At first, I thought the power had gone out, but the bathroom light was still on, and the chair Eileen had been sitting in a moment before was empty. I looked at my phone. Three in the morning. I got up and headed for the nursery. Christine appeared to be in her crib, but even up close, with the help of her nightlight, I couldn’t be sure that it was actually her. I turned on the overhead light. She didn’t move. Her skin looked waxy, like an eerily realistic doll. I reached down to give her a gentle shake.
“Pumpkin,” I said. “Wake up.”
Her eyes opened halfway. A live girl then, but was it really her? Something didn’t feel right. She closed her eyes again and I shook her harder, raising my voice. “Wake up, honey. Can you hear me? Can you wake up for Daddy now?” A thump came from behind me and I whirled to find Meredith in the room in her nightgown. She spoke to me slowly, in what sounded like a foreign language. I shook my head, standing between her and Christine.
“No,” I said. “You can’t have her.”
She moved towards the crib and I caught her by the arms and powered her back out of the room. I shoved her to the floor, then slammed the door and locked it. A high-pitched yowl came through the closed door. The knob rattled. I went back to the crib, where Christine had fully woken and was watching me with fear in her eyes.
“We have to go now,” I said, gently picking her up. “We don’t have much time.”
Meredith pounded at the door, her voice joined by others—a chorus of screeches and growls. I tried to open the window, but found that it had been painted shut. I swore and looked around for something to break the glass.
“Felix!”
The door banged open. Meredith, Eileen, and Peter all burst into the room—Peter in the lead, a switchblade glinting in his hand, my sister clutching a pistol. My phone buzzed against my thigh. “Leave me alone!” I shouted at my leg. Then, to the people in the doorway: “Get back!”
Eileen lifted the gun to her ear, talking to it in a frantic voice. Peter advanced, showing me his empty palms. I circled the crib, realizing that if I was going to get out of there, I was going to have to go through them. “Okay,” I muttered, hugging Christine to my chest and lowering my centre of gravity. “Daddy’s got you,” I whispered in her ear. “Everything’s going to be all right. Just close your eyes… Here we go.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“How do I know,” I asked Dr. Patel, “that none of it’s real?”
He shrugged philosophically. The blinds behind his desk were open, presenting a view of a sky so pale it was almost white. “There’s an element of trust here,” he said. “One might even call it faith. What I can tell you is that if we were to put you in an MRI machine, we could see the overactive and underactive parts of your brain. On medication, we could observe a physical change corresponding to the psychological one. But I have a feeling that’s not the answer you’re looking for.”
“No,” I admitted.
“What would you rather I’d said?”
“That it’s possible I’ve seen the future.”
Patel’s office was painted in warm, neutral tones, the walls devoid of pictures. He had a box of tissues on his desk and a small electronic tablet that he consulted from time to time. Otherwise, he made his notes by hand on paper. From the fidgety motion of his pen, he seemed to be drawing at the moment, rather than writing.
“There’s a phrase,” he said, without looking up from his paper. “I’m sure you’ve heard it. A willing suspension of disbelief. It’s how we engage with any fantastic story. We turn off the skeptical part of our minds that’s telling us something doesn’t make sense. Men can’t fly. Corpses can’t walk. People are never that articulate or that beautiful in real life. For you, the story is the world—a world governed by rules that nearly everyone agrees to abide by. If you want to engage with that world, or anyone in it, you’re going to have to ignore the small voice in the back of your head telling you that your world is different. You’re going to have to suspend your disbelief… I can’t force you to take your medication, Felix. But if you want to go back to your family—”
“It’s too late for that,” I said.
He stopped drawing and looked at me. “How do you know?”
“Meredith could never forgive me.”
“Has she told you that?”
“Not in so many words.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Is it possible that you’re the one who can’t forgive yourself?”
I looked at my hands.
“And your daughter?” he asked.
“I’m doing this for her,” I said, repeating something I’d been telling myself for months.
“Do you think she sees it that way?”
“It doesn’t matter how she sees it.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“If you had children…”
“What makes you think I don’t?”
I looked up in surprise, unable to imagine him as a father, or having any existence at all outside the walls of the hospital. “Well, if one of your kids was dying,” I said, “wouldn’t you do anything you could to save them? Even if it meant giving them up?”
“If, God forbid, I had a terminally ill child, I would cherish whatever time we had left.”
I grunted, doubting that he even had kids.
He tapped his pen on his desk. “When did you last see your daughter, Felix?”
“I don’t know. It must be… three months now.”
“Don’t you want to see her?”
“Of course I do.”
“There can be no visitation until you’re properly medicated. It was a condition of your release. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded grimly, annoyed by his use of passive language, as if he hadn’t been the one to impose the condition in the first place.
He returned to his notepad, tilting his pen at a deep angle, apparently shading.
“Do you feel that you’re a good father, Felix?”
I’d asked myself that question often enough to have a prompt answer. “Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“A good father protects their children.”
“Is that what you feel you’re doing by ignoring my recommendations? Protecting your daughter?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
He glanced at his watch. Our session was coming to an end. The rest of his questions were predictable. Did I feel that someone in particular was threatening Christine? Was I having suicidal thoughts? Had I been behaving erratically? Hallucinating?
I denied everything, having learned to answer in absolutes, leaving no room for interpretation. I wanted to see the sketch Patel had been working on, but he tore it off his pad and slipped it into my file, then gave me a placid smile. “Well…” I said, beginning to get up.
“How do you feel about Meredith?” he asked, not quite finished with me after all.
I sat back down, choosing my words carefully. “I… understand her perspective.”
“Which is?”
“She’s doing what she thinks is best for Christine.”
“And for you.”
I shrugged, unwilling to make that concession.
He gave me another half-smile. “Are you still at the same motel?”
“For the moment.”
“Be sure to let us know if anything changes.”
His desire to keep me there broke the surface of his gaze, like the dorsal fin of a shark. For a moment I worried there were orderlies outside the door, waiting to wrestle me to the ground. “So…” I said.
Patel’s half-smile went away. “We’ll see you next Thursday, Felix.”
A special discomfort below alerted me to the fact that I’d recently shat myself. Partially reclined, pinned to the bed by a crisp blue sheet, I stared at whatever happened to be in front of me. White walls. White ceiling. A buzzing white tube overhead. I coughed and pain spasmed through my body. I waited for the spell to pass. Somewhere in the room, a game show was playing at low volume. A studio audience cheered. My mouth was dry, my throat on fire. The quality of light on my left suggested the presence of a window, but when I strained my eyes in that direction, I could detect only the vaguest shimmer of blue. After an unknowable amount of time, I heard someone come into the room, a woman I couldn’t name, but associated with terrible things.