The Girl Without a Name

by Sandra Block

  “Yes, hi, this is Zoe. Zoe Goldman. Dr. Goldman,” I add, for no obvious reason.

  There is a pause. “And how do you know this girl?” Jasmine asks.

  Like a Jewish-sounding white doctor knowing her friend Destiny seems a bit implausible. “Here’s the thing. I didn’t want to get into the whole thing on the website to protect her confidentiality and all.”

  “Okay.”

  “But she’s actually my patient. I’m her doctor. She came to the hospital because the police found her and she wouldn’t speak.”

  There is another pause as she processes this. “Okay,” she repeats. Her voice is full of doubt, like I might just be some crazy person trying to insinuate herself on a missing persons case. The amateur-sleuth type. And my coked-up, Adderall-enthused messages from yesterday probably didn’t help matters.

  “Um, she is talking now, actually. But she still doesn’t know her name. She doesn’t know who she is at all.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Weird yes, but not unheard of. Likely she’s been through some kind of shock or trauma maybe.”

  “And so you think she got amnesia?”

  “Sort of.”

  She pauses. “Sounds like some kind of soap opera.”

  I laugh. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  My laugh wakes up Arthur, who launches on a mad dash around the family room, knocking over last night’s wineglass in the process. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s my dog, I mean.” I grab a paper towel. At least it was white wine. Arthur spilled an entire bottle of red last month, and the place looked like a crime scene.

  “Well,” she says. It sounds like she’s deciding whether to trust me or not. “She does look like Destiny. And she would be the right age and everything.”

  “Yes.” I’m dabbing the carpet with a paper towel, which Arthur keeps trying to grab like I’m playing a game of keep-away, unaware he’s at the top of my shit list.

  “Who knows?” she goes on. “Maybe she did go through some kind of trauma with him.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Her sister’s boyfriend. Maybe he holed up in Buffalo. Not that far from Philly.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  There is another pause on the phone, where I guess she makes the decision to trust me. “How you want to handle this?” she asks.

  I think a minute. “Could I have her call you?” Maybe just hearing her friend’s voice could jog her memory.

  “What, from the hospital?”

  “Yeah.”

  She pauses. “I guess I could do that. I don’t see a problem with that.”

  “How old are you anyway?” I ask. “You seem pretty mature for your voice.”

  She laughs. “Fifteen. We was twelve when she went missing. Well, I was thirteen, ’cause I got held back.”

  The math fits, age-wise. We set up a time for the phone call, and I take a last gulp of now-chilly coffee and grab my keys. I was running a little late before, but now I’m undeniably so.

  Another golden moment for Probation Girl.

  * * *

  Jane was in physical therapy today so our threesome took a group trek to the PT room, only to find out she was having therapy outside today. We exit the lobby to a cool but sunny autumn day. Cars roll by in front of us like a parade, discharging wincing, bent-over passengers for the ER or picking up smiling but still slow-moving patients from their wheelchairs to go home at last.

  Jane is farther up ahead in a wheelchair (unneeded, but I’m assuming hospital regulations prevailed) with Jeremy, the physical therapist. We walk over, past the gaggle of smokers—all wearing scrubs, incidentally—with Dominic among them. He may or may not be flirting with one of the female nurses. He glances up when we pass, and we pretend not to see each other. I notice Jason not noticing him, too. Finally we reach Jane, the sweet sound of her laughter ringing out. It’s a sound I’ve never heard from her before. Jeremy is popping wheelies with her wheelchair on a sunny patch of grass.

  “Hello there,” Dr. Berringer says.

  Jane beams up at us.

  “We thought we’d play hooky and have a session outside today,” Jeremy says. He is handsome in the typical physical-therapist mold. Brush cut, square jaw, perfectly proportioned muscles in his golf shirt with the hospital logo on the chest. “And I think we’ve just about graduated PT. She can walk up and down thirty feet. Actually, she beat me in the last five races.”

  Jane looks down at the grass, smiling.

