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.

“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.

“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.