Find Me (9 page)

“A what?” N6 says, squinting at me through the face shield, like I might be playing some kind of prank.

“A flood,” I repeat. “Like water. Like Noah's Ark.”

N6 takes a mop from the supply closet and hustles down the hallway. The nurses mop and mop but the water keeps coming, a thin stream seeping from the base of the toilet and expanding into a clear pool on the bedroom floor. It's rare to see something appear in the Hospital that the staff cannot control.

Finally N6 does something to the toilet that makes the water stop. He orders me and the twins to the Common Room until everything has been cleaned up.

“We want to stay,” the boys protest, their toes curling tighter.

The nurses point the ends of their mops toward the door.

Don't you ever wish you could tell us your real names? I know better than to ask.

In the hall, the twins explain the program they saw on the Discovery Channel about rising sea levels. A chart showed Hawaii being covered in water. The Kohala volcano is gradually submerging. Hilo is shrinking 2.3 millimeters per year.

“Hawaii is sinking,” Christopher says.

“It'll take a hundred years for Hawaii to sink,” I tell them. We pass the Common Room, where patients are coiled up like children on the floor, asleep or pretending to be. “You'll be dead by the time Hawaii sinks.”

After I say “dead,” they go silent. They shrink inside their scrubs. We walk by two women holding hands. They aren't from our Floor Group. I can't remember their names. They don't look at us as we pass. We the patients are like a chain of islands: occupying the same water, but isolated from one another.

“I'm sorry,” I tell the twins. “But it's true.”

“The fact remains,” Christopher says.

“We started digging faster,” Sam says. “What will happen if they find our hole?”

I roll my eyes. “I told you dumping dirt in the toilet was a bad idea.”

“Shut up,” Christopher says.

*   *   *

In the next
Mysteries of the Sea
, my mother tells us about the painting above her cot, a print by Winslow Homer called
Rowing Home.
Outside the Hospital, night is already spreading. As the light from the barred window dims, the TV grows brighter. In the painting, there are three figures, dark and obscure, in a small boat. A red sun bleeds color into the sky and into the stormy waves. My mother says no one captures sea light like Winslow Homer. No one makes water look more alive. It took him a week to paint the oars alone. She says she looks at this painting every night—the falling light, the small act of three men rowing, set against the vast motions of the sea—and it helps her find her place in the world, to feel at peace.

*   *   *

I wonder if I will ever know what it's like to feel at peace.

 

9.

On Thursdays, there was free admission to the museum where my first fosters, Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, worked. One afternoon, I rode the T to the waterfront.

In the station, a flyer for a missing girl, taped to a concrete post, stopped me. From the date of birth, I knew I was around the same age. The girl even looked a little like me. She had been missing for six years, a span of time that made the flyer seem more like a memorial than a way to search. I stared at the hotline number and imagined what it would be like to look at a flyer and recognize your own face, to realize you had once been someone else, that people were out there looking for you.

At the waterfront, the buildings were ragged with construction. I passed lots with long trash Dumpsters behind orange safety fencing. An office chair, the seat torn open, on a corner. I walked through a tunnel of scaffolding, smelling fish and brine. I saw a green rubber glove on the ground—a sign, I would later think, of the Hospital that lay in my future. The fingers were splayed; gray pebbles had collected in the palm. When I emerged, back into the light, my arms were sticky with sawdust. The sidewalks were damp from an early morning rain. All week I'd been feeling cold and restless. I thought maybe I was coming down with something.

That morning, I had woken up in my Stop & Shop uniform, in the dark of the basement apartment, and couldn't go back to sleep. I felt the itch of the black spot in my memory and decided to go looking for Mr. and Mrs. Carroll. I had questions about their son.

I passed a man in a red sweat suit walking down the sidewalk very slowly, a pace I didn't like. If you walk slowly in a city it means you don't have an internal destination in mind. You are just waiting for something to come along and that something could be me.

The museum looked like a spaceship teetering on the edge of the water, a huge glass box supported by an intricate system of smaller glass boxes. Inside I got my ticket and started looking around. Some guards sat on stools, limp with boredom. Some skulked from room to room, hunting for open beverages and cameras with a flash.

