The Girl Without a Name (21 page)

Detective Adams gave me this Scotch my first year of residency, when I got stabbed by my patient. An odd get-well present, but nonetheless being put to good use now. Sitting at my mom's old rolltop desk, I endure another burning sip, when my phone rings.

It's Mike, requesting FaceTime.

I push the FaceTime button. “Hello,” I answer. The “o” in the hello seems to trail on forever.

“Hello to you.” He grins and leans back. I can see the front spikes of his brush cut. I love touching his brush cut. I told him he should charge people for the “sensory joy” this provides. He told me he's keeping his day job.

“How was the interview?”

“Fine,” he answers, nonchalant, perhaps too nonchalant. “What are you up to? You sound funny.”

I hold my drink up to the camera. “I am drinking myself into oblivion,” I say grandly.

“Sounds like fun. Any reason for such revelry?”

“Yes. I had a shit day.”

“You, too?”

“Yes, a shit week, actually. And I am giving this motherfucker a send-off with my finest bottle of Scotch.” I lift up the bottle now, an adult show-and-tell. “My only bottle of Scotch, I should add.”

“Yeah.” He yawns. “I'm doing the same with a beer.” He lifts up a green beer bottle with a red label. I don't recognize the brand. “It appears you're further along.”

“So what's the cause of your shit day?” I ask.

“Oh, this and this. You know.”

“Meaning you're not going to tell me.”

He chuckles and takes another sip. “Family stuff. It's a long, boring story which doesn't require analysis. How about yours?”

“A long, thrilling story which does require analysis. But if you don't share, I won't share.”

He nods, hunching forward. His face freezes in the screen, then starts moving again. “I'm coming back soon enough, so it'll be fine.”

“I can't wait to see you.” I take another fiery sip. “We are totally going to kiss each other.”

He smirks, a happy smirk. “How many drinks did you say you had?”

“Three. Possibly four. I got confused about the finger thing.”

“Okay, got it. Well, I have an idea. Why don't you call me back tomorrow when you're sober?”

“I
like
that idea,” I say with enthusiasm.

“
All right
,” he returns with mock enthusiasm. There's the teeniest scratch on his forehead. Probably from bumping into something. We tall people are always bumping into things. He lifts his beer bottle. “Cheers, Zoe.”

“
L'chaim
,” I answer back. We hang up, and I wonder if I should have said “I love you.” Cogitating over this one, I manage to spill my nearly empty Scotch on some papers. Arthur jogs over and proceeds to lick every drop that made it to the floor. This strikes me as a good idea. He might be self-medicating. Grabbing a paper towel, I start wiping off the wood grain desk and open up one of the drawers to make sure nothing seeped through. But when I go to close it again, it sticks.

“Damn.” I push harder but it's blocked somewhere, so I pull the whole drawer out and peer in, my head spinning with the motion. There seems to be a wooden slat in there—a false drawer maybe? I get down on my knees and shove my hand in, pushing the wooden piece down and reaching into the tiny space.

My fingers grasp some sort of paper, an envelope perhaps, and I retract my arm slowly so as not to tear it. Lifting it up to view, I see it is indeed an envelope, an oversized envelope folded in half and sealed shut. When I tear it open, two stiff papers come into view.

Mint-green papers, each with a picture of Uncle Sam, and each for one hundred thousand dollars. The magical Treasury bonds.

Well, I'll be damned.

W
hen I walk in, the sound of the coffee grinder bores a hole right into my skull. I wander over to my usual settee and sit down, immediately fishing in my purse for some Motrin.

“Hey, what's up?” Scotty says, wandering over, then takes a closer look at me. “You look like shit. What, do you have the flu?” He backs up a step. “Don't come near me if you've got the fucking flu, man, because I seriously don't need that shit right now.”

“Calm down, I don't have the flu. I'm just hungover.”

“Oh,” he answers, surprised. “Okay then. Hope it was worth it.”

