But I do know, don’t I?
And then there I am again, closing the door to the medicine cabinet and watching Zoe, anesthetized by my Ambien and not an antihistamine at all, drift off to sleep so that she won’t be awoken in the night. And I recall the words, my words running that night through my mind: there’s no telling what the night will bring.
I see myself remove the golden chain from around my neck and begin to hang it on the filigree bird, but then I don’t. I stop just short and conceal it, instead, in the palm of my hand, kissing Zoe on the forehead in the adjoining master bedroom before I leave the room.
And I step into the living room to find Willow in a chair, my Juliet sound asleep on the floor. I set to cleaning the remains of dinner, and in my visions, in this foggy memory—or maybe not a memory at all, but a daydream, a fantasy—as I discard leftover spaghetti into a plastic garbage bag, I watch from a distance as the golden wedding chain and band tumbles from my hand and into the garbage bag, comingling with hardening noodles and bloodred spaghetti sauce, and then I hoist the plastic bag out into the hall and down the garbage chute.
But no, I think, shaking my head. That can’t be. This is not true.
Willow took my father’s ring. She killed that man and then she took my father’s wedding ring. She is a murderer, a thief.
“Is there more?” the woman asks of me as she watches me shake my head from side to side like the bob of a grandfather clock. “Do you have any idea where Willow might be?”
It can’t be. Willow took that ring, I remember then and there, the way I sat on the edge of the bathtub, water running so that Zoe—sick with a cold, or maybe allergies—would not hear me cry. The way I looked up and discovered the hook completely bare, the way I tried in vain to call Chris for advice, but he was too busy with Cassidy Knudsen to answer my call.
I no longer know what’s fact and what’s fiction. Fantasy or reality. I tell her that no, I don’t know where Willow is. I bark the words, suddenly furious and longing for my father, for my father to stroke my head and tell me that everything will be okay.
It’s all coming at me quickly now, images of Willow, of Ruby, of Zoe, of Juliet. Images of blood and bodies and babies, unborn fetuses being removed from my womb.
But that kind woman who’s name I don’t know, who’s name I can’t remember, it’s then that she does stroke a hand over my head as my father would do; she says that everything will be all right, and I want to ask, “Daddy?”
But I know what she would say, how she would look at me if I called her by my father’s name.
“We’ll figure it all out,” she promises, and I find myself leaning into the mollifying words, finding the words themselves, the conciliatory tone of voice to be exhausting, as I close my eyes and let them lull me back to sleep.
*
By the time Chris arrives, it’s dark outside, the world on the other side of the single window now black.
“You called them,” I say, my quivering voice holding Chris responsible for this entire mess. For the fact that they’ve taken Juliet, my Juliet. “You called the police,” I scream at him and I begin to curse, attempting in vain to rise from the bed and lunge at him, but finding instead that I’m tethered to it, my hands still bound to the bed in cuffs.
“Is that necessary?” Chris asks of a nurse who passes through the room attending to the various tubing and needles that are injected into the veins of my arms. Injected by aliens in face masks and bouffant caps. “Is that really necessary,” but the nurse says drily, “It’s for her own protection,” and I know what she says to him then, what she whispers to Chris then, about how she heard I ran headlong across a room and into the brick wall, as evidenced by a purple bruise now forming on the top of my head.
“She’s agitated,” the nurse says to Chris then, as if I can’t hear, as if I’m not in the very same room. “She’s due for more medication soon.”
And I wonder what kind of medication, and whether or not they will hold me down, on the bed, and administer the medication with a syringe, once again. Or whether I’ll be allowed to take pills, oblong pills in the palm of a hand, and I think again of the Ambien.
No, I tell myself. Antihistamines. Pain relievers. Not Ambien.
I would never give Zoe sleeping pills.
But I find that I don’t know.
“You did this to me,” I cry quietly, but Chris holds his hands up in the air, a look of innocence glued to his weary face. He’s disheveled, the tidy appearance that usually describes his trim brown hair, his bright brown eyes and winsome smile now clouded over with fatigue, concern and something more, something I can’t put my finger on.