As I wandered the museum, I counted the things I remembered. He bought his reading glasses at the drugstore. In his bedroom, he had a whole drawer of them, the frames large and square. He had an old white Honda with broken windshield wipers. In the rain, he took the bus. He did not put milk in his cereal because he was allergic to dairy. Once I brought up the way a boy from the deaf school who lived in our neighborhood drifted through crosswalks, like he was moving on a different wavelength. How at the playground he stood on the swings instead of sitting, how he kicked around the mulch. The Psychologist pointed out that if the boy could not
hear
the rules, it would take him longer to learn how to follow them, and I remember thinking he sounded wise. For a brief time, he went out with a woman who worked at the deaf school. She came around the house once, in a cardigan and a jean skirt, and then I never saw her again.

In the Hospital, I do not tell anyone that this list is the memory trick I practice when I'm alone at night.

I couldn't find Mr. or Mrs. Carroll. I even asked Information and the woman at the desk said that wasn't the kind of information she was available to provide. I ended up in a dark, curtained room on the top floor, watching a video. No one else was up there. I sat down on a bench. On the screen, a woman stood in a green room with a pair of antlers on her head. I heard ocean sounds: a rushing tide, a gull's cry.

The scenes began to change. There was a field and the damp bottom of a stairwell and a train racing through the night. The woman in the green room, sitting on a bench like the one I was sitting on, and staring into the camera.

Why didn't I just go to the Carrolls' house? I remembered their street in Allston. I could see the brass numbers tacked above the entrance. Over a decade had passed. They could have retired or gotten new jobs. Was this even the right museum? When I thought back to Allston, it was like being able to see all of a room except for one little corner. What was that dark spot hiding.

The video played on a loop. I kept watching. I imagined myself stepping into the screen and sitting next to the woman. I imagined wearing my own set of antlers and staring out at the empty room. I saw myself turning to the woman and asking what it would feel like to not carry such division within, because to look inside yourself and see so much mystery is the worst kind of loneliness.

For me, the woman had no answers.

 

10.

In the New Year, I start keeping a list of all the nautical terms I've heard on
Mysteries of the Sea.
It's like learning a new language, my mother's language. Abaft. Aft. Hull down. Brails. Doldrums. Scud. Sextant. Beaufort scale. Windward. Windlass. Lee side. Absolute bearing. Bower. Magnetic north. Whitecaps. Starboard. Vanishing angle.

*   *   *

I have watched my mother roll over her deck railing and into the water below, dark and seal-like in her diving suit. A light splash, a crown of bubbles—the only evidence that she came from land. She carried an underwater flashlight and the white circle grew fainter the deeper she swam, until there was only a ghostly glow. I have watched her curl up on the cot during a migraine, a white washcloth draped over her eyes like a convalescent in an old war movie. I have watched her hand cut the air as she made a point to her chief engineer, the gesture of a person convinced of her own rightness.

After seeing all this, after watching her become not a dream but a person, I can't stop myself from imagining my own abandonment.

Here is one version. She wraps me in the white shirt and lays the box on the steps with care. She shivers, pulls her coat sleeves over her hands—how long will it take for someone to find me? She looks into my wide, wet eyes. She strokes my cheek. She kisses my hair, leaving behind a string of spit, a bit of her. She can't decide what her last gesture should be. What to leave me with. She feels her heart turn into a fist as she walks away. She is certain she will never do anything harder.

Here is another. The shirt is sour with milk. She sets the box down and I whimper and she makes no move to comfort. That list of things a mother can do that are worse than leaving? She can see herself being capable of something like that. She breathes in the cold and looks at the fat pink thing squirming in the box and waits to see what she feels, if she feels anything. She leaves without tears and once the hospital is out of sight, she is light with relief.

After one of these imaginings, I wander over to a window. We're a week into January. Time has never moved so slowly. I look up through the glass, expecting to see something icy and pale, and am startled to find a dark and terrifying sky.

