It was almost as if she was asking me, begging me, daring me to take her child.
And so I did.
I stood from the inflexible armchair, slowly, gradually, piecemeal-like so that the chair wouldn’t make a sound. So that the floor wouldn’t cheep. So that my own two feet wouldn’t betray me. I flexed one muscle and then the next until I was standing upright, holding my breath.
I crossed the room, creeping by degrees so my shoes wouldn’t squeak on the floors. Miranda’s eyes were closed, enjoying the peace and serenity of having someone else care for her child.
It didn’t occur to her for one instant that someone might try and take her baby.
I slipped into the hallway without a peep. Two left turns and there Carter and I were, standing before the nursery, staring through glass at a half dozen sleeping babies. They lay bundled like burritos in their pink and blue blankets, with knitted hats atop their near-bald heads. They were sleeping, every last one of them, completely tuckered out. The newborns slept in rolling bassinets all arranged on display so that grandmas and grandpas could see. If it wasn’t for the slip of paper in each bassinet with the baby’s name and date of birth in blue ink, there was no telling them apart aside from the obvious distinction of pink and blue.
How easy it would be for two to be swapped, or for one to up and disappear.
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 notnoteating 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. “Itisyou,” 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.
