Motherless Child

When Daisy and her husband moved into their new house, Evelyn was one of the first neighbors to befriend Daisy. Evelyn had a four-year-old daughter, Susan. She was a flirtatious child whose blonde hair hung in shiny ringlets. Evelyn herself had a vivacious personality; she laughed easily and talked incessantly. Often Evelyn and Susan were dressed in identical mother-daughter outfits, doubling the smiles they received when they entered a room together. Their matching red polka dot dresses got the most attention.

In a few years, Evelyn had a son, Albert. He was an attractive child with large brown eyes and sandy brown hair. He looked just like his father. Now the mother of two, Evelyn’s behavior set people to talking. The neighborhood gossiped about how the city bus driver visited her on his lunch break leaving with a broad smile and liquor on his breath an hour later. The next son Evelyn gave birth to had no resemblance to Evelyn’s husband. The child had an olive complexion and course dark brown hair. A fourth pregnancy ended abruptly when Evelyn’s husband shoved her down the stairs. Ruth was born prematurely, her retinas damaged by the oxygen in the incubator.

One morning, a few weeks after Ruth was released from the neonatal intensive care ward of the maternity hospital, there was a knock on Daisy’s back door. The staccato knock was hard and it sounded frantic. When Daisy opened the door, Evelyn handed her the baby, “I’ve got to take Susan to the doctor. Will you care for Ruth while I am gone?”

“Of course,” Daisy said, cradling the infant in her arms. She was easy to ignore because she rarely cried. Blind and passive to the world around her, she appeared like a fledgling with her eye lids closed. She clung to the body that supported her and would feed her.

“She looks a little like her Daddy,” Daisy thought as she uncurled the tiny pale fingers. It was distressing to see her tiny fists pressed deeply into the sockets of her sightless eyes. Daisy wouldn’t ignore her though; she would hold her and coo soothing sounds, feed her the warmed bottled milk and change the soiled diapers.

Later that afternoon there was another knock on the back door. This one was soft and tentative. If Daisy hadn’t been in the kitchen at the time, she might not have heard it. The Glenwood Elementary school bell had rung several minutes earlier. Daisy’s daughter was already home and looking for an after-school snack.

The soft little knock on the back door in the middle of the afternoon was Albert, Ruth’s older brother. “Are you here to pick up your sister?” Daisy asked. The seven-year-old shook his head as tears began to dribble down his cheeks.
“Something’s very wrong in my house,” Albert said trying to hold back his sobs. “There is stuff everywhere.” Then he added, “There is a piece of paper hanging from the light over the kitchen table but I can’t read what it says.”

“Wait here with us until your father gets home from work,” Daisy instructed him.

An hour later it was Albert’s father who knocked on the back door. He had come home to find the house torn apart. Chairs were turned upside down and books thrown across the living room floor. The note said, “Ruth is at Daisy’s house.”
Evelyn must have been planning her escape for weeks. She had fled with the two children who did not resemble her husband. She had sold what she could: china, silverware, and antiques. What she could not sell she destroyed. Broken glass and slashed cushions were thrown or tossed at random. Her second-grade son could not read the note; yet he knew what the message must say. His mother had left him.