Find Me (10 page)

In the storage room, the keypad is dark. I lean on the door and it gives. Inside, the generator lights are a sickly yellow. Metal shelves are built into the walls; each shelf holds a row of gray rubber tubs. Every patient has a tub, their last name written across the bottom in black marker, the letters large and blocky. I try to un-see the names of the patients who have died.

Inside my tub I find my jeans and my black sweatshirt, all neatly folded. Three crumpled twenties are still a wad inside the front pocket. I press my sweatshirt against my mouth. It smells like the outdoors. I imagine my clothes have feelings and are glad to see me.

I lift out the sneakers and reach for the plastic baggie beneath. The photo is just like I remembered. The thin white blouse, the sliver of blue visible over her shoulder.

Since finding my mother there have been moments where I've doubted my own memory, my own sight. There have been moments where I've worried the woman on TV might not be my mother at all, but a careful copy, designed to trick me. The photo, my proof of her, is the only way to be sure.

The dark gloss of her hair is just the same. So is the teardrop shape of her cheekbones, the hard lines of her jaw. Her eyes. There is something slightly different about the angle of her nose. Her skin has paled with age. These alterations are to be expected: the body shows the impressions of time.

“Beatrice,” I say, touching her lips.

I tuck the photo into the waistband of my scrubs. I fold up my clothes, slide the tub back on the shelf. I leave the cold of the basement and go up and up, back to the fifth floor, the muscles in my thighs pulsing. The Dining Hall is still full. The patients are still sitting at their tables. On my way back to my Floor Group, I step in something wet. I brush against the shadowed body of a patient. Fingers skate across the small of my back. In one corner of the Dining Hall, I catch a white hazmat trudging through a wedge of light. A nurse, though I can't tell which one.

I sit down at my Floor Group table, where the twins are still playing their word association game. I rub my thighs. I squeeze out the soreness. My breathing slows. I feel alive with secrets.

“A hui hou,”
Christopher says. “I win again.”

*   *   *

It takes twenty-four hours for the power to come back on, for the Hospital to return to being warm and fluorescent, for the Internet to be restored. The TV service is a different matter.

In a Community Meeting, Dr. Bek explains that a power line fell during the storm. He clicks on the TV to demonstrate and the screen pops with static. He turns up the volume, so we can hear the buzzing, so it has a chance to dig inside our brains. The nurses are clustered by the window. The patients crouch, wanting to get away from the sound. They shut their eyes and scratch at their ears.

“How long will it be out?” I shout over the static, not wanting to see these gray worming lines on the screen but my mother's face.

Dr. Bek doesn't say anything. He doesn't lower the volume. He just stands there in his suit and watches his patients kneel on the floor. He watches them tuck their heads under their arms or between their knees, trying to escape the noise. If a stranger appeared in the doorway, I wonder if it would look like we were engaged in some peculiar form of prayer.

*   *   *

I use my next Internet Session to research my mother. I tell myself that I am working on a very special project, that I, like Dr. Bek, need all the data I can get. She is famous enough to have her own Wikipedia entry, which says she was born in 1968, in Nova Scotia, and raised in Belfast, Maine, where her parents owned a seafood restaurant. She went to college in Connecticut and was a champion swimmer. There's a photo of her in a bathing suit, hair slicked back, medals heaped around her neck. Water is beading on her chin. Her lips are pale, her pupils wide and dark. She is not smiling. She has been once married and once divorced. I don't see anything more about family.

I find a video of her in a minisubmarine that looks like a giant orange egg. The video lasts two minutes and forty-three seconds. I replay it thirteen times. Her figure is miniature inside the machine.

I watch the submarine move gradually into a stream of light. The camera tilts upward and I see the outline of the cave, black and yawning, like the open mouth of a giant. As she passes through the entrance, the light shifts, becomes translucent.

I listen to the supervising nurse breathe in a corner and think about all the staff does not know. I don't want to share my mother with the Hospital. She is one of the only things in here that feels private, that belongs to me.

