The Girl Without a Name (3 page)

I shove Arthur off my thigh, and he whines, his eyebrows upturned in aggrievement. He then proceeds to tear mad circles around the family room, his tail slapping me with every lap. He's a year old now but doesn't seem to realize this. I've even considered slipping him some of my Adderall. After about ten laps, Arthur plops onto his back, tail still wagging.

I sort through the mail—“
SPOOKTACULAR
” orange-and-black fliers for zombie costumes, red-white-and-blue ads where someone is Satan and someone is the Messiah for the election, and bills (too many)—when I see the letter. The cream-colored rectangle stands out from the rest of the junk. Thick, expensive paper with flowery black handwriting. Not computer-generated handwriting, actual by-hand handwriting. Being the last kid invited to a birthday party, I have always been enamored with the prospect of the handwritten invitation. I turn it over, and my heart skips a beat. It's from Jean Luc.

I tear it open. Jean Luc was my first love. We dated in medical school at Yale, when he was a postdoc in chemistry. And it's true, what I told Jason: I haven't heard from him in a while, in nearly a year. After he dumped me for the magazine-quality Melanie, we kind of ran out of things to say. Last I heard, she was happily transplanted in Paris and the toast of the town in party planning. I overheard her berating some poor vendor in perfectly accented French when Jean Luc and I last spoke. She frightens me, actually.

I shake out the envelope, and a black-and-white card falls out, an overly dramatic picture of Jean Luc and Melanie. They gaze, eyes glued to each other and unsmiling, like they're in an edgy magazine ad.

So not a birthday invitation, a save-the-date card. My stomach turns queasy.

He's
marrying
her? Dropping the announcement on the counter, I throw off my satchel and slump onto my comfy red couch. Arthur whines again so I grab his overflowing kibble bowl and bring it into the family room with me. (He gets lonely. Yes, he's both oversexed and spoiled.) The sound of Arthur's contented crunching fills the room, which at once feels despairingly empty.

I grab my phone and debate. I could call Mike, but complaining about your ex-boyfriend to your current boyfriend doesn't seem like a wise plan. Not that he would even necessarily be jealous. Mike is unflappable, almost annoyingly so.
Jean Luc is getting married to a maleficent creature? Okay, so what's the issue? It's over. Time to move on.

He's an ER doc, pragmatic. Right lower quadrant pain doesn't mean you may have borderline tendencies stemming from a troubled relationship with your emotionally distant father. It means you have appendicitis. That'll be two milligrams of morphine, surgical consult, and possibly a CT of the abdomen. Not to say he's unkind; he is more than kind. I still think of him visiting in the nursing home, watching television with my mom, who was in the later stages of dementia, grinning away like he was having the time of his life. He is thoughtful; he just doesn't overthink things. Overthinking is my forte. Jean Luc was an overthinker, too, in a way. He just thought mainly about himself.

I decide to call Scotty.

“Yo, what's up?” I hear strains of Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
in the background and his coworker yelling out orders. He's at work at the coffee shop.

“Hi, how are you?”

“What do you want?”

“What do you mean, what do I want? Can't I just call you?”

“You never just call me, Zoe. So what do you want?”

Arthur starts whining now for his water bowl, so I grab that from the foyer and spill half of it on the way back to the family room. “I got this letter.”

“Yeah?”

“Never mind.”

“Come on, you got a letter. Go on.”

“Well, it's from Jean Luc. He's getting married.”

I hear the slam of a register. “So who gives a fuck, Zoe? He's an asshole.”

My ever-empathetic brother. “Yeah, but—”

“And Mike's actually a decent guy. So fuck Frog-boy. He wasn't good enough for you anyway.”

Which is, I guess, what I wanted to hear. Even if it was delivered with typical Scotty flair. The coffee grinder sounds in the distance. “Oh, one more thing,” I say before he can hang up. “It's about this case.”

He groans. “What about it?”

