The Girl with the Wrong Name (21 page)

“Were these all you found?” I asked, pulling away. “Just these two?”

“I tried to find more,” the girl said, her arms rigid in my grip. She looked a little taken aback by my sudden show of emotion. “After I found the first two, I started digging all over the floor with my knife. Then that chick, Ms. Renaux, spotted me through the window and got all super-freaked. She started screaming at me, and then that big security dude ‘escorted’ me out.”

I nodded. “Mac. Yeah. He’s scary.”

She sneered. “He tried to be. But I’ve been sneaking back at night, through that window upstairs, scraping around for more till my freaking fingers bled. I just wanted to find enough to buy a plane ticket home. I swear, I wasn’t trying to rob anybody.”

I placed the two pearls in her palm and closed her scraped-up fingers around them. “I want you to take them,” I said. “They were my sister’s, but now they’re yours. And take this.” I reached into my pocket, pulled the last sixty dollars from my wallet, and stuffed them in her jean jacket. Then I stepped to the curb and held my hand out for a cab. “I want you to take this cab to the diamond district on West Forty-Seventh Street. Find a late night shop where you can pawn those pearls, and go home.”

She stood there, clutching the pearls, her jaw slack.

A taxi pulled up, and I opened the door. “Come,” I said, taking her hand and helping her in.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I replied. “Well, maybe just one thing. What
is
your name?”

“It’s LeAnne,” she said. “LeAnne Stemson.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, LeAnne. I’m Theo.”

She smiled, her hard eyes finally brightening. “Theo,” she said. “What a cool fucking name.”

I closed the cab door and watched her ride off.

“The pearls,” Max said, trying to put the pieces together. “That’s the other thing you’ve sketched a million times.”

My nagging panic returned. “I tried to tell myself about the pearls,” I said. “I knew they were buried in that room.”

“The ring and the pearls,” Max said. “Thee, it’s all the stuff for your dream wedding. All that’s missing is the dress.”

“Oh,
man.
” I clamped my palms on my head. “The
dress
. . .
Max, it was the very first
place he took me. I mean, the first place I took myself.”

“Where?”

I grabbed his hands, then let them go and waved for another cab. “He said she’d needed to change into ‘something fancy’ at her house for their date. But when we got to her house, it wasn’t her house, and we got all confused. I mean
I—
I got all confused. Because I knew it was the right house, but Sarah didn’t live there.”

“Okay, now I’m confused,” Max said.

“Max. She didn’t live there because it’s 2015. She lived there in 2003. 224 Bergen Street. It was
my
house, Max—our
house. I tried to take myself home.”

The woman I still
only knew as “the mother” cracked open the door. She was dressed in a white robe and slippers. She kept the chain lock fastened. Her hair was pulled back, and her face was stripped of makeup, eyes staring at Max and me like zombies who’d come for her brains.

Yes, it’s me! The freaky, homeless tweaker who was skulking around your house on Thursday night! The one who scared the crap out of your daughter. And I’ve brought a really tall, imposing friend with me! Oh, and yes, it’s midnight!

Once she got a good look at me, she tried to slam the door shut, but I held it open.

“No, please wait,” I begged. “I know it’s late. I know I scared you and your daughter before, and I am so
sorry about that, but if I could just have two seconds of your time to explain?
Please,
it’s incredibly important.”

“It’s really important,” Max echoed.

She looked at Max. Thank God
I’d brought a relatively normal-looking person with me this time instead of a hallucination. With his shave and his haircut, Max looked even less like a potential vagrant than he had before.

“My name is Theo,” I said.

“I thought your name was Emma,” she snapped.

“Um . . . I sometimes go by my middle name,” I pathetically suggested, “but my first name is Theo. Theo Lane. My mother is Margaret Lane. My sister’s name was Cyrano Lane.”

All at once she dropped her defensive scowl. She placed her fingers to her heart and a hint of pity flashed across her eyes. She remembered. She remembered the second I said the name. The
right
name this time. “She was your sister?”

I’d been so busy frightening her, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might, in fact, be a kind person. I nodded, swallowing the lump. “This was our house,” I said, knowing it to be true whether I recognized it or not.