I want to edit her Wikipedia page, even though online we're only supposed to observe, not communicate: check the weather, check the news, check the death list. No e-mails, no status updates. For our safety, Dr. Bek has assured us. Our security.

Under Biography I could type:
In 1995, a daughter, Joy Jones, was born.

Her daughter grew into a fine person, maybe even a
special
person, despite her mother leaving her
outside
in
winter
. Those are just some of the things I could write.

I close the window.

No one will ever write a Wikipedia page for me.

*   *   *

In another session, I find my mother's phone number, the one for her headquarters on Shadow Key: Rescue, Inc. I stare at the number, the ten digits linked by dashes, until it has been committed to memory.

*   *   *

After the blizzard, the snow does not stop. It keeps falling, hiding the plains behind a curtain of white, and a patient from Floor Group two turns symptomatic. During her morning exam, a nurse discovered a shoulder pocked with silver blisters. I imagine a gloved hand raising her scrubs and finding a shoulder blade turned to quartz. When they asked about the season, she smiled and said, “Summertime.” The nurses called for Dr. Bek and didn't mark another day on her calendar. By breakfast she was on the tenth floor and I wanted my brain to be filled with ice.

In the Common Room, I stand by the window and remember winter in Boston, how in January the ice would become thick and permanent and items would get trapped inside: a penny, a cigarette butt, a Coke bottle, a pen. On one of those raw winter days, I looked down at a frozen street corner and saw my own face looking back and imagined the ice had gotten me.

Later, in the Dining Hall, I wander around with an empty red tray. It's lunchtime, but for once I don't feel like eating. Louis is sitting alone at a table, apart from our Floor Group. Thunder booms outside and I wonder if another storm is coming and all of a sudden I'm not in the Hospital anymore. I'm back on the bus that brought us here. I'm looking out the window and seeing a sneaker lying in a ditch, the shoelaces black with mud, and then I'm back, standing next to Louis, who is dissecting a burrito with his fork.

“Shit,” I say.

“Don't you wonder who'll be next?” he says without looking up. “We should start taking bets.”

I've hidden my mother's photo in my pillowcase. When I'm alone, I take it out and will myself not to get sick.

“I wouldn't bet on you,” I say. “You're going to live a very long time.”

“How would you know?”

I smile, no teeth. “Assholes live forever.”

He does not smile back. I sit down next to him. He slumps in his chair. We don't speak for a while. I slide my empty tray back and forth on the table.

“Will you cut that out?” Louis smacks the table, glaring.

I let go of the tray. His hands are cupped around his eyes. I want to touch every finger, to kiss every knuckle, like I used to when we first came to the Hospital and weren't afraid to act like we needed each other.

“What's the matter with you? Besides the obvious, I mean.” The obvious being the country getting razed by forgetting and then coming back to life and all the while we stay stuck in here, getting sicker.

“Paige doesn't want to see me.”

“Oh,” I say. “Did she give you a reason?”

His hands fall into his lap. He looks out at the patients bent over their plates and sawing open burritos with plastic knives. “Do I really need to tell you, Joy? This is a hopeless place, for hopeless people. Not a place for romance.”

“I don't know about all that,” I say.

I touch his shoulder and feel heat rising from his body, proof of his aliveness. I want to tell him to not give up, that Paige only loves running, that she was never going to love him, that there are other kinds of people in here.

There is, for example, me.

“Well.” He rubs the fine hair on his arms. “It's not like I was madly in love.”

“Oh,” I say again. “So you don't miss her?”

“What I miss is living.”

I keep my hand on his shoulder. I feel his skin grow warmer under my palm.

Across the room, I catch the twins sitting under an empty table. Their legs are bent and pulled to their chests. They're facing each other, chins resting on knees, and whispering. They go unnoticed by the patients walking past, by everyone but me.

*   *   *

I walk the Hospital for hours that afternoon. In the third-floor hallway, I pass a spot where the paint has bubbled. I touch the lump, troubled by the anomaly, by the image of tumors multiplying inside the building and pushing their way through the walls. The cold coming up through the floor makes the bones in my feet ache. Afterwards I visit the Dining Hall and then do a slow pass through the Common Room, where Curtis is trying to get the TV to come on.