“Remember that facial recognition program you got working?”

Scotty cobbled together a bare-bones facial recognition program off shareware to help me find my birth mother a couple of years ago. He may be my pain-in-the-ass kid brother, but he's also, oddly enough, a computer guru. “Yeah? What about it?”

“You think we could use it to find Jane?”

“Who the fuck is Jane?”

“My patient. With catatonia.”

This time the coffee grinder seems to grate directly into my ear. “How old did you say she was? Like, twelve?”

“Twelve, fourteen. I'm not sure. Young teenager anyway. Why? Does that make a difference?”

“Yeah, it does actually. You need to match her picture to her image on the Internet from exactly the right age. Give or take six months maybe. Otherwise it gets hinky.” Another coffee order gets barked out. “Text me her picture. I'll try, but I can't promise anything.” With that, he hangs up, and Arthur trots by me with something white sticking out of his mouth.

“Arthur!” Here he turns away from me with the errant concept that if he can't see me, then I can't see him. Arthur hasn't hit all the Piaget stages just yet. “What do you have?”

Of course, he doesn't answer. But he only fights halfheartedly as I yank the soggy card stock out of his mouth.
Upcoming Nuptials.
Now missing a corner and part of Melanie's head, which is just as well. Arthur waits with uncharacteristic patience for the card and then gets bored when his doggy brain processes the idea that this isn't happening, and he slumps down to the floor. I sit there, watching him engage in some ill-advised licking, as my mood plummets to a 2.4.

I
'm lifting up the bedsheet when I notice the scar.

On her left ankle, it's an odd scar. A misshapen circle the size of a nickel with a hint of soft brown keloid on the rim. A cut? A burn? I rub the scar, but she doesn't budge. She just keeps staring her dead-eyed stare. Dr. Berringer finally relented to giving her a teeny dose of Ativan. It's been a week; it doesn't seem to be doing much. I pull out my camera phone and snap a picture of her ankle. Maybe it could help Detective Adams identify her.

Back at the nurses' station, Jason sits with a pile of charts. He's wearing a lime-green bow tie and shirt.

“Hey, it's a Chinese leprechaun!” I say, grabbing a chair.

He gives me the finger.

“Aren't we touchy today?”

“I'm in a shitty mood.”

“And I bet I can guess why.”

“Yeah, Dominic dumped me again.”

“Dominic's an asshole.” I grab a chart. “Forgive my lack of empathy.”

“No, you're right.” He hits another chart on the stack. “By the way, guess who's back?”

“No idea.”

“Tiffany.”

“Tiffany?” She has been my patient five times now. She gets admitted biannually to the County for crystal meth psychosis. Then off to rehab, or jail, depending on the alignment of the stars. Last time, I thought I convinced her to stay in rehab. I guess I was wrong. “What's she doing at Children's? She's practically got a bed reserved at the County.”

“Preggers,” he says.

I let out a whistle. “No shit.”

“Yup.” Jason gets the smile he always gets when relaying a particularly salacious bit of gossip. “And the County wants no part of detoxing a twenty-four-weeker.”

“I'll bet.”

“Shaved off a chunk of her arm, too,” Jason adds.

“Ooh, why?” Wincing, I grab the chart from him and start looking through it.

“She thought she had maggots.” He pulls out an order sheet. “At least she's still alive.”

“Yes, that is something.”

“Hey,” Dr. Berringer calls into the room. “Let's round later today, okay? I just want to see Jane real quick.” Jason nods and turns back to his notes. “How is she?” he asks as we walk down the hall.

“No change,” I answer.

“So the Ativan's not hitting her yet?”

“Guess not.”

We enter the room, and she doesn't move. Her almond eyes are glassy, vacant. She blinks, crinkles her nose, blinks again. Dr. Berringer lifts his index finger, waves it slowly in front of her eyes. She doesn't track it.

