I messaged my husband. There’s a lady at our door. She has a knife.

He tried calling, but my throat was too dry to make a sound. I can’t talk, I texted.

I’m calling the police, he wrote back.

I watched her pace outside my door. She walked to the end of the hallway and then came back. She got into the elevator and then came right back out.

The whole time, my heart thrashed in my chest.

When I heard another knock on the door, I jumped so fast the tray of vegetables on the counter clattered to the floor. Never mind that it was the police. “Let me in,” a man’s voice said. I unlatched the door, turned the lock, and slowly opened the front door. An officer slipped through the crack and closed the door.

“We have her,” he said. Then he opened my fridge, found a water pitcher, and poured me a cup. In my own home. “You have to drink,” he said. His tone made me wonder how bad I looked.

A minute later the woman walked by with an officer on either side, screaming so fast and loud I couldn’t make out a single word of her Hebrew.

“Do you have the knife, too?” I wanted to know I wasn’t crazy, that I’d really seen what I saw.

“You’re not crazy,” said the officer. “She’s crazy.”

Even though the lady had come to my door with a knife, and even though she’d done something so dangerous I still couldn’t take a deep breath, the officer’s answer made me cringe. Crazy felt so old-fashioned, so politically incorrect.

He waited with me until my husband came home, and the two of us climbed into the back of his police car for a ride down the light rail tracks in Yaffo to give a statement at the police station. I’d always wondered what it would be like to drive down the tracks. I never wanted to find out like this.

The officer walked us through the old station, to his little office in the corner of a trailer. He punched some things into his computer while we swiveled on the chairs across from him.

“The woman’s been hospitalized before,” he said finally. “Twice actually.” Then he offered us cookies. “They’re Badatz.”

My husband took a cookie. I declined.

“Why not?” the officer asked.

“I need to wait for my heartbeat to return to normal first.”

“It’s chocolate,” he said. “Chocolate’s good for your heart.”

“No excuses then,” I said and reached for a cookie. It wasn’t very good.

The officer spoke with us for a little while, tapped on his keyboard, and then walked us to the detective’s office, the one with no time or patience for the long line of people outside her door, so I could give an official statement.

When our baal dirah hears the story, he says it corroborates with another tenant’s complaint that in the middle of the night, a woman had knocked on the door to warn him about sheidim in the building.

“So she was just trying to protect everyone?” I ask. That’s why the knife had been in her hand, but she wasn’t raising it in threat?

“I don’t think she ever wanted to hurt me.”

No one else is calmed by my thought. “Okay, but what if she decides you’re the sheid?”

“She lives on your floor,” the baal dirah confirms.

My calm is gone. “I can’t go home ever again,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” the police assure us. “She’s going to the hospital, and you won’t see her again anytime soon.”

I see her all night. Every time I close my eyes, she’s standing in front of me with restless eyes and a knife. She’s over my shoulder when I try to make a coffee. She’s floating outside the door when I think about running to do some errands. In the elevator the next day, a woman gets in behind me. I scream so loudly, she drops the plant she’s holding.

She clutches her heart. I do the same.

“Ani mitzta’eret,” I say.

As the elevator door closes, I look toward my neighbor’s apartment. She’s lived there a lot longer than we have, but we’d never heard anything from her. Who’s paying her rent? Does she have a job — coworkers and friends — in which case it’s all slipped away? Does she have family — people who love her, who make sure she has a place to live? Both scenarios chill me.

Years before, I’d interviewed a woman about her experiences with Bipolar disorder. I asked what some of the hardest moments are, and she said, “When I feel it all start to happen.”

Outside, she was holding it together. Inside, she felt it falling apart. She knows what it means and she knows where it’s going. But knowledge isn’t always power.

“I second-guess every thought,” she’d continued. “I’m always asking myself, is this something everyone else would think or is it happening again?”

Because sometimes the monster comes back.

I debate telling my parents the story. Everything’s scarier when you’re across the sea, but I try for a day, and then I need to hear my mother tell me it will eventually be fine. I call and listen to the echo of her gasp when I mention the knife.

“What are you going to do if she comes back to your building after she’s released from the psych ward?” my mother wants to know.

We aren’t sure. Part of me wants to believe that post hospital we’ll return to life pre-knife, but I’m scared she’ll decide there are sheidim again. Or maybe that one of us is a monster. I’m scared she’ll get a new knife. Maybe even a bigger one.

I’m scared she’ll feel it all unravel and feel powerless to stop it. I’m scared of what that could mean the next time.

She’s probably scared of the same thing.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 821)