“I remember your mother,” she said. “She told me what happened to her daughter when I bought the house. But I never met you.”

Of course not. Because Mom never brought me back after that day, did she? We’d probably stayed at a hotel while she went about the business of selling our life away.

This could have been my house. Right now. This beautiful brownstone on this beautiful, tree-lined block on Bergen Street. It
had
been my house until I was five, but it could have been the home I grew up in.

Who would I have been then? If I’d known about my sister? If my mother understood grieving? If I’d grown up in Brooklyn like I was supposed to? Would that girl have smiled more? Would she have quoted Nietzsche in her eighth-grade yearbook? Would she have had a more peaceful mind?

“I need to see my old room,” I said, plain and simple. “Would it be all right with you if I looked at it really quickly?”

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head apologetically. “Not now. It’s after midnight. My daughter is fast asleep upstairs—”

“Mommy, what’s going on?” The tiny peep of a voice came from the top of the stairs inside the house. I could see her through the front door. Her dark hair was ruffled from sleep. She wore a Little Mermaid nightshirt down to her knees and held a stuffed Little Mermaid doll in her right hand, rubbing her sleepy eye with the left. I realized now that she was probably closer to seven or eight than five.

“It’s nothing, Josie,” her mom whispered, shooting me an annoyed glance. “Just some friends paying a visit.”

Josie finished rubbing her eyes and then took a better look at me. “Emma?” she asked.

“No, I’m sorry. My name is Theo.”

Josie’s little ruby lips dropped open in shock, the kind of pure shock only children under ten could manage. “
You’re
Theo?” she said, letting her Little Mermaid doll drop to the floor. “Theo Lane?” she squeaked. “Why didn’t you say that on Thursday?”

My brow furrowed. Her mother and Max stared at me.

Before I could answer, she shot past her mother, grabbed my hand, and began dragging me up the stairs. “I can’t believe you’re finally here,” she whispered. “What
took
you so long?”

I shook my head. There was no use trying to answer or make any sense of this. I just had to go with it. At least I knew that I wasn’t hallucinating. I glanced over my shoulder. Max and Josie’s mother gaped up at me as we climbed the carpeted staircase with its polished wooden banister.

Josie pulled me toward her room. The door at the opposite corner of the hall swung open, and a beefy man in a T-shirt and pajama pants stepped into the hall.

“Carol, what is going on?” he grumpily shouted down the stairs.

“Nothing, Daddy,” Josie answered, as if this were perfectly normal. As if her nonchalant tone might throw him off the scent.

“I have no idea, Dale,” Carol shouted back. She and Max thundered up the stairs. Josie pulled me to her room, flipped on the light, and my hand went limp in hers.

Daisies. Four walls covered in bright, daisy wallpaper.

“It had flowers everywhere,”
Andy had said.
“Daisies.”

White on yellow on white on yellow. On and on. Petals everywhere, except for the ceiling, which was covered in old Little Mermaid stickers. They’d been there so long that they’d blended into the paint.

The window facing the alley was open, but the window facing the street was shuttered closed, just as I’d seen it from outside, hiding the big crack in the window.

“We loved the wallpaper,” Carol said from behind me. “We decided to leave it for when we had kids. Honestly, the only thing we really moved was the bed. We never got around to those stickers, but it sure made Josie love that Little Mermaid, huh, sweetie?” She patted her daughter’s back.

“Theo,” Josie said, taking charge, “only you can come in. Mom, Dad, Cute Giant, you have to wait outside.” She pushed at her mother’s waist until Carol was in the hall and then shut us in quickly.

I stared at all the flowers, willing myself to remember this place. But I couldn’t. “How do you know my name?” I asked.

Josie pulled me down to the floor with her and whispered, “I didn’t tell anyone else. Not even Mommy or Daddy. Just like it said.”

“Like what said?” I whispered back.

“The box,” she replied.

“What box?”

“Your Magic Story Box, silly.”

She slid herself under the bed as I flattened myself down to see what she was doing, heart racing, literally floored. I heard the music fade up in my head.

The stories are here. They’re all in here

From Crafty Fox to Goldilocks on Story Box, on Story Box

There are no locks on Story Box, on Story Box, on Story Box
. . .

