“Heidi,” she says most pleasantly, as if we know one another, as if we’re friends. But I don’t know this woman; I don’t know her at all. But I find that I like that smile, a smile that makes me half-certain the men with the face masks, the woman with the questions, the potassium chloride, and the dog—the Presa Canario with its coarse brindle hair—were all a dream. I peer down to my arms and find no blood, no cavernous teeth marks left in the skin, no bandages to stop the bleeding. My eyes bound around the sterile room, searching for Juliet, behind the sheer curtains, in the folds of the bedspread.
“Where have they taken my baby?” I ask weakly, the words tired and paltry, my mouth like cotton. I can no longer scream. I pull dispiritedly on the handcuffs, trying to free myself from the bed.
“They’re for your own safety,” the woman says as she moves closer and sits in a chair beside the bed, an armchair she pulls close, skidding it across the tile floor as she says to me, “You’re in good hands, Heidi. You are safe. The baby is safe,” and I don’t know if it’s the compassion in her voice, or my overwhelming fatigue and despair, but I begin to weep. She snatches two, and then three, tissues from a dispenser on the bedside table and presses them to my face, for I cannot reach with my own hands. I pull away at first, away from this stranger’s touch, but find myself leaning into it then, into the warmth of her hands, the softness of the tissue.
She tells me her name, a name I instantly forget, save for the title that precedes it. Doctor. And yet she doesn’t look like a doctor at all, for there is no lab coat, no stethoscope. No balding head.
“We just want to make you feel better, that’s all,” she says, her voice pleasant and accommodating, as she runs that tissue across my cheek and wipes the tears from my eyes. Her hands, they smell of honey and coriander, reminding me of my mother’s cooking. My mind drifts back to my childhood home, the chunky farm table around which the four of us sat: my mother, my father, my brother and me. But my thoughts get stuck on my father, my father who is dead. I see the casket being lowered into the ground, lavender roses in the palm of my hand, my mother beside me, ever stoic, waiting for me to disintegrate into a million pieces in that graveyard, the one saturated by rain. Or wait—I wonder—was it the other way around? Was I the one who watched my mother, waiting for her to disintegrate?
I long to reach out and hold his wedding band, my father’s wedding band, in the palm of my hand, to wrap my fingers around the golden chain, but I’m affixed to the bed and cannot budge.
“Where is my baby?” I ask again, but she only says that she is safe.
She tells me without my asking that she has kids, too. Three of them. Two boys and a daughter named Maggie, only three months old, and it’s only then that I notice the baby weight on the woman’s otherwise slender frame, baby weight that has yet to fade. It’s this, the mention of her own children, that makes it easier to talk, easier to reveal the secrets I’ve held inside for so long.
Ruby, Juliet, Ruby, Juliet, and I remember then, that famous Rubin’s vase.
And so we talk about the sleepless nights and the fatigue. I tell her that Juliet has yet to sleep through the night, though my thoughts are heavy and opaque, words trapped in the sky on a cloudy day. I explain how she’s been ill—a urinary tract infection, I say—making it all the more difficult, to console a child who’s in pain. And the kind woman nods her head and agrees, and she tells me of her Maggie, born with a congenital heart disease, forced to undergo surgery just days after she left her mother’s womb. And I know then that this doctor, she understands. She understands what I’m saying.
And then she asks about Willow, not in the way the other woman did, but kinder, more gentle. She asks when she left, and why. “Why did she leave?” she asks, and so I tell her. I tell her about my father’s wedding band and the golden chain. About discovering the filigree bird hook with its distressed red finish completely bare, though I knew that I’d hung the chain there.
But no, I think, yanking again on hands that are bound to the bed in handcuffs, trying hard to peer down and prove to myself that the chain is there, around my neck as it should be. I ask the woman for it, for my father’s wedding band on the golden chain, but she peers beneath the neckline of a hospital gown and tells me there is no chain, no wedding band there.
And it’s then that my mind replays a scene, obscured somehow, by fog. Like a movie I’d seen in the past, the character’s names and title of the film long gone, but snippets of the movie left here and there in the recesses of my memory. Quotations, love scenes, a passionate kiss.
But in this scene, I offer medication to Zoe on the palm of my hand, two oblong white pills, and then I watch from the edge of a bed as she thrusts the pills into her mouth without a glance. I watch as she swallows, then, with a long swig of water. And then I return to the bathroom to replace a prescription pill bottle into an open medicine cabinet, the word Ambien staring me straight in the eye, beside pain relievers, beside antihistamines. And then I quietly close the door.
“Why didn’t you report her to the police?” the woman asks when I tell her about the wedding ring. I shrug my shoulders, on the verge of tears, and say that I don’t know. I don’t know why I didn’t call the police.