The Girl Without a Name (4 page)

T
he girl is in a cave.

“Jane!” I follow her deeper into the cold, damp air. Her footsteps echo as she runs from me. “Jane!” My voice rings off the walls. The air is pitch black, darker than night. I can't see my hands. “I want to help you! Jane! Stop!”

All at once, the footsteps slow down, and I do, too. Sweat turns cold on my neck. Then the footsteps stop, so I stop and listen. I reach out my hands like a blind person.

“Jane?”

I hear us breathing. My breath is short from running. As I reach out again, I touch something. Fabric, a shirt? It's damp. Her breathing gets louder, and I feel hot air on my cheek. She is whispering something to me. I lean in closer and just make out the words.

“It wasn't a cigarette.”

My heart clenches in my chest as I sit up, my eyes darting around the room. A moment of panic, disorientation. I'm in the laundry room of my old house, in the fire again. I'm trying to find my birth mom. No, I'm running in a cave.

Where am I?

Slowly the fear recedes as familiar forms take shape. The outline of my lamp, the spine of a book jutting out, my fuzzy blue robe thrown over a chair. I'm in my bedroom, not a fire, not a cave. Arthur whines, then nestles into the back of my knee. The dog has successfully maneuvered his way between me and Mike yet again. I consider waking Mike but remember he's got to be up at 4:30 a.m. for work, so I let him sleep.

My heart slows back down, and I take a deep breath, like Sam taught me to do. I haven't had nightmares in a while now, not since I was dreaming about my birth mother dying in the fire. I'm not used to it. I lie there with my brain buzzing for some time and finally glance over at the clock.

Three a.m.

Getting up, I'm about to hit the medicine cabinet for my Xanax when I remember I don't have Xanax anymore and lie back down. After what feels like another hour but is only twenty-three minutes, I reach over and grab my iPad. Arthur moves down to my feet and puts all forty-five pounds on them. I type “missing african american girls” in the search engine, which brings up pages of headshots. Fifty smiling girls. Like photos from an all-girls-school yearbook, but of missing, not graduating, girls. I scroll through them all, but there's no picture of Jane.

“Hey,” Mike says, his voice rough with sleep. He is squinting his eyes, his face a ghostly white in the glow off the iPad. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry.” I tilt down the screen. “I was just looking at something.”

“At three in the morning?”

“I can't sleep. I had a nightmare.”

“Oh.” He frowns. “About the fire again?”

“No, actually. About Jane.”

He rubs his eyes. “What are you looking at?”

“Don't worry. Go back to sleep.”

“No.” He yawns. “I'm okay.” Mike is so perpetually sleep-deprived I've seen him catnap on his feet before. He moves toward me, and Arthur woofs.

“It's a website for missing people.”

“Huh.” He props up his pillow. “Wasn't Scotty doing that facial recognition thing?”

“Yeah, but he's slow.” I show him the screen. The banner is in bold letters:
BLACK AND MISSING, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
. We watch as the website rolls through a slide show of missing African Americans, each one with a blurb underneath. A young woman in a purple scarf, her hand leaning against a tree trunk. A teenager with baby-pink heart earrings. An eighth-grade boy in a gold graduation cap.

“It's all African Americans?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I point to the mission statement at the bottom: “To bring equal coverage and resources to people of all races.” They might not get
Dateline
, but at least they get this. We wait out the slide show. No Jane.

“Go to bed, Zoe. We'll figure it out in the morning.”

On the bottom of the page, they give instructions on sending in a picture of your own “loved one.” My fingers debate for an instant. Mike turns his back toward me and immediately starts snoring again. I linger on the submit button. It's not a good idea. Logically, I know this. It's a HIPAA violation and more, and if Dr. Berringer or Detective Adams ever got wind of it, that would be lights-out for Probation Girl.

As quietly as I can, I transfer the photo of Jane as well as her scar from my phone, write up a no-frills blurb without revealing any sensitive information (which isn't hard, since I don't know any), and hit send. Probation be damned. I have to find out who this girl is.

Lying back down, I stare at the ceiling for a while, the shadows morphing into faces. I turn to one side, then the other, then readjust my pillow. All insomnia tricks that don't work. Then, just in case, I reach my hand down, feeling around under the sheets to investigate whether Mike might be awake or possibly interested in being so.

“What are you doing?” he asks, sleep in his voice.

“Oh, nothing,” I mutter, moving my hand. But he pulls my wrist back where it was, and it appears he is fully awake and, indeed,
very
interested. As I start stroking him, he reaches over to me, his warm hand spiraling in slow circles on my stomach, descending lower and lower, slower and slower, until he hits the bull's-eye. And I purr and relax, deciding insomnia isn't such a bad thing after all.

A
cardinal darts by the window, bouncing on a branch like a spring. I squint my eyes at the glare through the glass. “The Lexapro isn't helping.”

“Hmm.” Sam tugs at his chin, which I just notice has the finest five o'clock brown shadow.