Josie carefully placed her fingernails between the planks of the wood under her bed and removed three of the floorboards. “I only found it last year,” she breathed. “We are
super
lucky I could read it.”

She handed over a hinged wooden photo box about the size of a shoebox. There was a large, dusty, yellowed label on top. The neat handwriting was in all caps:

theo’s magic story box

Under that, in smaller writing, it read:

This is Theo Lane’s secret story box. No one else can open this box but Theo Lane.

A story box. Under the floorboards. Her pearls and my box, all buried.

I’d been trying to lead myself to this box for days. Now I could only stare at it like it was wired to explode. I brought my hand to the lid, but couldn’t bring myself to open it.

“What are you waiting for?” Josie whispered, propping herself on her elbows under the bed. “Is it really magic?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered back. My throat was bone dry.

“Well,
open
it,” she said. “No one else can open it but you. Okay, I
might
have peeked. But I don’t get what’s in there. They aren’t stories.”

I held my breath and lifted the lid.

Digital videocassettes. Old mini-DV cassettes. Of course Josie didn’t know what they were. They were obsolete. They were all lined up in the box like files in a drawer, except for one. One had been tossed on the top, facing up. The label stared back at me in red marker:

September 1st, 2003

THE BIG DAY!

Leaving 224 Bergen Street
was a blur. I think I kissed and hugged Josie more than I should have. I know
I thanked her for keeping my secret, and I promised her I’d be back soon. I think I hugged Dale and Carol even though they wished I hadn’t. I think I dragged Max out to the street, feeling dangerously wobbly, and told him to call Lou because my hands were too shaky to dial. It’s possible none of those things happened except the Josie part.

I do remember my three-sentence exchange with Lou. “Do you have the keys to the editing room at school?” I asked.

“Yeah, why?” she said. “What’s the story?”

“I think I might have the whole story in my hands.”

After that, I remember the emotions. Gratitude: that all of Mr. Schaffler’s video equipment was crap from the late ’90s. Comfort: sitting down at the editing bay with Max and Lou on either side of me. Fear: in their eyes and mine, as if they were spotting me as I stepped onto a mile-high tightrope.

I inserted the tape, glued my finger to the control keys, and pressed
play
. . .

Chapter Twenty-One

The screen flickers to life. So, finally, does she.

My sister. Cyrano Lane. No longer a still image, but a living, breathing, stunning creature in a glorious close-up. Her face is made up to perfection, her hair tied crisply in an elegant French braid. She holds a red marker in her mouth like a cigar. The frame swivels and shakes, tilting left, then right, then half obscured in darkness.

“Damn,” she complains, dropping the marker from her mouth. “I think I need to make the buttonhole just a little bigger for the lens. Thee, you won’t be mad if I rip your peacoat buttonhole just a teensy
bit, will you? I’ll buy you a new one tomorrow, but this is, like, the biggest day of my life. Cool?”

“Mm-kay,” a tiny voice replies from off camera.

My
tiny voice.

“Cool, thanks,” she says. The frame pulls back from her face, revealing her bare, slender shoulders and clavicles, then the string of white pearls dangling from her slim, delicate neck, the largest pearl hanging at the center of her chest. And then the sunny wall of daisies in the background. This is our room.

She reaches out of frame and brings back a silver mat knife. She plunges it toward the lens, cutting into the dark wedge that obscures the frame until the shot is whole again. Then she looks off to the side and smiles. “Now
that’s
what I’m talking about. Okay, if I sewed this thing in right, it should tilt up perfectly to see everything we want to see. It’s wired into the camera in your pocket, so it might be a little hot against your side, okay?”

“Mm-kay,” I reply again, jovial and eager to please.

“This little spy-cam cost me about a billion dollars, so let’s not go slamming into any walls.”

“I won’t,” I promise.

“Okay. Let’s try this sucker on.”

The shot goes into a wild blur, flashing past Cyra’s face, across a sea of Little Mermaids on the ceiling, past flares of sunlight, past a TV screen that shows a mirror image of the shot, past the quickest glimpse of my five-year-old face and my arm slipping into a navy blue sleeve—all of it set to the rumble and boom of the jostling microphone. And then finally back to Cyra’s beautiful face.

