The Girl Without a Name

by Sandra Block

  “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 screes 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.

  ZOE IS GAY, ANNOYING, OBNOXOUS [sic] AND UGLY.

  SIGNED, THE ENTIRE 5TH GRADE CLASS

  P.S. WE WOULDN’T CARE IF YOU DIED

  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.

  Chapter Five

  The 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 l
ike 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.

  Chapter Six

  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.”