Pretty Baby. Mary Kubica

expecting to see the two appear at any second: the army-green coat and lace-up boots, the vintage leather suitcase and sodden pink fleece blanket, the baby’s exposed creamy head, with faint, delicate plumage, the baby’s toothless smile.

      At work, a third-grade field trip arrives at our literacy center. With a handful of volunteers, we read poetry to the students, and then the students try their hand at writing and illustrating some poetry of their own, which the more adventurous of the bunch share with the group. The students coming to the center are mostly from lower class, urban neighborhoods, mostly African-American or Latino. Many are from low-income homes, and a smattering speak something other than English—Spanish, Polish, Chinese—in the home.

      Many of these children come from families where both parents work, if both parents are still around. Many are from single-parent homes. Many are latchkey kids who spend their afternoons and evenings alone. They are overlooked for more pressing matters: food and housing, to be exact. A morning at our facility is about more than literacy and developing a love of sonnets and haiku. It’s about the doubt that overtakes the children when they walk in our doors (quietly grumbling about the task at hand), and the fortitude with which they leave after a few hours of hard work and the undivided attention of our staff.

      But once they’re gone, thoughts of the girl and her baby return.

      The rain has quieted to a needless drizzle when lunchtime comes. I fasten my raincoat and head outside, careening down State Street while feasting on some healthy granola bar in lieu of lunch, heading to the library to pick up a book I have on interlibrary loan. I absolute love the library, with its sunlit atrium (though not sunlit today) and grotesque granite gargoyles and millions and millions of books. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.

      I pause beside a homeless woman leaning against the redbrick building, and set dollar bills in her outstretched hand. When she smiles at me, I see that many of her teeth are missing, her head covered in a thin black hat that’s supposed to keep her warm. She mumbles a thanks, inarticulate and hard to understand, what teeth she has blackened from what I take to be methamphetamine use.

      I find my book on the holds shelf and then take a series of escalators up to the seventh floor, bypassing security guards and elementary school field trips, wandering vagrant men, and women with other women, talking too loudly for the library. The library is warm and calm, and entirely welcoming as I make my way to the literature aisles in search of something enjoyable to read, the latest New York Times bestseller.

      And it’s there that I see her, the girl with her baby, sitting cross-legged on the ground in the midst of the literature aisles, the baby laid across her lap, its head elevated by a knee. The suitcase sits on the ground beside her. The girl, it appears, is grateful to be free of its weight for the time being. The girl pulls a bottle from the pocket of the army-green coat, sets it into the obliging baby’s mouth. She reaches for a book from the bottom shelf and—as I sneak into the nearest aisle, yanking some sci-fi thriller from the shelf and flipping to page forty-seven—I hear her voice softly reading aloud from Anne of Green Gables while stroking the underside of the baby’s toes.

      The baby is utterly calm. I spy through the metal shelves as the baby consumes the bottle, down to the residual bubbles at the bottom, and as she does her eyes become too heavy to keep open, and they slowly, slowly drift closed, her body gravitating to dormancy, perfectly still with the exception of involuntary twitches here and there. Her mother continues to read, continues caressing the tiny toes with a thumb and forefinger and suddenly I’m eavesdropping on a very personal moment between mother and child.

      A librarian appears. “Can I help you find something?” she asks, and I jump, clutching the sci-fi thriller in my hand. I feel guilty, flustered, my coat still dripping with rain. The librarian smiles, her features soft and kind.

      “No,” I say quickly, quietly; I don’t want to wake the baby. I whisper, “No. I just found it,” and I hurry to the escalators and downstairs to check out my new book.

      * * *

      I stop on the way home from work at the video store and rent a movie, a chick flick for Zoe and me, and a box of microwave popcorn, fat-free. Chris has always been a road warrior. As a young girl, Zoe was adversely affected by her “here one-minute, gone the next” father. When he traveled, we would invent fun things to do when we couldn’t be with daddy: movie nights and sleepovers in the big bed, pancakes for dinner, inventing stories in which Chris was a time traveler (much more entertaining) instead of a traveling investment banker (boring).

      I take the elevator up to the fifth floor of our vintage building and as I walk inside I find it eerily quiet, strangely dark. Generally it’s the blaring sound of Zoe’s stereo that greets me. But tonight it’s silent. I flip on a lamp in the living room, call out her name. At her bedroom door, I knock. I can see the light leaking out under the door, but there’s no response. I let myself inside.

      Zoe, still in her plaid uniform—which is a rarity, these days—is sprawled across the creamy shag rug that lines the hardwood floors. Her uniform is usually discarded for something graphic, something with sequins or rhinestone studs the minute she walks in the door. I can tell she is breathing—asleep—and so I don’t panic. But I watch her, hugging that yellow notebook in her arms, lying aimlessly on the floor as if her body suddenly became too heavy to hold. She’s wrapped in a plush blanket, her head propped on a throw pillow that reads Hugs & Kisses. Her space heater, which Chris bought after Zoe’s many complaints that her bedroom was too cold, is set to seventy-nine degrees. Her bedroom is a furnace, an oven, and Zoe, lying two feet away, is being cooked. Her cheeks are flushed; it’s a wonder the blanket didn’t catch fire. I hit the power button and turn the thing off, but it will take hours for the room to cool.

      My eyes deviate around the room, something Zoe would bark at if she were not asleep: the exposed brick walls that appear at random throughout the condo, the reason, Chris deduced, that Zoe’s room was so cold; the unmade canopy bed with the patchwork quilt; the posters of teen celebs and tropical paradises mounted to the walls with putty. Her backpack is on the floor, spilled open, the granola bar I thrust into her hand before school for an after-school snack lying untouched. Balled up notes from classmates are scattered upon the floor. The cats lie beside Zoe, embezzling the feverish heat for themselves.

      I run my hands through her long hair and quietly call her name once, and then twice. When she comes to, she sits up at once, her eyes wide, as if she’s been caught doing something wrong. Something bad. She jumps to her feet, the cats falling to theirs, and tosses the blanket to her bed.

      “I was tired,” she reasons, and her eyes dart around the room wondering what, if any, transgressions I found. None. It’s nearly seven o’clock, and outside, somewhere behind the dark, plump clouds, the sun is beginning to set. Chris, in San Francisco, is likely sitting down to an outrageous dinner at some extravagant restaurant, studying Cassidy Knudsen across the table. I push the thought from my mind.

      “Then I’m glad you took a nap,” I say, eyeing the creases across her cheek, her exhausted brown eyes. “How was your day?”

      “Fine,” she says, snatching the yellow notebook from the floor. She clings to it like a baby lemur clinging to its mother’s fur.

      “Was Mrs. Peters there?”

      “No.”

      “She must really be sick,” I say. The flu, it appears, is peaking late this year. “Same sub? The nag?”

      Zoe nods. Yes. The nag.

      “I’ll start dinner,” I tell Zoe but to my surprise she says, “I already ate.”

      “Oh?”

      “I was hungry. After school. I didn’t know what time you’d be home.”

      “That’s fine,” I tell her. “What’d you have?”

      “Grilled cheese,” she says and then, for