The Girl Without a Name (15 page)

“Yeah, yeah. And if you go, it could be double.” He tosses another item in the maybe pile. “You got a job lined up here?”

“I could. With the university maybe. But I don't know. I was thinking about a fellowship maybe. But then again, maybe I should go private and start paying off loans. I don't know.”

“Sounds like a lot of maybes.”

I finger the little heart pillow that Mom made at the nursing home. Purple with crooked black stitching that says “I love you.” Definitely a keep. “And Mike's basically got an offer here already and a couple of leads down in North Carolina. So that's the debate.”

“Hmm.” Scotty folds over a recalcitrant box flap. “You're smart. I'm sure you'll figure it out.” He cleverly doesn't offer his own suggestion.

I brush off a dusty Venetian-glass paperweight, deep blue with gold spirals reaching into the center, flanked by koi fish and orange flowers in dizzy rows. Like a kaleidoscope or a happy LSD trip. Mom and Dad brought it back from a trip to Italy. We stayed home with a babysitter, an elderly woman with only half a pinkie, which fascinated me beyond all reason. “You mind if I take this?”

“All yours.”

I move on to the next box and start ripping tape. “Scotty, did you ever think maybe she was mistaken about those bonds?”

Scotty throws out an old pack of playing cards. My mom was a poker superstar, oddly enough, until she forgot how to play. “Yeah.” He rolls up the sleeves on his T-shirt. “I've pretty much come to that conclusion.”

“Toss?” I hold up a couple of old cookbooks.

He takes one to examine it and hands it back. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Oh, by the way,” I say, hurling some pantyhose onto the pile, “I might need to make use of your world-renowned computer prowess again.”

He rolls his eyes. “For Jane Doe? Or Candy or whatever her name is?”

“How'd you guess?”

He shakes his head, combing through the next box with me. “I already tried the facial recognition stuff.”

“Yeah.” I grab some frayed pink ribbons and throw them out. “But I had another thought. If I send you the photo of her scar, could you do a search on it?”

“What kind of search?”

“I don't know. Just on the Internet? It's a really weird scar. Maybe if we could figure out what caused it, it would help us figure out who she is.”

“That's a reach,” he says, his voice echoing in the box. He tosses out an old skein of almond-colored yarn.

“It is. But would you do it?”

W
hen I walk into Candy's room the next morning, my heart falls. She isn't any better. She's worse. She's catatonic.

“Candy!” I call out.

No answer. Her big brown eyes stare out, dead, her dazzling smile gone. “Candy!” I jog over to the bed and take her hand, which is warm though not feverish. Squeezing it, I get no response. I run my hand across her field of vision. No blink, no response. Her vitals sheet reports nothing new. Fever is gone, though the temp is up just a little. Heart rate up, but not abnormally so. I lift her arm, expecting it to stay up in the pose, but her arm is stiff. It resists me. I try the other side, and it's the same. I run into the nurses' station, and Dr. Berringer is already there.

“Did you see Candy yet?”

“No, I just got here. What's up?”

“She's catatonic.”

His face crumbles. “Really?” He starts toward her room, and I follow. Immediately, he begins the same testing, checking visual fields, the tone in her arms. “These things do recur,” he says. “It's not that uncommon unfortunately.”

“But she was getting better.”

“I know.” He sounds as disappointed as I am.

“Should we get an ID consult?”

“What for?” He glances over her vital sheet. “She's not feverish.”

“No. But she was. And she's diaphoretic.”

“You can see that with Effexor, though.” He pinches her nail bed to check for any response. She doesn't even moan. It seems cruel, but it's part of the exam. “I spoke with a few colleagues about her again yesterday.”

“Okay?”

“They couldn't think of anything else we weren't doing. Said we should be thinking ECT.”

I move a lock of hair from out of Candy's eyes. “You think we're there?”

He stares at her. “I think we're almost there. We got her out of it before. Maybe hitting her with some more Ativan could do it again.”

“God, I hope so.” I close her chart, which is getting heavier by the day.

“How's Chloe?” he asks, washing his hands.

“Eating,” I answer. “Minimally, the nurses said. To avoid an NG tube.” I wait for him to move from the sink and run my hands under the faucet. “You were right. The NG demo worked.”

He winks at me, ripping some paper towels off. “Always does.” We head back to the nurses' station. “Got to wrap up some stuff in my office. See you in a bit.”

