For once in my life I don’t think about me. I think about Heidi, Zoe, the baby.
And I lunge. It’s not enough to gain control, but enough to knock the knife out of her hand. It lands on the hardwood floor with a thunk, leaving a chip in the oak floor that we’ll forever remember: a reminder of this day. We scramble for the knife, the both of us, the baby thrashing in Heidi’s unstable hands, her cry slowly caving in to exhaustion and fear. I charge for the Swiss Army knife on the kitchen floor, sliding headfirst, like a baserunner into second base, coming up with it in my hands.
And it’s then that Heidi turns—before I have a chance to get to my feet—and sprints, down the narrow hall, slamming the door and locking herself and the baby in the bedroom.
She’s crying; Heidi is crying. I can hear her through the door, sputtering some kind of mystifying diatribe about babies and Juliet, Cassidy and Graham, our neighbor Graham, the man from next door. Graham. I could call Graham for help. But there is no time. I try to reason with her—Heidi, please, open the door. Let’s talk. Let’s just talk this out.—but she won’t be reasoned with.
I think of all the pseudo-weapons that are in that room and the adjoining bathroom: nail clippers, a nail file. Electrical sockets.
And then there are the windows, five floors up from the concrete below.
I don’t think twice. I reach for the phone and dial 911.
“It’s my wife,” I say desperately to the dispatcher on the other end of the line when she asks the nature of my emergency. “I’m afraid she’s... I don’t know... She needs help,” I say then, shaking my head quickly from side to side; I don’t know what Heidi may do. Take her own life; take the baby’s life? Thirty minutes ago I would have said no, never, not Heidi.
But now I didn’t know.
“Just come,” I command instead, and I rattle off the address.
And then I hurry toward the bedroom door, fully prepared to knock it to the ground.
HEIDI
I don’t know what happens first.
They take my blood. They hold me down on the starch-white gurney, two men do, two men in face masks and bouffant caps, their hands clad in latex gloves. They hold me down while a third injects a needle into me and takes my blood; he steals my blood from me. Chris stands idly by behind a utility cart as I kick and scream, thrusting my body from the bed, until the men with the masks and the caps and the gloves press their weight into me until I can no longer move. Their alien faces stare at me: their massive, hairless heads, their frightening opaque eyes. They have no mouths, no noses as they probe me with this and that and I scream as Chris watches from afar, saying nothing.
And then they sit me down at a table, a folding table of sorts with three padded black chairs, a clock on the wall, the requisite one-way mirror you see on TV.
Not the aliens. No not the aliens. Someone else. Someone else entirely.
I don’t know what happens first.
“My daughter. I need to see my daughter,” I continue to chant, but they say to me that if I cooperate I’ll be able to see my daughter soon. If I cooperate. But whether it happens before or after the blood, I don’t know. I can’t say. There’s a woman there, an older woman with long silver hair and I’m watching as my Juliet gets passed from one person’s arms to the next, to the next, before she disappears.
“Do something!” I beg of Chris, but he ignores this, standing there in a room with dozens of desks and chairs. He ignores me, staring past me and through me, but never at me as they lead me into a room and close the door where Chris can no longer see. I wonder if I am invisible, if that’s that reason Chris cannot see me. Like air, oxygen, ghosts. Perhaps I am a ghost, an apparition; perhaps I am dead. Perhaps they did not take my blood but rather injected me with potassium chloride so that I would die, there on the gurney with the men in face masks. But my hands are bound in cuffs, and the woman with the long silver hair, she can see me. She asks questions about a Claire Dalloway, setting photographs on the table between us, gruesome images taking up residence in my mind, gory, bloody images of a man, spilled across a bed, a woman beside him, her torso strewn upon his, each slathered with blood. Carmine blood, thick and gooey, absorbing into the tawny sheets.
I remember the blood on Willow’s undershirt and I begin to scream.