She peers off to the side again, checking the TV monitor. “Aha! Ha, ha! We
have
Theo-Cam, ladies and gentlemen.”

I giggle. “Yaaaaay,” I sing.

“Yaaaaay,” she sings along. “Oh, shoot,
shhhhhh.
We have to stay real quiet, Thee. We can’t let Mommy and Daddy hear us. We’re on a super-special secret agent mission today that they can’t know about, remember?”

“Right,” I whisper. “Super-secret mission.”

“Okay, let’s check the frame.” She moves farther back, revealing herself head to toe. I can practically hear the glissando of harp strings as she floats into the wide shot, holding the bottom of her strapless white wedding dress like she’s preparing to curtsy.

She looks like Audrey Hepburn in the Givenchy dress from
Sabrina.

She checks herself in the TV monitor and twirls. “What do you think?”

“Pretty,”
I swoon.

“Why, thank you. Okay, let’s button you up. He’s going to be here any minute. We have to be at the Harbor Café by eleven forty-f—”

“I
know
,” I sigh. “Eleven forty-five. You’ve said it, like, a ga
jillion
times.”

“Well, I don’t like to be late. And someone very important is meeting us there.” She jumps back into extreme close-up and buttons up the rest of my peacoat. “It’s not too hot, is it? Because you cannot take off this coat no matter what. You understand that, right?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I say.

“Ugh, I am so sorry to make you do this, Thee, but you know Andy is super-duper camera shy. I can live with that any other day, but if he thinks I’m not going to record this day for our children and grandchildren to see . . .” She slips into a nasal cartoon voice.
“
Then he don’t know me very well, do he?”

“Hee, hee,” I giggle. “Bugs Bunny.”

“I love that you’re five and you get my references. Okay, so you remember the plan, right? We go out on our super-secret mission, and then we come right back here and hide the cassette in the Magic Story Box.”

“Duh.”

“Okay, smarty-pants. Just making sure.”

There’s a gentle tapping off camera, and Cyra has a quick panic moment ducking out of frame. I think she’s unplugging the TV monitor. Theo-Cam swivels to the window that faces the alley, and there, standing atop a metal ladder in all his golden glory, is Andy. He’s wearing a tuxedo, carrying a big, overstuffed backpack on his shoulder. He waves at Cyra with his devastating smile. She does a little happy dance as she runs to the window and lifts it up high for her Romeo to enter.

“Oh,
man
.” He grins, taking in his bride-to-be. “When you change into something fancy, you really change into something fancy.”

“Andy Reese’s!” I squeal with excitement, a toddler with a massive crush.

“Well,
hey,
Snuggle Bear!” he says. He climbs in through the window, revealing the black Chuck Taylors that match his tux. He drops his overstuffed bag on the floor, reaches into his pocket, and hands me a Reese’s peanut butter cup.

“What do you say?” Cyra prompts me.

“
Thank
you, Andy Reese’s,” I dutifully respond.

“Well, you know I’ve always got the hookup for my Snuggle Bear,” he says.

“What’s in the bag?” Cyra asks.

“You’re just going to have to wait to find out,” he says with a grin.

“Is that a Speed Stick in the pocket?” she teases. “Are you
that
nervous?”

“Come here,” he says. He wraps his arms around her, and they melt into a passionate kiss.

“Ew,” my little voice mutters.

But the kiss goes on and on as they begin to twirl across the room. Twirling and twirling until
smack,
Andy’s back slams into the window that faces the street, leaving a long crack right down the center.

“Oh,
shit
,
shit
,
shit
,” Cyra gasps. “
Shhhhhhh.
” She presses her finger to her lips as they both stare at the crack. And then they fall into silent laughter.

“Oh, man,” Andy whispers. “We got to get out of here.”

“Let’s go, let’s go.” She grabs hold of my hand.

“Wait,” Andy says, freezing in place. He keeps the smile tacked on his face, but it grows faint.

“What?” Cyra asks.

Andy turns his back to me, the camera. “She’s coming?” he murmurs.

“Andy, this is my wedding day,” Cyra says. “I only get one, and my sister is going to be there.”

“But what about, you know . . . the after-plan?”