“Any luck?” I ask him. How I miss seeing my mother's face.

“Nope.” He kneels behind the black box and fiddles with a nest of yellow wires. During the blizzard, a patient snuck into the Common Room and pissed in a corner. Our Floor Group treated the stain with powdered carpet cleaner, but there's still a dark, tangy splotch.

In the days between our Internet Sessions, we worry about what might be happening. If life on the outside is still getting better or if it is getting worse. We know how quickly things can change: one day the sickness does not exist; one day the sickness is in California; one day it is everywhere; one day it is starting to disappear. The scheduled Internet Sessions are like sips of water in a long hot desert, and we want more to drink.

Curtis gives up on the TV and starts grumbling about Dr. Bek's lack of progress. “Why should we keep waiting around here to die?” he says, dropping into the battered couch, not quite talking to me.

 

11.

I start to hear a scraping sound coming from the twins' room at night. It's a soft clawing noise, like they're using their fingernails to scratch through the floor. I roll away from the wall and shut my eyes, but I can't stop listening. I imagine miners pickaxing their way through a cave, archaeologists excavating ruins, explorers drilling through the earth's crust and mantle and into the deepest core.

*   *   *

Some nights I don't listen to the twins at all because I am tangled up in a net of remembering. I think about the stories Marcus and I used to tell each other in Charlestown. Real-Life Ghost Stories, we called them. Here's one.

On my first night in Mission Hill, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom and when I looked up, an older girl was in the doorway. She was tan and wide. Pink jelly bracelets were stacked on her wrists. She smacked the toothbrush out of my hand. It clattered against the floor. White foam ran down my chin. I felt the bathroom shrinking. She smacked me in the face. I crashed into the wall, banging my head on the sharp edge of the paper towel dispenser. She cornered me and did it again and again—fast, open-handed slaps. My face was scorching. My mouth was filling with blood. Her last slap knocked loose a tooth, a molar, and I swallowed it whole.

*   *   *

In the Hospital, I worry the gap in the back of my mouth with my tongue.

*   *   *

Here's another. After I had been with Ms. Neuman for a year, I woke to find Marcus sitting on my legs in his Frankenstein mask, the rubber bolts sticking out of his temples. He told me he had a dream. We needed to go downstairs. In the living room, we found Ms. Neuman lying on the carpet, in the glow of the TV, her ex-husband talking about stationary weather fronts in his toupee. Her slip was hiked up. She was still holding the remote. A stroke, not the killing kind, but she couldn't take care of us anymore, my case worker would tell me later, after I was gone from the yellow house on Ferrin Street, gone from Marcus, after I was spitting blood into a bathroom sink in Mission Hill and wondering how he knew.

 

12.

At the next Community Meeting, Dr. Bek informs us that the patient from Floor Group two has died. He tells us about the silver scales on her fingertips, about her forgetting. He tells us the last thing she said, “Oh,” and I imagine her lips rounding and her eyes growing large. I wonder if that “Oh” was a sudden recognition, a final moment of remembering.

He tells us her name, Marie.

In the Common Room, Floor Group two collapses into itself, knees bending, arms folding across stomachs, a structure dissolving into dust. They are the ones who will see the absence in her bed and in their hallway and when they push around the laundry carts. Each time a Group is reduced by a single body, a single voice, every member feels themselves grow smaller.

The nurses are a mass in the doorway. I can hear them breathing behind us, the rustle of their suits. Floor Group three sits on the couch and stares at Dr. Bek like a row of inquisitors. The standing patients sway between the white walls. After this Community Meeting, our Floor Group will do our best to clean away the palm prints from the walls, the greasy outlines of fingers that always make me think about the residue of ghosts—if ghosts leave anything behind.

There is no mention of what has happened to Marie's body. Late at night, in our room, Louis and I have agreed there must be a large incinerator somewhere in the Hospital.