by Sandra Block
End of September, but they’re still calling it that. It doesn’t even feel like fall. More like a gorgeous summer day, the air warm, almost sticky. Most of the attendees are wandering around in shorts, lugging Windbreakers they brought just in case. Mike is wearing a frayed polo shirt and cargo shorts. I take his hand and can tell he is pleasantly surprised. I’m not usually the PDA type, but he does look extra-adorable today. We pass by a corn stand, and Mike picks up an ear of dried Indian corn, spattered with shiny russet, black, and white-yellow beads. I try not to think about how many people have touched that same corn and the number of germs amassed on each kernel.
“How much?” he asks.
“One dollar each, five for the bunch,” the man answers, wrinkling his forehead into three distinct lines.
Mike pulls out a five. “I was thinking Samantha might like it,” he tells me.
“She’s visiting?”
“Columbus Day.”
“Yeah, she’ll love it,” I agree. He dotes on Samantha, his niece, which is wonderful of course. But it worries me a bit. I’m not really the having-children type, and we haven’t quite gotten around to discussing that yet. We walk on to the next booth, lined with pumpkins with happy, rouge-cheeked, painted-on faces.
“How much for one of these?” I ask, pointing to one of the pumpkins.
“Five dollars,” the woman answers.
“Okay.” I’m getting out my wallet when a little figurine catches my eye. A ceramic ghost and scarecrow sitting on a bale of hay, their arms around each other. A dizzy memory washes over me then, of Scotty in a white sheet with one eyehole bigger than the other and me dressed as a scarecrow, the straw scratching my wrists. My mom is taking a picture (back when they still used film) while my dad pours the candy out into a big, blue bowl. “Come on, please! Hurry up!” we are begging them. “It’ll be over soon!”
I turn the glazed piece in my hands. “This one?”
“Ten dollars,” she answers.
“Is that for you?” Mike asks.
“No.” I hand her the money. “For Jane.”
“Your patient?”
“Uh-huh.”
He pauses, cocking his head. “That’s actually really nice.”
“Gee, thanks. I have my moments.”
As we walk on, I spy a cotton candy stand in the distance and enter a full-fledged debate with myself. Pros: I want cotton candy. Cons: sticky hands, uncomfortably full feeling. Pros: all those colors, so fluffy. Cons: no redeeming value whatsoever, pure sugar. I subtly change our trajectory toward the cotton candy.
“What do you think about her anyway?” I ask.
“About who?”
“Jane.”
He answers with a head shake. “Way above my pay grade.”
“Yeah, I guess. I just wish I knew who she was.” I run my fingers over a bright multicolor wool sweater. Bulky golds, eggplant, wine-red threads. Something Mike would never wear. “So I called you this morning. Where were you?”
His sneakers kick up some pebbles. “I don’t know. When did you call?”
“Like, eight?” We walk past scarecrows made out of corn husks. “I figured you were at the gym.”
“No.” He crinkles his eyes, trying to remember. “Actually, I did get a call, but it was blocked. That was you?”
“Oh yeah, sorry. I forgot. I always block it now. Last week a patient got my number. He was giving me hourly reports on his mood.”
Mike lets out a loud chortle, catching stares. His bearish laugh matches him perfectly, with his broad shoulders that could veer into padding if it weren’t for the gym. “He was depressed, I take it?”
“More like OCD. He was just obsessed with his mood. He would give me ten-scale updates, with decimals. Like, ‘I think I’m a 5.4 today, which is better than yesterday. Yesterday I was a 4.8.’ He was getting into the hundredths place when I told him my number changed and he had to page me.”
“Zoe, Zoe, Zoe. Always an entertaining viewpoint on life.”
I decide to take this as a compliment. “How about you? What’s your mood today?”
“Hmmm.” He pretends to think. “8.2.”
“Not an 8.3?”
“Maybe. Just talking to you puts me at a 9.4.”
“That’s called mood elevation. I charge good money for that.”
“Right,” he guffaws. “You’re a resident. You’re not charging good money for shit.”
Finally we are nearing the cotton candy. “You want any? My treat. Guaranteed 9.5.”
He gives me a look. “Seriously? I just finished breakfast.”
“Your loss. One pink one, please.” I plunk down two dollars and am rewarded with a cloud of pale-pink goodness. We pass more pumpkin faces. “Oh,” I say with disappointment, looking ahead.
“What?”
“Candy apples. I love candy apples.” I pluck off a wad of cotton candy. “Should have held out.”
“Yes, that is tragic. Back to an 8.3?”
Laughing, I slug him, and we head to the next booth, by a clump of coneflowers that are past bloom, the centers rusted and petals scraggly and wilted. The scarecrow-ghost duo crinkles in my plastic bag.
A present for Jane, who doesn’t know it’s Oktoberfest. Who isn’t going to be a ghost, a scarecrow, or even a princess this Halloween. Who is staring in a blank hospital room, not outside at this picture-perfect day with a bright blue sky and not a cloud in sight.
* * *
Arthur greets me with a full-frontal attack, socking me in the solar plexus, then latching on to my right thigh and humping me like it’s the first night of his honeymoon.
Arthur is my dog, a psychotic labradoodle who came out on the shallow end of both gene pools. Let’s just say he misses me a lot when I’m away. Arthur was supposed to be my brother’s dog. Scotty brought him home from the SPCA when Mom was dying, without having fully researched whether or not his apartment allowed pets. So needless to say, he soon became my hand-me-down. Scotty babysits at least. He walks him on his lunch and sleeps over if Mike and I are both on call.
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.
Upcoming Nuptials
Jean Luc and Melanie
Saturday, April 15
Paris, France
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 aga
in 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.
Chapter Four
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 bil
lows 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.