“Maybe we could go up on the Ativan?” I ask. “I called the pharmacist. He said we have tons of room to move up on it. Two mgs q six if she's not getting too sedated.” (Actually, the pharmacist said, “Half a milligram isn't going to do jack. You guys might as well give her sugar water,” but I leave that bit out.)

Dr. Berringer nods. “Might as well. Let's start with one mg q twelve. If she's tolerating it, then we go up more.”

“Not two mgs? That's what the pharmacist recommended.”

“One mg, Zoe. Low and slow.”

“Okay,” I agree with reluctance. “Hey, and another thing I noticed.” I point at her foot, lifting up the sheet, and he walks over to see. “See the scar? Isn't that weird?”

“Yeah, it is.” He gets in closer, putting his nose right up to it. “A burn maybe?”

“It looks like a circle or something.”

He runs his hand up and down the scar, like a clinician, but with tenderness still. “Yeah. Cigarette burn, I'm thinking.”

“It's kind of big for that, isn't it?”

“Hard to say with the keloid.” He shrugs. “That's how it looks to me.”

I nod, putting the sheet back down. It billows in the air, then settles.

“Abuse isn't uncommon in these cases unfortunately.” He picks up the Halloween figurine, the buddy ghost and scarecrow from her bed stand. It looks chintzy in his hands. “Who gave her this?”

“Oh, I did.” I start filling out an order sheet with the new Ativan dose.

He places it back down, gently. “You're a sweet girl, Zoe.”

I hold back a smile. No one's ever called me a sweet girl before. When I glance up from the sheet, he is looking at me, his eyes glowing blue. I drop my gaze back down to the chart.

Later that morning, I head off to see how Tiffany's doing.

How she's doing is not well. Skeletal, thinner than last time I saw her, her belly with just a suggestion of a bump. Her face is dotted with scars, her arm taped with a large white bandage with yellow oozing through the cotton. The bandage smells rank. Probably infected. I write for a surgical consult in case it needs debridement, then sit next to her on the wrinkled blanket.

“Tiffany?”

She stares out, silent. Like Jane. But if Tiffany is catatonic, at least we know why. She gazes out the window at the yellow-green grass, half dead from all this warm, dry weather. I stand up from the bed, and Tiffany rocks with the motion. After another minute, I decide not much therapy will be achieved right now. But as I get up from the bed, she surprises me by talking.

“I know I let you down,” she says. Her voice is low and quiet. Exhausted.

“No.” I turn to her. “You didn't.”

Her top lip trembles, but she doesn't cry. “I filled out an application.”

I wait for more. “An application?”

“Yeah. To be a flight attendant, like we talked about.”

I vaguely recall this conversation from the last admission. She revealed to me that it had always been her dream to be a flight attendant. I urged her to go for it. “Okay?”

“It took me a month. There was a lot to fill in.” Her voice is flat, dead.

I take a seat in the chair by her desk and wait a long time until she speaks again.

“I never handed it in.”

I lean back in the chair. “Why not?”

“Because I'm a loser.” She says this without a trace of self-pity.

“I don't think that's true,” I say, scooting toward her. “I think you've got a bad disease.”

“Same difference.” There is another long pause. “And now I'm killing my baby.”

I don't have a response for that.

“Can I be alone now, please?”

“Sure.” Standing up, I put a hand on her shoulder, and she stares off, not seeming to notice. I'm in the hallway, unfolding my patient list, when my text quacks.

got your pic of the scar. Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.
It's Detective Adams.

weird, isn't it?
I reply.
What do u think it is?

prob cig burn. Let u know if I find out anything.

So it's on to the next patient on my list. Caden Jennings.

The door opens to a painfully skinny fourteen-year-old. He pats his knee twice, then smacks his face. Hard, not just a light tap, leaving a red palm mark over the swirl of gray-purple bruising from pummeling himself before.

“Caden,” I say, walking toward him.

