Pretty Baby. Mary Kubica

up at the crack of dawn, clearly having digested too much caffeine. She was in her robe and slippers, clutching her cell phone in the palm of a hand, and I knew there was more to this story than she was letting on. This wasn’t just about a homeless girl she’d seen. There must be a hundred thousand homeless people in Chicago. Heidi notices them, don’t get me wrong. She notices each and every one of them. But they don’t keep her awake at night.

      “That’s why God made homeless shelters,” I say. Outside, there is rain. Again. The TV stations are flooded with reporters standing on roads and highways that are underwater. Dangerous and impassable, they say. Even the major expressways—portions of the Eisenhower and the Kennedy—are closed down. Apparently we’ve entered a state of emergency. The news cameras pause on a yellow street sign: Turn Around, Don’t Drown, it says. Words to live by. A dripping reporter in a golden poncho stands in the Loop getting whammed by rain (as if seeing the rain on TV rather than listening to the way it pelts the windows and roofs of our homes will drive home the point) warning that even a few inches of rapidly flowing water can carry a car away. “If you don’t need to travel this morning,” she says, giving a concerned look as if she actually gives a shit about our safety, “then, please, stay home.”

      “She doesn’t do homeless shelters,” Heidi replies in a knowing way, and it’s then that I understand. Heidi didn’t just see this girl. There was an exchange. A conversation.

      What she’s told me thus far, or what I’ve dragged out of her involuntarily, is that she saw a young homeless girl beside the Fullerton Station, begging for change. A young girl with a baby. I arose from bed and came into the living room—my mind on one thing: TV—to find she’d just finished up a call on her cell, and when I asked who she was talking to, she said, “No one.”

      But I could tell it wasn’t no one. It was clear to me that it was someone, someone that mattered to Heidi. But she didn’t want me to know. This is what happens to men who travel all the time, I thought. Their wives cheat on them. They rise from bed first thing in the morning to carry on clandestine conversations with their lovers while their husbands are catching some much-needed sleep. I spied my wife: guilty, frenzied eyes, suddenly not as chaste as I knew Heidi to be, and asked, “Was it a guy?”

      I thought of Heidi, last night, of the way she pulled away from me in bed. Was he here? I wondered. Before me? I didn’t get home until after eleven, to find Zoe AWOL, Heidi in bed, and I remembered when Zoe was little, the way she and Heidi would create welcome-home banners and plaster them with stickers, drawings, photos and whatever other frilly little embellishments they could find, for when I came home, and now, five or six years later: nothing. Only the cats were waiting for me beside the front door, their annoying squawks not a warm welcome but rather an ultimatum: Feed us or else... The tiny stainless-steel bowls that Heidi never forgets to fill were empty.

      “Heidi,” I asked again, my voice losing patience. “Was it a guy?”

      “No, no,” she responded immediately, without hesitation. She laughed, nervously, and I couldn’t tell if she was lying, or if my suggestion put her dirty little secret into perspective. Some covert affair or...

      “Then who was it?” I demanded to know. “Who was on the phone?” I asked again.

      She was quiet, initially. Debating whether or not to tell me. I was about to get really pissed off, but then she grudgingly told me about the girl. The girl with the baby.

      “You talked to her?” I ask, feeling my heart decelerate, my blood pressure decline.

      “She just called,” Heidi replies. Her cheeks are flushed, either a symptom of caffeine overdose or she’s embarrassed.

      My chin drops. “She knows your phone number?”

      Heidi is stymied by guilt. Unease. She doesn’t answer right away. And then, sheepishly: “I gave her my card. At dinner. Last night.”

      This, I think, is getting weird. I stare at the woman before me in dismay—at the bedhead of auburn hair, the manic, caffeinated eyes—and wonder what she’s done with my wife. Heidi is a dreamer, yes. A visionary, an optimist. But there’s always a dose of reality mixed in.

      Except that this time, it appears, there’s not.

      “Dinner?” I start, but then shake my head and start again, getting down to the more pertinent details: “Why did she call?”

      I find myself staring into Heidi’s demented eyes and wishing it was another guy.

      Heidi marches to the coffeemaker as if she has any business drinking more caffeine. She tops up a personalized mug Zoe and I gave her for Mother’s Day a few years back, a black ceramic mug garnished with photos of Zoe that the dishwasher has begun to wear away. She dribbles in the hazelnut creamer and I think: Sugar, too. Perfect. Just what Heidi needs.

      “Ruby was crying all night, she said. All night long. Willow was really in a tizzy. She sounded exhausted. It’s colic. I’m sure of it. Remember when Zoe was a baby and had colic? The crying all night long. I’m really worried about her, Chris. About both of them. That persistent crying. That’s the kind of thing that leads to postpartum depression. To shaken baby syndrome.”

      And really, I can think of only one thing to say: “Willow? That’s her name? And Ruby?”

      Heidi says that it is.

      “People are not named Willow, Heidi. Trees are named Willow. And Ruby...” I let the rest of that sentence fall by the wayside, for Heidi is looking at me as though I might just be the devil incarnate, standing in the middle of our living room in checkered boxer shorts and nothing more. I bypass Heidi, and head into the kitchen for my own cup of coffee. Maybe then this will make more sense. Maybe after a cup of coffee, I’ll come to realize this has all been a misunderstanding, the translation lost somewhere in my tired, sluggish brain. I take my time, fill the mug and hover before the granite countertops, ingesting the coffee, waiting for the stimulant to arouse the neurons in my brain.

      But when I return from the kitchen, Heidi is standing before the front door, slipping a long, orange anorak over her robe.

      “Where are you going?” I ask, bewildered by the coat, the robe, the messy hair. She kicks the slippers from her feet and submerges her feet into a pair of rubber boots lounging before the door.

      “I told her I’d come. Meet her.”

      “Meet her where?”

      “By the Fullerton Station.”

      “Why?”

      “To see if she’s okay.”

      “Heidi,” I say in my most rational, objective tone. “You’re in your pajamas.” And she looks down at the lilac fleece robe, the gaudy, cotton floral pants.

      “Fine,” she says and races into the bedroom and replaces the floral pants with a pair of jeans. She doesn’t take the time to remove the robe.

      This is absolutely absurd, I think. I could tell her, make a bullet point list or maybe a bar graph for her to see it, visually, how this is absolutely insane. On one axis, I’d list all the anomalies of the situation: Heidi’s fetish for homeless people, the lack of discretion when handing out her business card, the hideousness of the lilac robe and the orange anorak, the rain; the other axis would show the values of these anomalies, the outfit far outranking the business card, for example.

      But all that would do is land me in hot water.

      And so I watch from the leather recliner out of the corner of my eye as she grabs her purse and an umbrella from the front closet and disappears through the door, chanting, “See you later.” My lethargic reply: “Bye.”

      The cats jump to the sill of the bay window, as they always do, to watch her leave through the building’s main entrance and down the street.

      I make myself scrambled eggs. I forget to recycle the egg carton. I warm slices of limp bacon in the microwave (which feels entirely wrong to do