*   *   *

A blizzard, the first to come this winter. The snowfall gets so thick, I can't make out the flat fields surrounding us. That afternoon, there is no sunset. There is only gusting snow and hissing wind and dark slivers of sky through the bars. We are plunged straight into the deepest night. On the speakers, the Pathologist summons the Floor Groups to the Common Room, where Dr. Bek and the nurses have gathered.

Dr. Bek reviews our inclement weather protocols. If we lose power, the emergency generators will come on. If we lose power, we should congregate in our communal spaces and keep each other warm with the heat of our bodies. We should stay away from the windows. We should not go wandering into hallways and stairwells. This is not the time to get lost.

The patients glance at the Common Room window with nervous eyes. Through the bars the sky looks like black paint being mixed around in a can.

In Massachusetts, I have seen snow that falls as heavy as a driving rain and drifts as tall as me. I have seen winds that shred power lines and uproot trees. I think I am prepared.

Dr. Bek asks if we have questions. Hands grab at the air.

“Are we going to die?” a patient from Floor Group three calls out.

He blinks rapidly, like he has something in his eye. “No one is going to die,” he says.

*   *   *

We lose power in the middle of dinner. The lights flicker and flicker and then go out. We sit in darkness, our trays in front of us, our food growing cold, and listen to the windows rattle behind the bars. We hear a humming and the lights come back on, but they are not the lights we are used to. They are a dull gold and they shine out from the corners, so some tables are trapped in a bubble of light, others shadowed.

We finish our dinner, our fingers moving dumbly in the partial light. I wrap my fist around a plastic fork and poke at a kidney-shaped piece of chicken. I can hear the staff breathing on the borders of the room. Floor Groups four and six leave their tables and begin collecting trays. Our table is cloaked in shadow, so they forget all about us. After dinner, the patients stay where they are, afraid to leave the enclosure of the Dining Hall. The faces around me are dark glimmers.

I'm sitting across from the twins. They have started a word association game, where they take turns calling out things that have to do with Hawaii. This is the memory trick Dr. Bek has invented for them. Whoever can keep it up the longest wins.

“Magma!”

“Lokelani!”

“Sugarcane!”

“What does the winner get, anyway?” I ask after Christopher wins for the fourth time in a row, clearly in no danger of forgetting.

“The distinction of having superior knowledge,” he says.

I hear the clank of a tray falling. Somewhere in the Dining Hall a patient is laughing. On the speakers, the Pathologist is making a sound that reminds me of the ocean noises on the video I watched at the museum.

What was I really looking for that day?

I overhear Olds say that when she was growing up in Michigan, they called weather events like this “silver storms.” I let that phrase linger with me. I imagine icicles hanging like tentacles from power lines and trees.

*   *   *

Once a thunderstorm knocked out power at the Stop & Shop. An emergency generator switched on, but the electronic lock on the manager's office failed. A cashier went in and stole the manager's computer and never came back to the store. If only that had been my shift. In the Dining Hall, I start to get ideas.

No one notices when I slip away from my Floor Group, into the cold hall. Faint lights run along the sides of the ceiling. My footsteps sound like falling rain. I'm halfway to the stairwell when I hear a scream spill out of the Dining Hall. I am afraid of what patients might become willing to do in the near dark.

An incomplete list of things that make patients scream in the Hospital: nightmares, needles, bad memories, fear of death, homesickness, rules, rage, boredom, lack of sunlight, each other.

In the stairwell, I go down five flights of stairs, all the way to the basement, the zero floor, where the air is frigid and damp and I can hear the storm whirring. I dart around a corner and down another hallway, lit by floodlights. I pat the walls, the cold stinging my palms, and search for the storage room door. I think about how my life before the Hospital prepared me for dark underground moments like this. Consider the pattern of transferring T lines: through a narrow tunnel, up stairs, down stairs, through another narrow tunnel, all of it done underground, the thumping sound of footsteps above, the walls vibrating from passing trains. Consider the journey through the dark of my basement apartment, from bed to toilet and back again, in the middle of the night. The graveyard shift at the Stop & Shop. The city was training me and I had no idea.