I’m thinking of my father as I make my way down the steps, my fingers instinctively reaching for the yellow gold wedding band that hangs on a chain around my neck. I trace the grooves and ridges of the ring, the words the beginning of forever etched on the inside.
And then, for a split second I’m nearly certain I see him, there, in the crowd, my father in his Carhartt overalls, one hand thrust in a back pocket, the other holding a Marlboro Red, looking straight at me when he smiles. A hammer dangles from its allotted loop on the pants, a baseball cap sits on his head—Cleveland Indians it says—atop a mess of brown hair, which my mother always begged him to trim.
“Daddy,” I nearly say aloud, but then the image disappears as quickly as it appeared, and I shake my head, remembering. It couldn’t be.
Or could it?
Of course it couldn’t, I decide. Of course.
And then I’m breathing in that familiar carcinogenic scent—wanting to smell it and yet not wanting to smell it—when I hear it: a baby’s wail. My feet have just hit the pavement when the sound grabs me by the throat and I spin instinctively, my eyes searching for the source.
And there I see her, sitting underneath the train tracks, shivering in the nippy air. She’s leaning against a brick wall beside newspaper stands and rank garbage cans, beside swollen puddles, sitting on the cold, wet concrete, rocking the baby against her chest. The baby is crying. There’s a frenzy to the way she rocks the baby, a mother with an inconsolable baby, moments away from becoming unhinged. Zoe was a colicky baby, prone to endless hours of intense crying. I can relate with the frustration and the overwhelming fatigue in the girl’s eyes. But what I can’t relate to is her presence on a city street, in the midst of twilight, on a cold spring night. I can’t relate to the desperate way she thrusts a waterlogged coffee cup (likely snatched from the neighboring garbage can) at passersby, begging for money, and the way people give her the once-over, dribbling spare change in her cup: a quarter here, a handful of pennies there, as if any amount of spare change has the ability to save this girl from her fate. I feel my breath leave me for a moment. This girl is a child and the baby is a baby. No one deserves such a fate, to be penniless and displaced, but certainly not a child. My mind leaps to the outrageous cost of infant formula and diapers, knowing that if this girl is supplying diapers for that baby, there is certainly no spare change left for her own provisions. For food and shelter, for the umbrella with the flamboyant golden daisies.
I’m rear-ended by a throng of commuters departing the “L.” I scoot out of the way, unable to join the clique of other wage earners, those retiring to warm, dry homes and home-cooked meals. I simply cannot. My feet are frozen to the pavement, my heart racing. The baby’s wail—piercing and miserable and utterly inconsolable—rattles my nerves. I watch the girl, watch the frenzied rocking, hear the tired words fall from her exhausted mouth as she holds out her cup. “Please, help.”
She’s asking, I tell myself. She’s asking for help.
And yet the do-nothings continue on their way home, rationalizing their lack of concern with the change they drop in her cup, change that would have otherwise found its way to the washing machine or some countertop or bookshelf, where it would sit purposelessly in a ceramic pink pig.
I feel myself tremble as I approach the girl. She lifts her chin as I draw near, and for a split second our eyes lock before she thrusts out her cup and looks away. Her eyes are worse for wear, jaded and pessimistic. I nearly balk for a moment because of the eyes. Icy and blue, a cornflower blue, with much too much eyeliner staining the surface of her bloated eyelids. I think about fleeing. I consider pulling a twenty dollar bill from my purse and setting it in her cup and being on my way. Twenty dollars is much more substantial than a handful of change. Twenty dollars can buy dinner for an entire week, if she’s thrifty. That’s what I tell myself in my moment of hesitation. But then, I realize, she’d likely spend it on Enfamil formula, placing the baby’s needs before her own. She’s rail thin, skinnier than Zoe, who is a string bean.
“Let me buy you dinner,” I declare, my voice much less bold than the spoken words. My voice is quiet, quivering, nearly suffocated by the sounds of the city: taxis passing by and blasting their horns at commuters who jaywalk across Fullerton; the automated message Attention customers. An outbound train, from the Loop, will be arriving shortly, followed by the imminent arrival of the brown line on the platform above us; the sound of the baby’s cry. People pass by, chatting and laughing loudly into cell phones; a forgotten rumble of thunder rolls through the darkening sky.
“No thanks,” she says. There’s a bitterness to her words. It would be easier for her if I dropped in my twenty and continued on my way. Easier now, in this moment maybe, but not when the hunger begins to eat away at her insides, when the baby’s inconsolable crying makes her snap. She stands and reaches for the leather suitcase, shuffling the baby in her arms.
“It helps,” I say, quickly, knowing she’s about to make a run for it, “to lay them on their stomachs sometimes. Like this.” I motion with my hands. “It helps with the colic.” She watches my hands go from upright to horizontal and she nods—to some extent—and I say, “I’m a mother, too,” and she sizes me up and down, wondering why I don’t just go. Like everyone else, drop in my change and go.
“There’s a shelter—” I begin.
“I don’t do shelters,” she interjects. I envision the interior of a homeless shelter: dozens upon dozens of cots lined in a row.
She’s incredibly tough on the exterior. Hardened and rebellious. I wonder if inside she feels the same. She wears the same torn jeans, the same army-green coat, the same lace-up boots. Her clothing is grungy, wet. Her crooked hair carries a slick look, greasy, having not been washed in some time. I wonder about the last time she enjoyed a warm shower, a good night’s sleep. The baby, too, from what I can see is far from clean.
I consider Zoe on her own, on the streets. Homeless. The vision, purely hypothetical, makes me want to cry. Zoe, with her saucy exterior and sensitive, defensive interior, begging for spare change beside the “L.” Prepubescent Zoe with a baby of her own in three or four inconsequential years.
“Please let me buy you dinner,” I say again. But the girl is turning and walking away, the baby slung over her shoulder awkwardly, fussing and thrusting her teensy body about. I’m consumed with desperation, with this need to do something. But the girl is moving away from me, swallowed up by rush hour traffic on Fullerton. “Wait,” I hear my voice say. “Please stop. Wait.” But she does not.
I drop my bag to the moistened sidewalk and do the only thing I can think to do: I shimmy out of my raincoat, fully waterproof and lined, and at the corner of Fullerton and Halstead—where she waits anxiously for a green light to cross the plugged street—I drape the coat over the baby. She delivers me a dirty look.
“What are you—” she starts, accusatorily, but I retreat a step or two so she can’t undo the one thing I can think of to do. The cold air rushes my bare arms where I stand in a short-sleeve tunic and useless, lightweight leggings.
“I’ll be at Stella’s,” I say as the light turns green, “in case you change your mind,” and I watch as she joins the mass exodus of people crossing Fullerton. Stella’s, with its All-American cuisine and pancakes twenty-four hours a day. Completely unimposing and modest. “On Halstead,” I call after her, and she pauses, in the middle of the street, and peers over her shoulder at me, her visage hazy in the glow of oncoming traffic. “On Halstead,” I say again, in case she didn’t hear.