“Not really. Scotty, listen, I need to tell you something.” I point to the chair next to me. “Can you sit down?”

“Um, no, I can't sit down. Because if you didn't notice, I'm actually at work and—”

“Scotty.” I shush him, reaching into my purse again. I pull out the unsealed envelope. “Look inside.”

He takes the envelope with some hesitation, pulling out the paper like it might bite him. His face transforms then, from a look of wary apprehension to one of shock. Shock and glee. “No fucking way,” he says, almost in a whisper.

“Yes,” I answer with a smile. “Yes fucking way.”

“This is…” He searches for a word and doesn't find it. “I can't fucking believe this. Where did you find it?”

“In Mom's rolltop. It had a false drawer.”

“I can't…it's just…I knew it. I just knew it.”

“Yeah, I know. You were right all along. There were two of them in there. One for you, one for me.”

“And you thought I was crazy,” he says, half to himself.

I shrug. “Well, that is my training bias.”

“I can't even…” He sits down, speechless, the paper trembling in his hand.

“Hey, you all right?” I put a hand on his arm.

“Yeah.” But when he looks up at me, his eyes are wet. He brushes his tears off with some impatience. “This is crazy. I should be happy. I
am
happy. It's just…I don't know.”

“It's a lot to take in,” I say, shifting from sister to psychiatrist mode. Or maybe I'm just being both.

“Yeah,” he answers, taking in a deep breath. “It sure is.” He folds his arms across his chest, his lightning-bolt tattoo peeking out from under his shirt. “It's, like, her last words to me or something. It's hard to explain, but I knew she was trying to tell me something. I knew it was important to her.”

The grinder starts up again, and my head throbs, though the Motrin is slowly kicking in. “Maybe she wanted to know we'd be taken care of, when she couldn't be there anymore.”

Scotty nods, then smooths out the bond, staring at it again.

“Any ideas what you'll do with yours?” I ask.

“No,” he says, still dazed. “No clue at all.”

“Quit this place?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Well, we have time to think about it, for sure.”

He turns to me. “What about you? Have you thought of anything?”

“Oh, definitely.” All morning I've been smiling at the thought. Even with a massive hangover, still smiling. “Dr. Goldman,” I say in an announcer's voice, “is going to pay off her loans and go for a fellowship.”

“Third person, huh?”

I laugh.

“No, that's good.” He fiddles with the paper. “A fellowship in what?”

“Yeah,” I falter, “that's the question.”

Scotty stands up, then sighs. “Anyway, from the sublime to the ridiculous, got to get back to work.” He looks at the Treasury bond in his hand, not sure what to do with it.

“I can take it if you want,” I offer. “I was going to put it in the safety deposit box.”

“You have a safety deposit box?” he asks, skeptical. And since I'm not ultra-organized, I can see why he might be.

“Yeah. Well, it's Mike's, actually,” I admit. “But when he gets back…”

“I'll keep it,” he says, then lowers his voice. “I'll put it back in the safe for now.” Then he gives me a smile, the brightest smile I've seen on him in quite some time, and walks off. I lie back gingerly on the settee and open my RITE review book. I'm not due in the hospital until four p.m. for Candy's ECT, so I have plenty of hours to kill.

And I am, to put it mildly, dreading it.

“I still can't fucking believe it!” Scotty shouts into the phone.

My head pounds with his voice, and I turn the Bluetooth volume down. My hangover is still lingering despite another handful of Motrin and more than my fair share of coffee. This is the third time Scotty called with an idea about how he's going to spend his first million, or first hundred thousand in any case. I pull into an empty corner of the parking lot. The whole resident lot is dotted with just a handful of cars, for all of us unlucky on-call residents. The afternoon is cold, the sky fading to a lavender before nightfall.

“I was thinking about a start-up, maybe.”

“In what?”

“Well, I've been kicking around a bunch of ideas,” he answers vaguely. “Kristy's going to help me put together a business plan.”

“Oh, that's good.” A business plan for a bunch of ideas.