Settling down at the table, I start plowing through Candy's chart for some clues, anything that could lead me back to catatonia. But there have been no changes. Ativan same. Effexor same. Risperdal same. Jason saunters into the room, whistling.

“What?” I grumble. “Are you seeing Dominic again?”

He stares at me. “How the hell did you know that?”

I look back through the chart. “You're whistling.”

“Ooh, nonverbal clues. Look at you being all psychiatric.”

“Yeah, well. I'm not in a whistling mood today unfortunately.”

“Why?” He pops a cherry cough drop in his mouth. “What's wrong with you?”

“Candy. She's catatonic again.”

He looks up from his chart. “That sucks.” The faintest triangle of a goatee is growing in under his lip. “Any more on the sister?”

“Still missing.”

“Too bad Daneesha's gone.”

I grab another chart. “Why?”

“She would have known where Janita was,” he says, and walks off whistling again.

I flip through Candy's latest labs. CBC doesn't show any sign of infection, so Dr. Berringer's right: An Infectious Disease consult will be pointless. Pulling out my phone, I hesitate. I know it could piss the detective off, but I do it anyway.

“Hi, Zoe,” Detective Adams answers, his voice resigned to my hundred weekly calls by now. “What's up?”

“Just checking if you heard anything on the reward?”

“Not as of yet. How's Candy?”

“Not great.” I pause. “In fact, she's catatonic.”

“Oh no, really?”

“Yeah. And we've pretty much maxed out the meds. They're talking about doing ECT this time.”

“ECT, what's that?” he asks.

“Electroshock therapy.”

He lets out a long, high-pitched whistle. “No shit.”

“Yeah. I'm not loving the idea, to be honest. But we're running out of options.”

The pause grows over the phone. “I best leave all that up to you guys. Docs usually know what they're doing, I've found.”

I chuckle. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I tap my pen on the paper. “Maybe if we increased the reward?”

“Zoe, take care of Candy. I'll call you the minute I hear anything.”

After rounds, I'm hanging out in the library, wasting time on the Internet. No hits on my Candy Facebook post, which I updated. The sun is setting out the window in creamy-pink streaks across the sky. Scrolling down to earlier Facebook posts, I see a Vine posted from Melanie (which Jean Luc has shared!). Because I am fond of torture, I open it. Six seconds of lameness, with them both laughing and Melanie feeding him sushi. Which he hates. Or claimed to hate. Her ring is blinding. I close out the Facebook app with an inward groan. What is Vine-worthy about feeding someone sushi anyway? My phone rings then, saving me from any further pangs of envy.

“Got a new one,” Jason says. “Bed Five. Possible steroid psychosis.”

“Cool. I'm on it.”

“Oh, and guess who else is back?”

“Tiffany?”

“You got it.”

“Oh, I can take her while I'm down there.”

“They didn't ask for a consult yet, just wheeling her in. Giving her Narcan, I think. She looked pretty bad, actually.”

“Give her a few days,” I say. “Same old dance. They'll stabilize her, send her to us, and two months later she'll be back.”

“Aren't you all jaded today.”

“Just realistic,” I mutter. Heading into the ER, I run into Damien, one of Mike's fellow residents. The shift has just changed, so the place is buzzing. I always thought Damien was trying to date me on the sly and hinted as much to Mike. “Yeah,” Mike said thoughtfully, “he's kind of a snake.” But they're friends.

“Hey, how's the big man?” Damien asks, referring to Mike. Damien is five feet four, so this is the joke. “Been stuck in Children's hell for a while now, so I haven't seen him lately.”

“He's good.”

“You guys still…?”

“Yup,” I answer. “How are things going around here?” I gaze around at the usual suspects: nervous-wreck parents, athletic teenaged boys with arms twisted the wrong way, vomitting toddlers, and a crying high school girl who's about to lose her appendix.

“Same old,” he says, gazing around, too. He takes a drink of coffee from a metallic travel thermos. He's just starting his day while I'm ending mine. “Just coded a twenty-five-year-old.” He points to the curtain we're standing in front of. “On some kind of drugs. I've seen her a couple of times down here. Had a seizure, went into cardiac arrest. Pregnant, too. Fucking awful.”

Dread fills up my chest. “She died?”

“Yeah, unfortunately. We coded her over thirty minutes. V-tach right into asystole. Shocked the hell out of her.”

“Can I? What's…what's her name?”

“Oh, don't remember. Terry? Tammy?”

“Tiffany?”

“Yeah, that's right. Tiffany. Why? You've had her before?”

