Читать книгу Pretty Baby - Mary Kubica - Страница 13

WILLOW

“Heidi was the first one in a long time who was nice to me.”

That’s what I tell her, the lady with the long silver hair, too long for someone her age. Old ladies are supposed to have short hair. Grandma hair. Short, wrapped tightly with hair curlers, the way Momma would do Mrs. Dahl’s hair when I was a girl, with the hot-pink curlers she’d plug in to warm, then sit for a half hour or more, painstakingly wrapping the dark gray, brittle hair around the curlers, then plaster it with spray. We’d wait, in that tiny bathroom of ours (my job was to hand Momma the pins), listening to Mrs. Dahl go on and on about how they’d artificially inseminate the cattle on their farm. I was eight years old and so I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I sounded out the words they spelled, words like s-e-m-e-n and v-u-l-v-a.

“Then why’d you do it?” she asks. The lady with the long silver hair, combed straight. And big teeth. Like a horse’s.

“I didn’t want to hurt her,” I say. “Or her family.”

She sighs, leery of me from the moment she walked into the cold room. She hung back, by the door, just watching me with gray eyes from behind a pair of rectangular glasses. She’s got thin skin, like tissue paper, used tissue paper, crinkles everywhere. Her name, she says, is Louise Flores. And then she spells it for me, F-l-o-r-e-s, as if it’s something I might need to know.

“We’ll start at the beginning,” she says, sitting on the other chair. She sets things on the table between us: a recorder, a stopwatch, a pad of paper, a felt tip pen. I don’t like her one bit.

“She wanted to buy me dinner,” I say. I’ve been told that being up-front will go a long way with the silver-haired lady. Louise Flores. That’s what they said, the others who were here: the man with the chin strap and mustache, the cutthroat lady dressed in head-to-toe black.

“Mrs. Wood wanted to buy you dinner?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “Heidi.”

“Well, wasn’t that nice of her,” she says bitterly. Then writes something down in the pad of paper with the felt tip pen. “Ever hear the saying ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?”

When I stare off into space, ignoring her, she prods again, “Huh? Have you? Have you ever heard that saying: ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’?” And she’s staring at me with her gray eyes, where there’s a reflection of the one fluorescent light off the rectangular glasses.

“No,” I lie, letting my hair fall in my face so I can’t see her. What you can’t see, can’t hurt you. That’s one I know. “Never.”

“I see we’re off to a great start here,” Louise Flores says with an ugly sneer, and presses a red button on the recorder. Then: “I don’t want to talk about Mrs. Wood though. Not yet. I want to go back to the beginning. Back to Omaha,” she adds, though I know good and well Omaha isn’t the beginning.

“What’ll happen to her?” I ask instead. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I tell myself, honest to God, I didn’t.

“To whom?” she asks, though she knows good and well who I mean.

“Mrs. Wood,” I say flatly.

She falls backward, sloping into the angles of the chair. “Do you really, truly care? Or is this just an effort to waste time?” She stares at me, hawkeyed, like Joseph used to do. “I’m in no rush here, you see,” she adds, crossing her arms across herself, across a crisp white blouse. “I’ve got all the time in the world,” and yet there’s a bite to her voice that suggests she does not.

“What’ll happen to her?” I ask again. “To Heidi?”

I imagine the warmth of that nice home, the feel of the soft bed, as the baby and I lay together under the brown blanket that felt just like the soft fur of a bunny rabbit. There were pictures on the walls, there in that home, family pictures, the three of them, pressed close together, smiling. Happy. It always felt warm in there, a different kind of warm, one you felt from the inside out, not the outside in. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, not since Momma. Heidi was about the closest I’d gotten to Momma in eight whole years. She was kind.

The lady’s smirk is smug, her gray eyes lifeless, though her thin lips compress into a phony smile.

“As the saying goes, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” she says, and I imagine Mrs. Wood, in an orange jumpsuit like me, that kind smile washed off her face.