Take Me
Laura tried to encourage independence in her kids in the
event she should be abducted by aliens. Bob, addicted to his work as he
was, would barely notice her absence, but she did worry about the kids.
She hoped, if she were abducted, it would not be the night before a spelling
test. Tuesday and Wednesday were her best times. At the same time, she
realized that the kids were growing older each day, making their own sandwiches,
putting on their own Band-Aids, and soon they wouldn't need her at all.
She read everything she could find about the abductions.
People said they were lifted from their beds and floated, right through
walls, up to the waiting spaceship. Then there seemed to be some kind of
time warp. People stayed long enough to receive thorough examinations and
for some women actually to be impregnated with mixed-breed embryos and
give birth to them. But when they arrived back home they had been gone
for only two days.
Laura did not believe the discomforts of the examinations
people had described could be any worse than a regular check-up with her
ob-gyn. She sometimes wondered how it would feel to be a mother to a half-human,
half-alien embryo, to see it growing, to know it was the last best hope
for a dying civilization. Fulfilling this desperate need was a comforting
thought to her. She imagined bringing a snapshot back to the kids and saying,
"Look, there's your baby sister."
One woman, who had experienced numerous abductions between
the ages of four and twenty-something, described meeting her two half-alien
daughters, wispy blonde creatures who hugged her shyly and said, "Mama,
I love you." The National Inquirer had an artist's rendering of what
the daughters looked like.
Just imagine! Laura Floyd, who had spent her lifetime,
it seemed, folding clothes, packing lunches, and being polite to phone
solicitors, could become mother to a savior of civilization. Not unlike
the Virgin Mary. Why, it tended to blow one's mind.
Laura told no one of this. Not a soul. She wrote a note
to the children and put it in an envelope labeled, "In the Event of
My Disappearance." The note contained instructions on how to run their
twelve-year-old washing machine and where she kept the appliance light
bulbs for the refrigerator. Her pen poised above the paper, she felt, vaguely,
there was something else of importance she should relate to the children,
and to Bob, but couldn't think what it was, and quickly signed the note.
She cut out a comprehensive article on extraterrestrial abductions, and
put that and the letter in an envelope in her jewelry box.
She began to think of her nightgowns not just as sleepwear,
but travel wear as well. She avoided filmy, see-through styles and tried
to think in practical terms such as warmth, protection from rain, and so
on. L.L. Bean was a good source.
Laura got into the habit of watching the skies at night.
At first she had been unhappy with Bob's desire to live so far out in the
country, away from neighbors, with such a long train ride to his office
in Chicago. He left at five o'clock in the morning and returned sometimes
as late as ten at night. He traveled often for weeks at a time.
But the sky was big here and the stars were brilliant.
They spread over her each night, cool and comforting, as she lay on her
back on a blanket in the yard. After the children were asleep she watched
for spaceships and mentally beckoned the aliens. Aliens, she reasoned,
could intercept her thoughts as she sent them whirling into the chill night
air. Unlike Bob who, whenever Laura got upset, sputtered, "You can't
expect me to read your mind!"
So each night she lay on her blanket, trembling a little,
her senses on edge, waiting for something to happen. Sometimes she caught
herself thinking about what it would be like to have sex with an alien.
They had been described as small and hairless, with thin, unsensuous mouths
but gentle, inquisitive eyes. She imagined she might be squeamish at first,
but that the alien would possess certain mind-control capabilities which
could drive her to paroxysms of ecstasy.
But she never saw anything. She heard an occasional owl,
she saw airplanes and shooting stars. She often fell asleep out there and
later wandered upstairs to her bed with dew in her hair.
One night she climbed into her empty bed, slept briefly,
and when she swam up toward consciousness a few minutes later there was
a man in bed beside her. She shrank away with a gasp. His rounded shoulder
was just inches away. Then she noticed a bald spot at the crown of his
head. She realized, feeling foolish, that the person was Bob, back early
from a business trip.
But was the bald spot larger than she remembered? She
studied the back of the head for long seconds. Was it Bob? At that moment
the man groaned and turned onto his back, throwing his hand across his
forehead with a sigh, giving her a full view of his profile. It did indeed
look like Bob, though she couldn't remember studying his profile in this
much detail ever before, and his mouth seemed less full than she remembered.
There was a small red mole next to his ear that Laura did not remember
at all.
Laura slipped out of bed and went in the bathroom, closing
the door very slowly so it wouldn't squeak. She turned on the light and
stared at herself in the mirror. A pale, thin face with large eyes looked
back at her. Her curly dark hair was graying and badly cut. Her collarbone
protruded from the neckline of her sensible, all-terrain nightgown. Yet
her features seemed to be absolutely her own -- not slightly altered, like
Bob's.
What if the man lying beside her wasn't Bob, but an alien
taking his place? Presumably his appearance could be approximated but,
just as when you know one twin and look at the other, there would be slight
inevitable differences. Her heart thumped hard, once. She decided to go
back into the bedroom and study his profile again.
She turned off the light and soundlessly opened the door,
then tiptoed toward the bed in the dark, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
At that moment a thick, almost palpable beam of light shot through the
window and traversed the room. The white sheets on her side of the bed,
empty, almost blinded her. Then Bob's sleeping form was garishly illuminated
in bluish yellow for a full two or three seconds, long enough for Laura
to see a small hole in his T-shirt under the arm, a string hanging from
his boxer shorts, and, on the hand flung in unconscious melodrama across
his forehead, his too-tight wedding ring.
The beam of light lifted Bob from the bed and he hung
suspended for a few seconds like a marionette. Then he was pulled suddenly
and soundlessly through the window at incredible speed, his form shrinking
in seconds to the size of an acorn.
The light disappeared and Laura stood in the blackness.
She stumbled to the window, tried to look out, but the brilliance of the
beam of light was still imprinted on her retinas. She blinked and passed
her hand across her eyes.
When she looked out again, she saw only the stars and
the lacy black tops of trees. An owl cried, "Who?"
Laura turned and looked at the empty bed. She was still
so frightened she could feel her eyelids and kneecaps twitching, yet a
hot flush of anger gathered in her throat. They had taken Bob instead of
her!