  “I think OT is still doing some work on writing, getting those hands back into fighting shape.” He grabs her hand and wiggles it teasingly, and she grins again. (I’m sensing a crush on said physical therapist.)

  “That sounds positive,” Dr. Berringer says.

  A gust of wind rushes by, and the smokers huddle, while Jane pulls her blanket over her lap.

  “Getting cold?” Jeremy asks.

  “A little,” Jane admits. “But I don’t mind. Let’s stay out here just a little longer?”

  “Why not?” He stretches his back, his chest straining the buttons of the polo. “It’s good to get some sun.”

  The wind picks up again, whispering through the papery, dried-out, pink petals of the hydrangea bush in the planter. The base is littered with cigarette butts. A long, black car pulls up, nearly as long as a limousine, and idles in the driveway. A girl and her mother get out and glance around nervously before heading in, with no obvious physical ailment. I wonder if this girl will be my next patient. The sun glints off the license plate, and a little girl in the back window waves slowly at us, a somber look on her face. The car pulls away, and Jane looks up at us.

  Her eyebrows are furrowed, and her face is different somehow, like she just awoke from a long slumber.

  “My name isn’t Jane,” she says. “It’s Candy.”

  * * *

  “So Jane has a name?” Mike takes a swig from his dark Dos Equis.

  “Jane has a name,” I say, delving into the chip dish again. “Jane is Candy.”

  “Don’t eat them all,” Mike says, whacking my hand.

  “We can get more,” I argue.

  “Fine, eat them all. Eat all of the chips. But don’t eat your hand.”

  My appetite has rebounded nicely with my Adderall back down. “So what do you think? Her name is Candy. The last thing she remembers is chasing a limousine.”

  “Hmm.” He dips a chip in guacamole. “A really bad prom experience?”

  “Ha, ha, ha.”

  He shrugs. “I’ve had my share. But I’ve got my pride, you know. I never actually chased after the limo.”

  “No last name still. But I did hear from Jasmine.” I take a long drink of margarita.

  “Jasmine?”

  “The girl from the Black and Missing website.”

  “Oh yeah. What did she have to say?”

  “She thought she could have been a girl named Destiny. Her friend who went missing, from Philadelphia.”

  Mike takes another chip. “Doesn’t sound like a fit.”

  “No, probably not. We’ll see.”

  A round of laughter floats over from the bar as we keep plowing through the chips. Mike taps his nearly empty beer bottle on the table. “So, about next year.”

  “Not to change the subject or anything,” I say.

  “Of course not.” He spins the bottle. “Any thoughts?”

  “Thoughts? Lots of thoughts. Just no concrete decisions.”

  “Uh-huh.” A man with a sizzling platter swoops by us and on to a different table. “The thing is, they’re talking about jobs now. So I really do need to figure this out. Jeff told me he could pretty much guarantee me a job at the County.”

  “That’s good.”

  “But some of that depends on your decision, you know? I could just as easily go with that urgent-care center in North Carolina, where Mom is.”

  I nod. “I just don’t know. Fellowship-wise. Definitely not child psych. Tha
t I know. And I was thinking maybe addiction, but Jason told me the burnout rate is through the roof. And geriatrics is just too depressing.” I slurp my margarita. “I don’t know.”

  “You could do a year of practice and figure it out?”

  Mike, the ever-practical. “Yeah. The fellowship thing may be a moot point anyway. My loans aren’t going anywhere, so maybe it’s time to just face the music.”

  He scrapes the bottom of the basket for some chips. “One more year of loans won’t kill you. And I could help out,” he adds in a quiet voice, “if need be.”

  Mike, the ever-kind. “That’s sweet of you, but…” I let the sentence trail off, and we sit in silence for a moment. A basketball game plays on the TV overhead. “You know, even if we do end up in different places,” I say, “it doesn’t mean we have to break up or anything. If you go to North Carolina and I’m here, let’s say…we can still be together.” I steal the last chip. “They have these things called planes nowadays.”

  He toys with the beer bottle again. “Yeah, I guess.”