“Don’t worry, I have that all figured out,” she says. “We’ll make it work.”

Andy lets out a long sigh.

“Or we could just call the whole thing off,” Cyra says. “We could just plan another—”

He shuts her up with a kiss. “Okay, come here, Snuggle Bear,” he says, holding out his hand to me. “We’re going to have to get you down this ladder. What do you say you and Andy Reese’s go strutting down Burger Street?”

I hear myself break into massive fits of laughter behind the camera. “Burger Street!”

“She never gets tired of that one,” he marvels.

“Wait, I almost forgot.” Cyra grabs a small brown paper bag from the desk and hands it to Andy.

“What’s in here?” he asks with a sly grin.

“It’s not for you.” She giggles.

“Damn,” he sighs, disappointed, stuffing it into the front pocket of his backpack. He reaches for me again and the “Theo-Cam” becomes a shaky blur.

Max, Lou, and I watch as Andy lifts me safely down the ladder, walks me down the alley, lifts me over the iron gate, and hails us a cab.Then an endless static shot of the inside of a taxi. My eyes stay riveted on the screen, but some instinctive, almost autonomous part of my brain begins to control the playback buttons, making decisions about what needs to be seen.

fast-forward
. . .

Theo-Cam sits at the marble table closest to the door of the Harbor Café. The camera looks out the window, across the front lawn, all the way to the tall ivy gates of Battery Gardens. The river and Lady Liberty melt into an ethereal blue-green blur in the background.

Andy and Cyra sit together on the right side of the frame, feeding each other pastries, handing me a chocolate croissant that rises in and out of the shot as I eat.

Cyra looks out the window and gazes up at the Battery Gardens balcony, sighing as she watches a couple (two black and white dots on the screen) pose for photos.

“Someday,” she says, “when our parents get over all their issues and realize we weren’t too young, we’re going to renew our vows in a
humongous
wedding at Battery Gardens.” She turns back to Andy. “Promise me?”

“Promise,” he says. He looks down and checks his watch. “Oh, man, come on now,” he complains. “It’s eleven forty-two. The Justice is meeting us at noon. She’s
got
to be here by eleven forty-five.”

“There she is!” Cyra bellows, delighted. “My maid of honor!” She pops up from her seat and flies out the door to greet a young and vibrant Emma Renaux on the front lawn.

Emma rushes to meet Cyra, a white purse strapped to her shoulder and a big bouquet of daisies wrapped in white deli paper. They embrace on the lawn.

“Okay, Snuggle Bear,” Andy says, rising from his seat. “It’s time to tie the knot.”

Theo-Cam rises as Andy hoists on his backpack and walks out into the wind to give Emma a hug. The hug lasts too long—Emma won’t let go at first, but as Theo-Cam runs at her, she finally releases Andy and greets me.

“Well, don’t you look as snug as a bug in that adorable coat,” she says.

“Thanks,” I reply.

“Come on,” Andy says, pushing the girls along. “The Justice is meeting us in front of K.O.P. at noon. Let’s move.”

We travel the short walk to Parker Street and approach the immaculate, brand-new façade of Keeping Our Promise. Bright, gleaming letters are set against the bright white stone wall.

The Justice of the Peace waits at the top of the front stoop—short, bald, and pleasant. Andy and Cyra thank him for meeting them.

“And this is your witness?” he asks, turning to Emma.

“This is our witness,” Andy says.

A witness. Emma was the one and only witness to their wedding, with the exception of five-year-old me. That’s what I’d been trying to tell myself when Andy (I) was falling apart in the crushing pressure of Room Nine.
Emma was a witness.

She was
there.
Emma was there on their secret wedding day. Why didn’t she tell me that in the hospital?

fast-forward
. . .

They move in fast-motion. Andy unlocks K.O.P.’s front door and heads into the lobby with the Justice of the Peace. But Emma waits out on the stoop, and her face momentarily fills the frame.

The look on Emma’s face . . .

It’s the first time the camera has gotten close enough to really see it. The weighty sadness behind that pasted-on smile. The tiny creases of mourning in her furrowed brow. And something else. An ugly tension in the corners of her eyes and mouth. Visible veins in her neck. It’s not just sadness, and it’s not just jealousy.