“You're growing back your goatee?”

“Oh yeah,” he admits, his face tingeing pink.

“I like it.”

“Thanks,” he says, giving it a quick scratch. “But back to what you were saying.”

“Yes, I think it's not helping because it's not depression.”

“You're saying it feels like ADHD.”

“Yes. And I have carried the diagnosis since age six.”

He folds his hands together. “How are the other things in your life?”

“Like what?”

“Anything going on with Mike, for instance?”

I slump down in the sofa chair. “No, not really. He's good.” I fail to mention my ex's upcoming nuptials, though. I pick up the miniature rake, which makes a pleasant scraping noise in the sand. I rake rows of lines, bird tracks. “I had a nightmare last night. About Jane.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Took me forever to get back to sleep. I almost wished I had some Xanax.” Sam and I had both agreed to stop Xanax when I developed an overfondness of them for nightmares, anxiety, and any other minor ill.

“I don't think it's the best idea, do you?” he asks.

I cross my legs. “No, probably not.”

“With your family history and all.” By this he means my
biological
family history, strewn with meth addicts and heroin fiends, not to mention garden-variety alcoholics.

“It's just this patient really gets to me for some reason.”

“Jane?” he asks. “Or does she have a name yet?”

“No, still Jane. And I can't shake the feeling that there's something huge, right in front of my face. Some way to help her that I'm missing.”

“You started the benzos?”

“Ativan.”

“And it didn't help?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe you just need to push the dose?”

“We are,” I say. “Too slow for my liking. But then, I've never been the paragon of patience.”

He laughs, then clears his throat. Not to offend or anything. A flash of red sweeps by the window, and then there are two cardinals sitting on the branch. The blood-red male and the duller, gray-red female. On a date maybe, or I suppose they could be just friends.

“You can only do so much, Zoe,” he says. “They don't give us magic wands.”

“I know.” I trace spirals in the sand. “But I just feel like, I don't know, I need to help her. I mean, I want to help all my patients, of course. But this one's different.”

“I see.” He looks at me. “Any idea why this patient may be affecting you more than others?” He waits a moment but I have no answer. “Do you see any connection maybe, between yourself and her?”

“Connection?” I ponder this as deeply as my dopamine-depleted brain allows. “Well, she's my patient.” Even I know this is a lame attempt, more evidence that all my neurons are not firing at full throttle.

He nods to be encouraging, then starts twiddling his thumbs. This is Sam's tell. He twiddles when he's waiting for me to make a breakthrough. After two years now, I can read the guy. He's old-school psychiatry, all Socratic method and waiting for me to hit my own breakthroughs. Though sometimes I wish he'd just stop playing the psychiatrist from
Ordinary People
and tell me already. “Anything strike you about her identity maybe?”

“Her identity?”

“Yes.”

I stare at him in confusion. “What about her identity? She
has
no identity.”

“Right.”

I shrug my shoulders. “And?”

“And?” he repeats, drawing me out.

“And so what?”

“A little girl who doesn't know her identity? Sound familiar?”

My mouth opens. Of course. He's referring to my own identity crisis. In my first year of psychiatry, when I discovered the truth about my birth mother and my adopted mother. My poor mom, in the final throes of dementia, lying rail-thin on a nursing home bed, smelling of urine and not sure who she was, let alone who I was. My mom, who lost her own identity before she died.

He glances up quickly at the clock above my head. “Okay, Zoe. How about this? Let's wait another week. See if the Lexapro increase does anything. It can take some time. And if not, we can go up on the Adderall.” He pauses. “But it's not a bottomless pit. At some point, the cardiovascular risks outweigh the benefits.”

“I understand.”

Sam stands up and pulls out his phone, and I pull out mine, like we're facing off for an iPhone duel. “I'm off next week for Yom Kippur,” he says.

“Oh, right, glad you reminded me.” I type this into my calendar. “What temple do you belong to?” I've never seen him at Beth Zion, my temple. I forgot to ask Scotty if he's coming this year. It'll be our first Yom Kippur without Mom, though she wasn't exactly compos mentis for the last one.

“Beth Zedek,” he answers.

“Oh well, la-di-da. Conservative…a
real
Jew.”

He laughs, thin wrinkle lines fanning out from his eyes, which I've never noticed before. “
L'shana tova
, Zoe,” he says.

“
L'shana tova
,” I answer back, hoping it will indeed be a happy new year.

“I feel like she's trying to tell me something through the dream.”

“Yeah, that you're fucking crazy,” Scotty answers. He leans back in the chair and yawns.

I am sitting in my favorite eggplant-covered settee by the fireplace, though it's superfluous in this Indian summer weather. I drain the last of my iced cappuccino, rattling the bronzed ice cubes. Scotty works here at the Coffee Spot, my home away from home since I came back to Buffalo. He started the job after flunking out of the University at Buffalo. I used to wonder how on earth anyone could fail out of college. Now I'm more forgiving on the matter.

