“Where have they taken the baby?” I cry out, trying in vain to free my hands from their cuffs, so that the handcuffs scrape the inner lining of my wrist. My hands are bound behind my back so that I can hardly move, a guard forcing me into my chair each time I attempt to stand, to rise from my perch and find my baby. “Where have they taken my Juliet?” I plead again when she fails to respond. And then I hear it, clear as day: I hear my baby cry. My eyes dash around the soundproofed room, searching every nook and cranny for my Juliet. She’s here. She’s here somewhere.
“She’s in good hands,” the woman says, but she doesn’t tell me where. I drop my head beneath the table to see: is she there? Hidden beneath the table?
“Mrs. Wood?” the woman asks, tapping on the table to get my attention. She’s impatient and short-tempered, this woman with her tape recorder and her felt-tip pens. “Mrs. Wood, what are you doing, Mrs. Wood?”
But no. Only a washed-out tile floor, varnished with coffee stains, and smut, grime, filth.
“I need to see my baby,” I say, raising up to look her in the eye. “I have to see my baby.”
There’s a moment of silence. The woman, Louise Flores, the assistant state’s attorney or so she says she is, stares at me with dull gray eyes. And then: “You must be mistaken, Mrs. Wood. The baby you brought in,” she tells me, “that baby is Calla Zeeger. She is not your baby.”
And I’m gripped with a sudden onset of wrath and fury, and I find myself rising with great difficulty to my feet and screaming at her, that she’s wrong, that the baby is mine. Mine! I ignore the pain I feel in my arms, my back as I stretch them in ways I didn’t know I could move, like women whose children are pinned beneath cars, finding they can suddenly lift four thousand pounds in a single motion, in one single hoist.
A guard is coming at me quickly, ordering me to sit down. “Sit down now,” he barks, and I see him then, I see him clearly: a Perro de Presa Canario with a coarse brindle coat bounding across the room, barring razor-sharp teeth, growling—a rasping, gravelly growl: a warning. Slobber dribbles from his wide-open mouth, his teeth like spears, his eyes intent on his next meal. His hands are firm on me, on my shoulders, pressing me into the chair so that it hurts along the ridges of my shoulders where his hands meet my flesh. And he bites, that Presa Canario does, he bites quickly, unexpectedly, tearing the skin, so that blood runs its course down my arm, and I stare at that blood, blood which the others—the woman, the man—do not see. Blood which is invisible, like me.
I sit. But I don’t stay seated. I stand again from my chair and push past the guard, losing balance and crashing headfirst into the wall. “I need to see my daughter!” I scream. “My daughter. My daughter,” over and over again, maybe a thousand times or more, before I fall to the ground in tears.
And then that woman decides that she’ll leave, then and there, with an autonomy that no longer belongs to me, rising from her chair. “I think we’re through here,” she says, her gray eyes not making contact with mine.
I hear her say something about the need for a psych consult, the words delusional and disorder suffusing the room long after she leaves.
And then the blood. And the gurney. And the men with the face masks and gloves. Aliens. My ears ring as they inject me with needles and probes. But what comes first, I can’t say. I don’t know what happens first, how Chris comes to loiter at the far end of the room behind the utility cart, watching as aliens inject me and take my blood, as they administer a lethal dose of potassium chloride so that I will die. “Stop them!” I demand of Chris, but he ignores this, again, as he ignores me, and once again I am invisible, a phantom, a spook.
My Chris, who never cries, is wet with tears. He stands, still as a statue, behind that utility cart, refusing to move. I’ll never forgive him for this.
And then I am tired, oh so very tired all of a sudden, the fatigue weighing on me like a thousand bricks there on the gurney while the men with the face masks and gloves watch, they watch as I stare at the tubular flourescent lights that line the ceiling tiles, my eyes suddenly becoming too heavy to hold open and I wonder, in that final moment before I go to sleep, what else they will take from me.
I want to beg Chris to stop them, to plead with him to do something, but I find that I can no longer speak.
*
I awake in a room on a bed with a window that overlooks a green grassy park. A woman stands before that window in a pair of wide-leg pants and a button-down shirt, her back to me, staring out at the scenery. There is wallpaper on the walls: herringbone stripes in ecru and sage, and hardwood on the floor.
When I try to move I find myself bound to the bed; the chime of metal on metal makes the woman turn to me, to stare at me with gracious green eyes and a smile.