  But he doesn’t sound so sure. And I must admit that it didn’t work so well with Jean Luc. “We’ll see. I just feel like the answer will hit me someday. Hopefully, someday soon.”

  “Hopefully.” His tone is vaguely annoyed as he stares into his beer. “But you know, Zoe, sometimes doing nothing ends up being the same thing as doing something.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Here we go!” A cheerful waitress in a billowy Mexican shirt comes to our table, her arms raised high with our own sizzling platters. The smell makes my mouth water.

  “Thank you, Lord,” I say.

  “That’s right, come to Papa,” Mike says as the fajita plate descends to him. Digging into our food, with the mariachi music blasting through the speakers, I feel like I’ve been given a momentary reprieve.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By Monday, it is clear the name Candy doesn’t bring us any closer to an answer.

  Half of the puzzle is solved, but we still don’t know where she’s from or her last name. Detective Adams does a fresh round of neighborhood canvassing and hangs up new missing-child posters with a smiling “Candy” instead of the stone-faced Jane Doe. Nothing comes of it. Meanwhile, Discharge Planning is still breathing down our collective necks. “We may not know who she is or where she belongs,” Tina Jessep said to me yesterday in a rather icy tone, “but she doesn’t belong in the hospital.”

  Today I catch up with Candy (I keep wanting to call her Jane) in group “share” therapy. Jason and I are sitting at the back of the room, watching our respective patients.

  “Miss Judy” leads off the discussion. She has an unfortunate habit of ending all of her sentences with “uh-huh? uh-huh?” so that it’s brutally annoying to listen to her for more than five consecutive minutes. This has also earned her the patient-wide nickname of “Miss Uh-huh.”

  “So today,” she starts, flipping back long, dyed-black hair that reaches to the back of her thighs (how she doesn’t get a basilar dissection every time she sits down, I’m not sure), “I’d like to focus on positives. Uh-huh? Uh-huh?”

  No one answers. Chloe is chewing her fingernails. Brandon is tracing over the scars on one arm. Candy watches intently, like there might be a quiz.

  “We always focus on what’s going wrong—the negatives, uh-huh? So today I want to focus on the positives, uh-huh? The things we can think about to get us over the bad times, the humps in our lives. Uh-huh? Uh-huh?” She waits about ten seconds, but no one offers any response. Chloe chooses another nail to decimate.

  “Because if there’s one thing we know, uh-huh, it’s that there’s going to be tough times, whether we like it or not—tough times that we have to get through. Uh-huh? Uh-huh?”

  I don’t know how they get through twice-weekly share therapy with this woman. I would turn homicidal in a jiffy.

  “Chloe?” Miss Judy asks.

  Chloe looks around the room, like there might be someone else named Chloe who could save her from answering the question. Sadly, there isn’t. “Yes?”

  “I’d like you to tell me something positive you can focus on.”

  “Positive?”

  “Uh-huh. Positive. Like, maybe, a favorite perfume?”

  “Perfumes give me migraines.”

  “Or a favorite color then?”

  “A favorite color. Let’s see.” She pauses, pretending to think deeply. “Black. Black is my favorite color.”

  “See now, that’s a nice color, uh-huh? Uh-huh? Black?”

  “Yes, I like black,” Chloe continues, “because it symbolizes death, depression, depravity, negativity. Basically everything I feel most days.”

  Miss Judy looks at Chloe and debates whether she is being played and decides probably so. She turns to her next victim. “What about you, Candy?”

  “Yes?” she answers without delay. Her speech has improved vastly this week since she figured out her name.

  “Do you have a favorite color?”

  “Yes, I do. Purple,” she announces.

  I sit up straight in my chair. So she knows her favorite color but not her name?

  “Uh-huh. Purple. What do you like about purple?” she asks, pleased to have someone finally responding to her.

  “I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. “I just do.”

  “Now see, purple is good. That’s a terrific start here. Uh-huh, uh-huh? Any other positives in your life?”

  Candy leans back in her chair and thinks. “I like pizza. And leopard skin. One of the aides on the floor bought me a purple leopard-skin purse from the gift shop. I love it.”