Trauma Team, Room One. Trauma Team, Room One
beckons over the loudspeaker. “Got to go,” he says, putting his thermos on the table and looping his stethoscope on. “Say hi to Mike for me.” He trots off, following a troop of scrub-clad men and women chasing after a gurney.

I head over to Tiffany's bed, pushing the curtain aside to a brightly lit room, like the room forgot the person in there isn't alive anymore. The bedsheet is over her face, and I lift it up. It's Tiffany for sure, eyes closed now, patches of hair missing from her yanking it all the time, sores on her face. Like she's been dying for years and this was just the final step. Her foot sticks out of the sheet at the foot of the bed, her baby toe with a silver-moon pinkie ring, and a crack running through the crescent.

I cover her foot back up with a blanket and hear yelling followed by a flurry of nurses in Bed Five. Must be my steroid psychosis. I close Tiffany's curtain and make my way over to my next consult.

Mike is not a graceful runner. He is a football runner, a wrestler-runner, not a runner-runner. But then again, I'm not exactly a gazelle myself. And I'm the one huffing and puffing, while he could seemingly chat through a marathon.

“So they're thinking ECT?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I answer, my voice ragged.

“Maybe it could help.”

“Maybe,” I manage again.

Mike takes mercy and doesn't ask any more questions for a bit. I called him earlier tonight, not fully in distress but close to it. After Candy, then Tiffany. I felt trapped in my living room with the fake fireplace and its well-planned precarious logs, and my cozy red couch. Like I was in a dungeon. I started pacing around, to no avail. I have hours like this, days sometimes, when my brain and my body don't align and my limbs are a restless extension of my head. This is when I used to row, back in college and medical school.

But instead I called Mike, who suggested we go for a run. So I agreed, remembering Sam's frequent admonition. I unwrapped my new, fresh-smelling running shoes from their box, tightened my laces, and met him at the park.

Sweat wicks under my shirt, and by the end of the first mile I realize I dressed too warmly. The afternoon thunderstorm emptied into an unseasonably warm night. As we keep going, I relax into the run. My footsteps pound out a rhythm, and the tight coil in my brain starts to unwind, ceasing its useless roiling and spinning. Never-ending circuits, mazes, flying thoughts. Candy staring out, dead-eyed. Tiffany's pinkie toe ring. The xiphoid pointing out of Chloe's chest. My mom's purple puffy pillow. Spiraling over and over. Snippets of songs, conversations, thoughts. Probation. Probation. Probation.

“So did you ever find out any more on Berringer? And the drinking thing?”

I shake my head. Sweat sticks to my forehead. “Just what I found out on Google. And what Jason said. He hasn't smelled like it lately, but that's not saying much.” I still haven't gotten around to telling him about putting him to bed that night. And truthfully, I probably never will. “I told you about that stupid sushi video, right?” I ask, to change the conversation.

He answers me with an eye roll. “And I was just so interested.”

I laugh. “Okay, okay. I get it.” As I run, I'm feeling better already. Lighter.

“You hear any more about the priest?”

“The priest?”

“I thought you said a priest,” he says, wiping off his forehead with his shirt and gracing me with a nice view of his abdomen.

“Oh yeah,” I say, “the Demerol guy. No, no more word. I think they're crazy, though. It's gonna be a nurse or something.”

We run in silence awhile, through the almond sheen of the streetlights against the pavement, the moon glowing through a seam in the clouds. A dog tears by on the lawn across the way, yipping madly.

My mind slows then, like it usually does at this point in a run. I don't notice my breathing anymore, or my burning legs. Images pop up, and I don't bother to bat them down. Candy. Daneesha. Janita. Candy's purple leopard-skin purse. Effexor. Risperdal. Catatonic. Dr. Berringer's bloodshot eyes. The night unfolding on the ghostly twelfth floor. Chloe's sunken eye sockets. Jason's budding goatee. Purple. Purple. Hospital art projects. Sisters. Art quilt. Candy's art quilt: numbers, letters, suns. Daneesha's quilt:
FUCK THIS SHIT
.

Numbers, letters, suns.

I stop. The soft wind whistles, swaying the pines. Numbers and letters—of course.
A limousine took her!

“Holy shit.”

Mike stops short. “What? Did you pull something?”

“Why didn't I think of it before?”

He wipes his sopping forehead with his sleeve. “Zoe, what are you talking about?”

“Numbers and letters,” I tell him. “It's a license plate.”