“Your son is here?” I whisper. “Asleep in his room?”

Lyla smiles but does not answer. Her eyes shine with an unbearable, incandescent joy, or madness, or both. Clutching my hand, as if we are little girls about to visit the best dollhouse in the world, she leads me up the stairs and down the hall to her son’s room.

A boy’s room, no question. The posters, toys and carelessly stacked video games could have belonged to my own son. More than that I can’t quite make out, because Lyla doesn’t switch on the light, and the only illumination comes from a wall-socket night-light. A plastic Goofy, glowing in the dark.

Tommy’s night-light is Mickey Mouse.

“Where is he?” I ask, keeping my voice low. “Where’s Jesse?”

Lyla points at the bed. If her eyes get any bigger they’re going to fall out of her head.

“There’s nobody in the bed, Mrs. Cutter.”

I reach out, flip on the light.

Lyla covers her eyes with her pale hands and moans. In other circumstances, my instinct would be to comfort the poor woman, maybe even play along with her delusions. But my cold heart has only one concern and it is not, for the moment, the state of Lyla Cutter’s mental health. I need answers and the empty bedroom makes me think that I will find them here, if only I can get this frail creature to tell me what really happened to her son.

She does not resist as I gently pry her hands away from her eyes and turn her to face the empty bed.

“I’m begging you,” I say. “Please help me. My son was taken from me. I think your son was taken from you. What happened, Mrs. Cutter? What happened to the boys?”

Tears well in her eyes, but she seems to be focusing on me, which is encouraging. “Jesse wasn’t taken,” she explains. “He wasn’t kidnapped. Jesse got sick, is what happened.”

“Sick?” I ask, taken aback.

“It was just a cold, like kids get, you know? That’s what we thought. His head hurt, so I gave him a children’s aspirin. Just one. You know how dangerous aspirin can be with children. But the headache wouldn’t go away, so Stephen took him to the E.R.”

Lyla’s eyes flutter and her focus dissolves. She begins to hum a little tune I can’t quite recognize. Could be the theme to a kids’ show, maybe Sesame Street. Wherever she’s going, I can’t follow.

In the movies a slap to the face always returns the mad to sanity, if only for a moment. But I’m convinced that any violence or threat will send her further into whatever place she presently occupies. So all I can do is implore her to continue.

“Your husband took your son to the hospital. What happened then? What happened to Jesse? Did your son die, Mrs. Cutter, is that what happened?”

She shakes her head forcefully. “A virus,” she mutters. “It was a virus. Like a cold but worse, much worse. It made him sick, very sick, but he didn’t die. They wouldn’t let him die, not my Jesse. Not my beautiful boy.”

She’s drifting away again, head moving to music only she can hear, and I decide desperate measures are in order. I open my purse, take out the photograph I’ve been carrying like a talisman. And then, God forgive me, I force her to look at the photograph. Shove it in her face like an accusation. “You see this, Lyla? I’m searching for this boy. He means everything to me. He’s my life. Have you seen him? Did your husband steal my son?”

She grows utterly still, staring at the picture. Tommy in his Little League uniform.

“You’re trying to trick me,” she says, looking away. “You’re a liar. A liar just like Stephen.”

“Look at the picture, Lyla.”

She folds her slim arms across her chest, as stubborn and unrelenting as a child. “You want me to think that’s a picture of Jesse, but I know it’s not. A mother knows. Besides, that’s not even the right uniform.”

“This boy looks like your son?”

“Who are you?” she asks me. Then her expression gets canny. “You’re Stephen’s girlfriend, aren’t you? He sent you here to punish me. To put worms in my head.”

“Lyla, do you have a picture of Jesse?”

“I don’t blame him for having a girlfriend,” she says wistfully. “You’re very pretty. Prettier than me.”

“Mrs. Cutter, I’m not your husband’s girlfriend. I’m a mother looking for her son. Please, this is very important, could you show me a picture of Jesse?”

Something in my desperate tone touches her. She goes to a bureau in the boy’s room, slides open the top drawer and hands me a framed photograph.

A boy posing in his Little League uniform, sporting a smart-aleck, mischievous grin that floors me.

“Oh, my God.”

“You tried to trick me,” Lyla says. “That’s not right.”

“I didn’t try to trick you,” I say, showing her the two photographs side by side. “Your son and my son are twins. Identical twins.”

A glance at Lyla reveals that she isn’t buying it, that she thinks I’m still trying to deceive her. “Did your son get sick, too?” she asks. “Did he go in the hospital and not come home?”

“No. Tommy is as healthy as a horse.”

“Then they’re not identical, are they?” she says tauntingly.

“They’re brothers, Mrs. Cutter. Look at the pictures. My God. See how they stand the same? Smile is almost the same, too.”

She shakes her head, denying. “Liar, liar, pants on fire. Did you take your pants off for Stephen? I bet you did.”

“Please, Mrs. Cutter. Look at the pictures. They’re brothers. Family Finders must have thought they’d get more money selling them separately.”

“Ask Stephen. He knows everything. He’s a know-it-all.”

“What exactly happened to Jesse in the hospital, Mrs. Cutter? What did the virus do?”

Her hands float up to her heart and she hugs herself. And then with her eyes closed, in a singsong lullaby, she tells me what I need to know. “The virus went to his heart, his heart. The virus went to my little boy’s heart.”

It hits me like a body blow. Then with an abrupt sensation of sick-making vertigo, I’m falling down an endless elevator shaft, free-falling to the end of my world. Because I remember what the man in the mask said to me, that first day when he invaded my home. When he told me what the consequences would be if I didn’t cooperate.

I’ll cut out Tommy’s heart, he said. I’ll cut out his heart and give it to you in a plastic bag.

That’s what he wants. What he’s wanted all along. My son’s good heart.

40 friends

Prominently displayed on the reception desk at the Health East Medical Complex, a glass jar of Hershey chocolate kisses. Taped to the jar, a hand-lettered sign advising me that Chocolate Is Good For Your Heart and the admonition to Help Yourself To Health. Under normal circumstances I’d be tempted, but the world has tilted off normal and I’m a madwoman pretending sanity. Holding myself together with psychic duct tape while the elderly volunteer, a woman with orange hair so thin her freckled scalp shows through, searches the register for Jesse Cutter, a long-term-care patient. It’s all I can do not to leap over the counter and search the photocopied lists myself.

“Cutter, Cutter,” the woman mumbles. “Should be in the Cs, right?”

Why is it that so many people work as unpaid volunteers for for-profit medical chains? Maybe because they got in the habit when hospitals were nonprofit, owned and run by communities. Or because making themselves useful gives them a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning, or in this case late in the day for a midnight shift.

Whatever, the volunteer is trying her best and I have to refrain from screaming out that my son has been designated as an involuntary organ donor. As it is I’ve got one eye on the TV bolted to the wall. The sound is off but the local news broadcast is filling the screen with images of burning homes and grisly automotive accidents. Matter of time before they get to me, I assume.