Eddie, his coworker, walks by and gives me a wave with the dishrag, then scurries back to the front to take care of a customer. Eddie is a paradox of sorts: fit from yoga, tattooed, and ponytailed, but bumbling and diffident to the point of monosyllabic. I take another sip of my iced cappuccino, forgetting I've drained it, and put the cup down.

“So, nothing?”

“Not nothing. One hit.” He hands me her picture, printed off the computer. “It's just she happens to be an exchange student from Nigeria.”

“In Houston, no less.” I examine the picture, which is off a website from her high school. She's a freshman.

“So I gotta doubt she's your girl.”

I fold the paper in quarters. “It's worth a phone call anyway.”

“Whatever.”

“What do you mean, whatever?”

“Do you possibly recognize a pattern here?” Scotty scratches under his Sabres cap. “This bizarre need to become obsessed with your patients?”

“It's called doing my job.”

“Yeah, sure,” he snorts. “Remember that fucking psychopathic lady? That ended well.”

“
She
was obsessed with
me
,” I argue, while he glances ahead at the melting numbers on the Dali clock to check the time left in his break. “Speaking of obsession, how is the great hunt for the Treasury bonds going?”

When Mom was spiraling into her dementia, she mentioned that Dad might have stashed away some Treasury bonds and she might have forgotten where they were.
Might
being the operative word here, because there
might
not have actually been any such bonds to begin with. But she became obsessed with finding them, and now Scotty's convinced there's gobs and gobs of money out there, just laid to waste.

“Crappy,” he says. “I haven't found shit.”

I shake my ice cubes. “Maybe that's because they don't actually exist.”

“Yeah, so you've told me a million times.”

“I'm consistent.”

He takes a sip of his own iced cappuccino. “You know, Zoe, I know you think I'm a fucking idiot, et cetera, et cetera, and maybe the whole thing's one big circle jerk, and maybe she was just demented and delusional and whatever psychobabble shit you want to call her, but I promised her on her fucking deathbed I would look for the bonds, and I'm looking for the bonds. All right?”

“All right, jeez.” I break out my RITE review book.

Scotty pulls his straw in and out of the drink with an annoying squeak, not responding. I agree that it would be nice if there were money lying around. I'd be able to do a fellowship instead of hitting the streets to pay off my loans. It would be nice if we had world peace and an end to world hunger. It would also be nice if Mom were still alive. There are a lot of things that would be nice.

Scotty tosses his drink in the garbage with a well-practiced wrist flip, garners his two points, then gets up. “Back to work.”

“Hey, before you go. Just take a quick look at this.” I hold the phone up for him to see, and he bends down.

“Zoe, man, that's fucking disgusting.”

“What? It's just a scar.”

He shakes his head without answering and heads to the counter, grabbing an apron. I glance down at my RITE review book, but before making the commitment to open the thing, decide to check in on the Black and Missing website first. No comments under Jane's picture, just “Thank you. We received your picture and will do our best to help find your loved one.” Deciding I'm all out of excuses, I open my review book. Question number one:

Of course, the question is on catatonia. Apparently, God is making jokes now.

Unfortunately for Jane, the answer is
d
: all of the above. But that still doesn't answer the real question, the question that won't be in my review book: Who is she, and what is she doing here?

“Hi, Zoe.”

I look up to see Dr. Berringer standing there.

“Oh, hi.” I stand up, too.

“This is my wife, Trudy,” he says. She takes my hand like a queen. Trudy Berringer is pretty, if in a manufactured way. Boob-job, fake-blond, tanning-booth pretty. She has “former debutante” written all over her.

“You come here a lot?” he asks. His eyes look gray against his sweater.

“Oh, yeah, well, my brother works here.” I point over to him, and Scotty gives a polite wave from afar.

“We were just walking by,” he says, and Trudy nods her agreement. “Nice place,” he comments, taking it in. We all stand there staring at each other. It strikes me that we really have nothing to talk about. I can't exactly ask about Jane in the middle of the coffeehouse. Nor can I reveal that, oh, by the way, I posted her picture on a missing persons website and unfortunately got no hits yet. “Well, we're going to grab something.” He points up to the register.

“Right, right. I'll see you later.”

“Nice to meet you,” Trudy says.

I sit back down on my settee and open my book while Eddie takes their order. Number two:

I circle
e
, then steal a glance over at the Berringer couple. They're sitting in the corner in the glare of a sunny window, sipping coffees. Both are watching the traffic from opposite sides of the table, not speaking. Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
starts playing. (Scotty threw out the Wagner after I complained about it enough, and now they play this ad nauseam. Management decision, he told me.) I look over at Tad and Trudy again.

Maybe it's just that you run out of things to say after years together. Maybe it's just companionable silence. Maybe, as a psychiatrist-in-training, I'm making too much of nonverbal clues. But as they sit there, staring past each other, I could swear they look unhappy.