Mary Kubica - Pretty Baby

“Who’s that?” Heidi asked later, after the phony smiles and “So nice to meet yous” were through, after Cassidy had walked away in search of another happy marriage she could muddle. “Your secretary?”

I never knew what Heidi meant by that, if it would have been better or worse if Cassidy Knudsen was my secretary.

Later, at home, I caught Heidi pulling negligible gray hairs from her head with a pair of tweezers. Soon after, beauty products besieged our vanity, those laden with antiwrinkle agents and age defying vows.

This is what I’m remembering as I thrust Henry’s cell phone back at him, making sure to say, “Here you go, Henry,” in a powerful tone so that Heidi, back home in Chicago, knows Cassidy and I are not alone, and flee into the hallway with my own phone. Heidi is a beautiful woman, don’t get me wrong. Gorgeous. A person would never guess an entire decade sat between Cassidy and my wife.

And yet, Heidi knew.

“Hey,” I say.

“What was that all about?” she asks. I envision her at home, in bed, pajamas on, red flannel or maybe the polka-dot nightgown Zoe picked out for her birthday. The bedroom TV is tuned in to the news, her laptop spread across her legs. Heidi’s hair is pulled into one of those messy updos—anything to keep it out of her eyes—while she searches online for information on the slums of Dharavi or maybe poverty statistics from around the world. I don’t know. Maybe, when I’m not home, she searches for porn. No. I change my mind. Not Heidi. Heidi is much too tasteful for porn. Maybe she’s looking up some practical use for vegetarian meat crumbles. Cat food? Cat litter ?

“What?” I say dumbly. As if I hadn’t noticed. The hotel hallway is covered with the most awful wallpaper, some kind of geometric red design that makes my head hurt.

“Cassidy answering your phone.”

“Oh,” I say. “That.” I tell her about my phone call with Aaron Swindler and then change the subject as fast as I can, blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. “Still raining back home?” I ask. There can be nothing more mundane than talking about the weather.

It is. All day long.

“What are you doing up so late?” I ask. It’s after eleven o’clock back home.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Because you miss me,” I suggest, though of course we know it’s not the case. Chances are I’m not there more than I am there, as has been the case since we started dating. Heidi is used to me being gone. As they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder. That’s what she says anyway when I ask if she misses me. I think she secretly likes having the bed all to herself. She’s a stomach sleeper—and a blanket stealer—with a fondness for sleeping diagonally. For our marriage, me in a hotel room simply works.

“Sure,” she says. And then the expected: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Who said that anyway?” I ask.

“Not sure.” I can hear her fingers moving across the laptop. Click, click, click. “How’s everything going?”

“Fine,” I say and will her to leave it at that.

But she doesn’t. Not my Heidi. “Just fine?” she pries, and I’m forced to relay news of the delayed flight due to rain, followed by turbulence and a glass of spilled orange juice, lunch with a client at Fisherman’s Wharf, the reasons I don’t like Aaron Swindler.

But when I ask about her day, it’s Zoe she wants to talk about. “She’s being weird,” she says.

I chuckle. I slide down the red geometric wallpaper and have a seat on the floor. “She’s twelve, Heidi,” I say. “She’s supposed to be weird.”

“She was taking a nap.”

“So she was tired,” I say.

“She’s twelve, Chris. Twelve-year-olds don’t nap.”

“Maybe she’s getting sick. The flu, you know,” I say, “it’s going around.”

“Maybe,” she says, but then, “she didn’t look sick.”

“I don’t know, Heidi. I haven’t been twelve in a long time. And besides, I’m a guy. I don’t know. It’s probably a growth spurt, maybe some puberty thing. Maybe she just didn’t sleep well.”

I all but hear Heidi’s chin hit the floor. “You think Zoe’s going through puberty ?” she asks. If Heidi had her way, Zoe would have remained in diapers and fleece footie pajamas for the rest of her life. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “No,” she says, deciding for herself. “Not yet. Zoe hasn’t even started menstruating.”

I cringe. I hate that word. Menstruating. Menstruation. Menstrual flow. The idea of my daughter wearing tampons—or me having to hear about it for that matter—fills me with dread.

“Ask Jennifer,” I suggest. “Ask Jennifer 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?

HEIDI

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.