We hang up, and I make my way over to the lobby and then up to the eleventh floor after what feels like a day's hike. When I get to the room, my head still hurts and my stomach is queasy. Dr. Berringer, on the other hand, looks fresh as a flower, an irony that's not lost on me. The procedure room is a cold, pale-yellow box of a room with a border of lemon-yellow diamonds meant to cheer up the place, but the tattered corners only lend to the gloom.

Candy is stationed on the bed, stiff and foreign in this new room like a piece of moved furniture, her navy blanket lying across her like a shroud. Out of the bottom of the blanket, her foot pokes through, toes dotted with stubble. I can just hear Daneesha now. “Girl, you got to get me a razor. This shit is
nasty
.”

We all stand around the room waiting for the anesthesiologist, who is late as usual. My legs are tired from standing. A peek at my watch says it's five p.m. So we've been waiting over an hour.

“You follow football, Zoe?” His voice is excruciatingly cheerful.

“Not really.”

He grins, cracking his knuckles. “The Saints are a-marching. This is the year.”

Nobody comments on this, and the pale-yellow silence grows. Candy is still as stone and as silent. She's stopped moaning for now.

“When was the last ETA?” Dr. Berringer asks.

“Dr. Munroe said fifteen minutes,” Nancy answers. “But that was fifteen minutes ago.”

“Oh,” Dr. Berringer says, reaching into his pocket. “Just got a text.” He throws his head back. “Stuck in traffic. He guesses an hour and a half longer.”

“An hour and a half?” Nancy groans.

“He's coming in from Dunkirk,” he explains.

“Oh, yeah,” Nancy says. “I heard it's snowing pretty bad out there.”

“Well, what do you think?” he asks me. “Break for now?”

“I'll help wheel her back,” I offer. Nancy and I stash the ECT machine away and steer Candy back to her room. The wheels squeak rhythmically against the newly washed floor. Her room feels like home. Though it's no home really, she looks more comfortable here at least. Her scarecrow figurine, her self-portraits, and
Gulliver's Travels
, with its wrinkled, cracked spine, sits like a relic on the table. When I adjust her blanket, the tang of old sweat whiffs out.

Dr. Berringer walks into the room then. He's out of his lab coat now and puts his arm into his leather jacket sleeve. “I'm going to grab some dinner. You want to come?”

“No, I'm fine, thanks.”

He stands there, staring at Candy with me a moment. The wind wails outside, making the window casing creak. “Zoe, I'm sorry about yesterday. I shouldn't have yelled at you like that. I've just been under a huge amount of stress.”

I keep my eyes on Candy. “That's okay. I know I'm not exactly the easiest resident.”

“No, never think that, Zoe. You should never just listen to what anyone says. You stick up for your patients. That's what you're supposed to do.” He smiles at me. “You're going to be an excellent psychiatrist. I mean it.”

I fight a smile. I've always been a sucker for praise—a fact I'm not proud of.

“This case,” he mutters, like that explains it all, and in a way, it does. “Come with me to dinner. Let me make it up to you. My treat.”

“Oh, all right.” I have no energy left to argue. We walk to the nurses' station, and I hang up my lab coat next to Dr. Berringer's and grab my coat. The nurses are changing shift, all colors of scrubs milling around, rubber clogs and white sneakers. The buzz of activity cheers me up a mite.

“So where are we going for dinner?” I ask.

I didn't realize how hungry I was. We sit in a little blue booth by the window, me scarfing down fried noodles like I've just been rescued from a month in the woods.

Dr. Berringer assesses me with clinical interest. “You sure aren't one of those salad gals, are you?” The waitress hands him his soup, and he rubs his hands together with anticipation. The wind keeps up a steady howl outside, the pines swaying in the distance.

“So,” he says, “how's your last year going?”

“Good.”

“You doing a fellowship? You're a natural in peds.”

I know this is untrue. “I'm not sure. I was thinking addiction maybe.”

