My heart stops beating altogether; I lose the ability to breathe.

Suddenly I’m bounding across the room, fully prepared to snatch that baby from Heidi’s hands.

Heidi rises to her feet all of a sudden, before I can catch her, clutching the baby like it’s hers. I think of that birthmark on the baby’s leg. The doctor said we really might want to have it removed, she’s said. She and me. Like it was our baby they were talking about. Our baby.

This was never about Willow, I realize then and there, that sudden, obsessive desire Heidi had to help some homeless girl she’d seen on the train.

This was about the baby.

And suddenly I’m not worried about Willow—Claire—hiding out on the other side of the office door; I’m worried Heidi has done something to hurt the girl.

“Where’s Willow?” I ask again, standing a foot, maybe two, shy of Heidi and the baby. And then again, when she doesn’t answer, “Where’s Willow, Heidi?”

Heidi’s voice is flat, nearly impossible to hear thanks to the baby. But I read her lips anyway, the simple proclamation: “She’s gone.”

Wake up, wake up, wake up! my mind screams, certain this is only the aftereffects of last night’s drinking binge. Certainly this can’t be real.

“She’s gone,” I repeat more to myself than Heidi, and then, “Where?” And a dozen possibilities float through my head, a dozen possibilities that scare the shit out of me, each one worse than the next.

But Heidi doesn’t answer the question.

The baby struggles in her arms. I grab a blanket from the arm of a chair and try to hand it to Heidi, to get her to cover up. “Give me the baby,” I say to my wife, and then, when she shakes her head and backs farther and farther away—toward the bay window, stepping on a cat’s tail in the middle of retreat—a compromise: “Just let me hold Ruby so you can fix your dress,” I suggest, unprepared for the impetuousness that takes over Heidi’s obliging brown eyes. Her eyes look demented, her skin flaming red.

And then she begins to scream.

Her words come out deranged, like some head case you’d see on TV. Illogical terms that oddly make sense to me. There are words: baby and Juliet. Juliet. She must say that word a dozen times or more: Juliet.

She’s pissed that I called that baby Ruby. The baby is not Ruby, Heidi reminds me: she’s Juliet. But no, I think recalling the article Martin Miller sent to me; this baby is not Ruby nor Juliet.

This baby is Calla.

“Heidi,” I say. “This baby is...”

“Juliet,” she snaps again and again and again. “Juliet!” she screams, frightening the baby all the more.

I can hardly place the name, it’s so far flung from memory. And yet it’s there, in bits and pieces. Heidi—years ago—lying on a hospital bed, cloaked in a hospital gown and tears; Heidi flushing her contraceptives, pill by pill down the john, pretending not to cry.

But now she’s calling me names: liar and murderer and thief. She doesn’t mean to, I know she doesn’t, and yet she’s squeezing that baby unintentionally, and the baby is crying—howling like a wolf at the goddamn moon—and Heidi is crying, too, tears that flow down her cheeks like water down a drain.

“You’re mistaken,” I say, as gently as I can. Heidi has convinced herself that the baby, that this baby, is the one she lost eleven years ago to cancer. And I could explain the idiocy of this—the fact that that baby is dead, the fact that if that baby were still alive, he or she would be eleven years old—but I realize all too clearly that the woman standing before me is not my wife.

I step forward and reach my hands out to the baby, but Heidi snatches her away. “This baby, Heidi. This baby is not...” and I could go on, but I don’t. I’m terrified by the unstable look in her eyes, of what she might do to that baby. Not intentionally. Heidi would never hurt a baby, not intentionally anyway.

And yet I don’t know.

“Just let me hold the baby,” I say, and then to appease her, “just let me hold Juliet.” And I’m thinking of all the things I should have done when we lost that baby. I should have consoled her more, I think; that’s what I should have done. I should have taken her to a shrink as her ob-gyn said to do. Among other things.

But Heidi said she was okay. She said she was fine, after we’d made the decision to abort that child so the doctor could treat Heidi’s cancer. And yet I ignored the sadness I saw in her, the craving, the need. I figured if we ignored it, it would go away, like a stray cat, a pesky sibling.

She’s quiet for a moment, watching me. I’m certain she’ll give in, if only I can convince her that it’s for the baby’s good. “Let me make her a bottle,” I say, my voice as soft as silk. “She’s hungry, Heidi. Just let me make her a bottle.”

The words come out pleading, desperate. But Heidi doesn’t give in. She can read right through me, Heidi who knows me so well.

She brushes past me and into the kitchen, where she rummages through drawers. I grab her by an elbow as she passes by, but she shoves me in a way I never thought my wife capable of, enough that I lose my balance and almost fall. By the time I get my bearings, I find her in the middle of the kitchen, holding a Swiss Army knife in the palm of a hand, the sharp blade aimed at me.

I should have seen this coming; I should have known. I go through the past few days in my head, trying to figure out what I overlooked, some desperate cry of Heidi’s for help.

A breakdown, that’s what was happening. A mental breakdown. A psychotic break.

But how did I not see it coming? Did I ignore the warning signs?

“Go away, Chris,” she says.

She doesn’t have it in her to use that knife—or so I tell myself—but even I’m not sure.

“Heidi,” I whisper, but she thrusts that knife into the air, stabbing the oxygen in the room. I glance at a clock on the wall and know that Zoe will be home soon.

For once in my life I don’t think about me. I think about Heidi, Zoe, the baby.

And I lunge. It’s not enough to gain control, but enough to knock the knife out of her hand. It lands on the hardwood floor with a thunk, leaving a chip in the oak floor that we’ll forever remember: a reminder of this day. We scramble for the knife, the both of us, the baby thrashing in Heidi’s unstable hands, her cry slowly caving in to exhaustion and fear. I charge for the Swiss Army knife on the kitchen floor, sliding headfirst, like a baserunner into second base, coming up with it in my hands.

And it’s then that Heidi turns—before I have a chance to get to my feet—and sprints, down the narrow hall, slamming the door and locking herself and the baby in the bedroom.

She’s crying; Heidi is crying. I can hear her through the door, sputtering some kind of mystifying diatribe about babies and Juliet, Cassidy and Graham, our neighbor Graham, the man from next door. Graham. I could call Graham for help. But there is no time. I try to reason with her—Heidi, please, open the door. Let’s talk. Let’s just talk this out.—but she won’t be reasoned with.

I think of all the pseudo-weapons that are in that room and the adjoining bathroom: nail clippers, a nail file. Electrical sockets.

And then there are the windows, five floors up from the concrete below.

I don’t think twice. I reach for the phone and dial 911.

“It’s my wife,” I say desperately to the dispatcher on the other end of the line when she asks the nature of my emergency. “I’m afraid she’s... I don’t know... She needs help,” I say then, shaking my head quickly from side to side; I don’t know what Heidi may do. Take her own life; take the baby’s life? Thirty minutes ago I would have said no, never, not Heidi.

But now I didn’t know.

“Just come,” I command instead, and I rattle off the address.

And then I hurry toward the bedroom door, fully prepared to knock it to the ground.