on my hands and knees beside her and scrub floors.
But before that, when I was too young to clean, Mom would lug me along on assignments and there I’d spend my days playing pretend in strangers’ homes. Cooking imaginary meals in their palatial kitchens, tucking my imaginary children into their mammoth beds before Mom scooched me out of the way so she could wash the sheets.
“You don’t remember me,” Eleanor Zulpo decides, realizing that it must have been sixteen or seventeen years ago or so, when I was three or four. “Of course you don’t remember,” she says, loosening her hold on my neck, telling me that I look just the same as I did back then. “It’s those dimples,” she says, pointing at them. “Those adorable dimples. I’d know these dimples anywhere.
“I read about your mother in the paper,” she says then, sitting beside me on her own stool, unwrapping a hot dog. The sight of it alone, that hot dog, lying out on a foil wrapper, slathered in ketchup and relish—that and the smell—reminds me of the dead bird. The pigeon. And instead of a hot dog, I suddenly see blood, guts, gore, and I gag, vomit inching its way up my esophagus. I reach for my drink and force it back down, gargling, trying to get the taste of vomit from my mouth.
Mrs. Zulpo—Eleanor, she says to call her—doesn’t notice. She keeps going. “I saw her obituary,” she’s saying. “It was a great write-up, a lovely tribute for a lovely woman,” she says. I tell her that it was.
I submitted the death notice to the newspaper. I covered the cost of the obituary. I found an old photo of Mom to use, one that was a good six years old at least, taken back before she got sick.
We’d lived our entire lives in private, but for whatever reason I felt the whole world should know that she was dead.
“There have been other cleaning women since your mother. But never anyone as good as she was, as conscientious, as thorough. She was one of a kind, Jessie,” she says, and I tell her I know. Eleanor tells me stories. Things I didn’t know, or maybe I did. Memories that have been lost to time, erased clear from my brain’s hard drive. About the time I helped myself to her Wedgwood china when Mom was cleaning. How I snatched it right from her hutch and set the dining room table to have a tea party with. “Wedgwood china,” she tells me, grinning. “A single cup and saucer go for about a hundred dollars each. They had been my own mother’s, given to me when she died. Heirlooms. Your poor mother,” she laughs. “She nearly had a heart attack when she found you. I told her it was fine, that it wasn’t like anything had gotten hurt. And besides, it was nice to see the dishes being put to use for a change.”
And then she tells me that, at her suggestion, the three of us sat down at the dining room table and drank lemonade from the Wedgwood china.
It fills me with a sudden sense of nostalgia. A yearning for the past.
“What else do you remember?” I ask, needing more. Needing someone to fill in the gaps for me, all those details I can no longer remember.