“Addiction?” he asks, surprised.

“Yeah,” I answer. “Why? Do you think that's a bad idea?”

“No, no. It's just, most of the people I know that went into that fellowship were kind of…different…”

And no doubt he's had more than a passing acquaintance with many of them. “‘Different' is something I've been called once or twice before.”

“Hear, hear,” he says. “To different.” He raises his mini-teacup in a toast. I can envision many a bleary “hear, hear” in his past. The waitress comes by with the tray, and he digs right into his lo mein, using chopsticks expertly. I slather some plum sauce on my moo shoo pancake.

“I hope this doesn't go on too long,” I say. “My dog is probably going crazy.”

“Oh yeah? What kind of dog?” He wipes his mouth.

“A labradoodle.”

He swallows another large bite. “Champ?”

“Good memory. But no, that was years ago. His name is Arthur.” I shrug. “I don't know, my brother named him. Thought it sounded refined.”

He laughs.

“It's better than Sizzle. That was my last dog. Black cocker spaniel.”

“Sizzle?” he asks.

“Yeah, my mom named her. Said she was like a firecracker.” We got her after my dad was killed in the car accident. With everything else she had to deal with, Lord knows what my mom was thinking, but it helped, as much as anything can help two kids who lose their father in high school. Little Sizzle, gazing at the gangly, sad-eyed girl that was me, and giving my cheek a sandpapery lick. The memory attacks me without warning, and my eyes fill up. I take a breath to steady myself. I really don't need to break down right now, over a moo shoo pancake.

“Zoe?” he asks, his eyes the color of denim in the shadow of the restaurant lighting. “You okay?”

I nod but don't speak. A yes might morph into a sob. I backhand my tears, but more are coming. I blow into the scratchy cloth napkin.

“It's okay, Zoe,” he says quietly. Like a friend, not a psychiatrist. “It's about your mom?”

I nod again.

He doesn't say anything for a second, then clears this throat. “I know.” He looks down at the table. “When my mom passed, it was…”—he pauses, resting both elbows on the table—“really hard. That's all I can say. I think she was the only one who ever really understood me.” He shifts his hand to my arm. The touch is solid, warm.

“Thanks,” I say.

We eat the rest of the meal in a semi-comfortable silence, until we finish our last little cups of tea and he glances at his watch. He sighs, almost ruefully. “It's about that time.”

As we leave the restaurant, we are plunged straight into a wall of cold wind. The kind of wind that makes you gulp for breath and bury your face into your coat. Dr. Berringer reaches for his phone and has to scream above the howling wind.

“Yeah?” It comes out muffled. A napkin leaps up from the parking lot, twirls around and falls, and then gets swept up again. As we climb up into his black Jeep, I have to yank the door against the wind to shut it. Once in the car, we both sit a minute, assembling ourselves in the sudden silence. The car doors rattle.

“Wow,” I say.

“Fifty-mile-an-hour winds, the news said.” He pulls the car into reverse. “The case is back on. Dr. Munroe finally got in. It's up to you if you want to stay or not. I know it's getting late.”

“Oh, no, I'll stay,” I answer, though I feel bad for Arthur, who has probably eaten through the crate by now. I'll call Scotty to let him out. My phone quacks, and I don't recognize the number, so I answer.

“Hello, is this Zoe?”

“Yes?”

“Hi, this is Andy.”

I pause, trying to place the voice. Andy?

“Andy, from the lab,” he says, miffed that I possibly didn't remember him. It comes back to me now. Tattoo sleeve. “Proud Mary.” “Oh, right!” I aim for medical student contrite. “Sorry, it's been a crazy day.”

“Listen, I got that blood tox that you brought to me.”

“Oh, really? I thought they said that was lost.”

“You just didn't speak to the right person,” he says with braggadocio. “You got a pen?”

“Sure,” I lie.

“Okay, here goes. Negative for benzos. Negative for THC. Negative for alcohol. Opioids negative.”