The Halo Effect

57

“Dr. Snow. Get up.”

Cleo was standing beside him. The wind whipped around her legs and blew the nun’s habit up into the classic Marilyn Monroe pose. How could I be thinking this?

She held out the knife, glistening in the little bit of moonlight shining down on that part of the terrace. Drops of blood slowly ran down the blade.

Below me, he groaned, but they were watery groans, diluted and weak.

With my fingertips I pried his hands off my neck, and then slowly, as if I had never done so before and wasn’t sure I knew how, I got to my feet.

The sirens were below us now. The police would come up. Just a little too late.

I walked to Cleo and put my arm around her, and she put her arm around me, the hand with the knife at my back. Her body did not move. I barely felt her breathing. She was as still as a statue atop a tombstone in a graveyard. For one second. And then she shattered. Her crying was dry at first and deep in her throat, as if her body, her torso, was weeping, but not yet her heart, not yet her head.

Suddenly more lights blazed on in the apartment. Bright and too white. Four policemen in uniforms, guns drawn, and preceding them, Detectives Jordain and Perez.

Through the window, Cleo and I watched them looking around for a body, for people, for the perpetrator, for a victim. It was as if they were on a stage.

Neither Cleo nor I had any strength to move, to summon them.

Noah was the first one to see us. He put a hand out. As if he could reach me through the glass. He called out and I heard my name. Then the terrace door opened and all the cops came out. One dropped to his knees and put his finger to Elias’s throat.

“He’s still breathing. He’s got a pulse.”

Someone else called out, “He’s got a pulse.” And two paramedics ran out onto the terrace. And efficiently and wordlessly got a blood-pressure cuff on him and began talking his vitals.

I was sorry about that.