He jumps out of his chair and reaches out his long arm, hyperextending his elbow. He has the look of a teenaged Ichabod Crane, his chin glazed pink with acne. After he shakes my hand, he flings his arm backward like he just touched a hot stove. Then he spins around counterclockwise, twice, and plops back down in the metal chair, scraping the tile with the force of his body. The tile at his feet is chipped from years of that very chair scraping at that very desk. I take the seat next to him.

“Sorry,” he says, gazing at the floor. “I can't help it.”

“Don't worry. That's why you're here.” I try to sound cheerful, walking my pen down the order sheet. “Has the neurologist seen you yet?”

“I'm not sure. The medical students, I think?”

“Short coats or long coats?”

“Short,” he answers.

“Yeah. That would be the medical students.”

“They seemed pretty clueless, actually,” he says, his voice breaking like it hasn't decided on a range yet. Puberty hasn't been kind to our Caden.

“Yup. That would be the medical students.”

He laughs, his shoulders relaxing an inch. As if in rebuke, his left hand crosses over and taps his knee twice, then clocks the side of his face again. I force myself not to wince.

“So tell me about the thoughts you've been having,” I say.

He gives his chin a vigorous scratch and exhales. “It started with the number six.” He lets out a quick “screee!” noise and shakes his head to one side, like he's trying to get water out of his ear. “I try to avoid them. Sixes. But they're, like, really hard to avoid. Especially in math.”

“I can see how that would be.”

“And there's one in my address, too. A…a…six.” He shivers like the word tastes bad. “So my mom got mad when I scratched it off the mailbox. But”—he pats his knee and gives his face a slap—“I felt like, if I didn't do it, something really, really bad was going to happen. So it's almost like she should be thanking me, but I knew she wouldn't understand that.”

“Right.”

“And then I was getting in trouble in math because I would cross all the sixes out and try to do the problems without them. I mean, I don't see what the big deal is. I'm still getting the concepts. I'm actually very good at math.”

“Well, that's good,” I say, encouraging.

He looks down, quiet for a moment, then lets out a “scree!”

“You said it started with sixes,” I remind him.

“Yeah, it started there but then it, like, moved. Then I had a problem with colors. Well, not all colors, just black and sometimes green.”

“Sometimes green?”

“It depends on the shade, you know? Like, lime green is okay, but forest green or any kind of dark green is just very bad, very evil-like, you know?”

“Sure,” I answer, though I'm not really sure. Clearly I have to bone up on Tourette's.

“And if I spend too much time around those colors, it's going to be a problem. So I just try to avoid them. But, you know, if a teacher is wearing a green sweater, they don't necessarily want to take it off, you know? But, like, I don't actually see why that's a major problem, you know? I mean, unless it's really cold or something.”

We share a smile. He may have been making a joke, or not. He taps his knee, slaps his face, and then hangs his head in exhaustion. I'm exhausted just watching him.

“And of course kids are making fun of me, which seems to be the job of the kids in my grade.” Here he
scree
s twice. “They keep putting black paper in my locker or handing me notes with the number six on it, like, a hundred times.”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah, I couldn't go near my locker for, like, an entire day.”

A memory pops up then, of finding a note in my locker in fifth grade. Written in grape-purple ink, because girls are always the ones to be so unnecessarily mean.

The note burned, a shameful secret in my backpack, for an entire week before my mother caught me crying in my room and I showed it to her. She hugged me, smelling of heavy perfume. Chanel number something. She was going to a party with my dad that night, the sitter already on her way. “Zoe,” she said, “not one of these kids is worth the hair on your pinkie toe.” This made me burst out laughing, and every time I thought of the note thereafter, it was paired with the hair on my pinkie toe. I can feel tears threatening and swallow them back.

“Are you okay?” Caden asks. He stares at me with nary a tic.

“Oh. Yeah.” I wipe at my eyes. “Allergies,” I add, sniffling my nose for effect.

“Okay,” he answers doubtfully, like he's wondering which one of us is the patient here.