Close Encounters Read Online Free PDF Page A

his own fashion, over meals, in bed, on the commute, on vacations. All served to remind me that I was a perfectly normal woman in her early thirties, if a bit dull. I decided to chance it.
    When the doctor informed us we were expecting I could not have been happier. Although I worried that hormonal changes might affect my emotional state, Michael assured me that everything would be fine. And everything was, for the most part, until the sonograms showed what appeared to be twins.
    Only one twin was inside the other.
    â€œIt’s a fairly rare condition,” the doctor explained, tracing his pen along a radiograph of my abdomen. “Fetus in fetu— child inside child .”
    â€œWell, what are we going to do?” I asked. “Surely the one child will kill the other, growing inside it like that.”
    â€œUsually the inner child is parasitic, yes, but not a viable human entity,” the doctor agreed. “The child is more like a tumor—a tumor with a spine, perhaps some malformed appendages—but in no way a fully living, conscious entity. Usually the mother is able to carry it to term. And then we extract the teratoma from the healthy child.”
    â€œAre you certain that I will be able to carry this child full-term?” I questioned, touching my stomach. Would the turmoil awaken her? What if she were the turmoil?
    â€œWe’ll closely monitor your progress,” he assured. “We don’t catch most cases of this particular oddity until after childbirth usually, so we’re ahead of the curve here.”
    The first few months came and went without incident. Gradually, however, I began to feel stirrings.
    It was hard to describe them. It was too early for the baby to be moving, and yet I felt a specific movement, someone turning over in bed, shaking off sleep. And I began to feel more aware of things, like the color of the sky behind the swaying trees, the sounds of the breeze through their leaves, the smell of sycamore and pine, of wet grass. I began to doodle at work, to hum along with the songs on the radio. It was so much like her, these things, but she was not here, not that I could tell. And yet, I didn’t feel quite myself. It seemed that there were hours of the day that I couldn’t account for—the time between university and home, arriving at our doorstep hours after dinnertime, Michael opening the door with a flourish, his sleeves rolled up and his hair falling in long wisps across his creased forehead.
    â€œWhere’re you been, Julia? I’ve been worried sick.”
    â€œI felt a little nauseous, so I took a nap in the office. It came on so suddenly…I couldn’t get to the phone to call.”
    â€œPerhaps we should see the doctor, then.” He led me to the kitchen, where an overcooked, rubbery casserole awaited. I was not hungry; I could taste the burn of wasabi on my tongue. Had I eaten sushi? He sat across the table and stared at me intently with those calculating blue eyes of his. I smiled slightly and let a rubbery glob of cheese and noodle slide down our—my—throat.
    Other times I would wake up fully dressed in the kitchen in the middle of the night wearing jeans and a shirt that formerly were regulated to garden duty or the market, leaving or coming back I could not tell. What a strange time in one’s life to discover sleepwalking , I would muse, and thereafter, I began to tie a cord from my wrist to the bedpost.
    I dreamt long, vivid dreams about untying the rope, getting dressed in the same awful old clothes, and walking about the town at night, looking in shop windows, familiarizing myself with roads and walkways, engaging in discussion with the most horrible and dangerous of men, men who rode motorcycles and had necks as roped and thick as bridge girders, whose teeth were stained with tobacco. I dreamt I took our car at high speeds through the countryside, pulling over at a patch of moonlit wildflowers and