  “Good, good. Uh-huh. Now this is what I’m talking about. Positives, everybody, positives.”

  It’s odd, hearing her go on about how much she loves her new purple leopard-skin purse, like Little Orphan Annie is singing “Tomorrow” to a roomful of Eeyores.

  “It’s good to start with little things. Your favorite colors, foods. Then, you’ll find, the good things start to take over. Take root in your garden. Remember we said last week how your brain is like a big garden? Well, it’s time to weed out the bad thoughts and let the good things grow. Uh-huh?”

  Candy is nodding right along while the other patients stare at Miss Judy in disbelief. Let the good things grow?

  It’s just about time to round, and Jason and I manage to escape as Miss Judy attempts to pry some answers out of Brandon. I’m starting to wonder if the dreaded discharge planner is right. Maybe Candy doesn’t belong here, dealing with the likes of Miss Judy.

  Dr. Berringer is waiting in the room, flipping through charts. “I have a bitch of a headache,” he says, grabbing another chart. His eyes are glassy, and he’s wearing the same clothes today as he was yesterday, a wrinkled blue checkered shirt with the second button undone. Must have put in a tough night, though I was on call last night and caught all my winks—didn’t even get a Tylenol order. He turns to Jason. “How’s Brandon the Burner doing? Can we discharge him yet?”

  “I’m not sure about that. He was cutting himself with a sharpened toothbrush yesterday,” Jason says.

  “Well, maybe we should just—” A text interrupts him, and Dr. Berringer whips out his phone, his face turning into a scowl. He shoves it back in his pocket. “Sorry, what were you saying about Brandon?” The phone buzzes again, and he grabs it. “Sorry,” he says, standing up and marching out into the hall to call someone. When he leaves, a strong smell hangs in his wake. A bitter scent that it takes me a second to recognize. But I’ve smelled it many a time on many a patient before. On young men with ripped shirts and bruised knuckles in the ER on any given Saturday night. On the impeccably dressed lawyer in my Thursday-afternoon clinic who assures me she never goes over two bottles of wine at dinner.

  I’m about to ask Jason if he smelled it, too, when Dr. Berringer returns. “Okay, let’s hear about Brandon.”

  Jason goes on about Brandon’s self-mutilation while Dr. Berringer listens but doesn’t, his
jaw clenching and unclenching, and I’m left half wondering if I imagined it, the scent still hanging in the air.

  * * *

  “Hello,” Mike calls out. “Honey, I’m home.”

  I laugh at the corny line, turning a page in my RITE review book. “How was work?”

  He leans down to pet Arthur, who is doing his happy “Mike’s home” dance. “Not too bad. One MVA, four headaches, and about a hundred sinus infections.”

  “That time of year.”

  He drops his coat on the kitchen chair and starts rifling through the refrigerator. I catch his silhouette in scrubs in the gray light. “We have any food?”

  “There’s some leftover Chinese in there.”

  “Ah, yes.” He takes out some lo mein and dumps it on a plate to microwave it. “So what’s new with you?”

  “Not much.”

  “Have you solved the curious case of Candy yet?”

  “Nope. But hopefully we’ll talk with Jasmine tomorrow.”

  After a bit, the microwave chimes and he grabs his plate. “You didn’t talk to her yet?”

  “No. I still have to explain it to Candy.” I take a sip of my wine. “Tomorrow.”

  We sit for a bit as Mike digs into his lo mein and Arthur watches him with a mournful “feed me” expression.

  “So I have a question for you.”

  “Hmph?” he asks, still chewing.

  “What would you do if you thought your attending had a drinking problem?”

  He takes a gulp from a bottle of water. “Is this a theoretical question? Or do you think your attending has a drinking problem?”

  “The latter.”

  “Hmm.” Another gulp and the bottle is empty. “Honestly, I probably wouldn’t do anything.”

  “Really?”

  “Well.” He looks around a second. “You have any wine left?” I point to the island, and he pours himself a glass and sits back down. “How sure are you about this?”

  “I don’t know.” I refortify my glass as well. “I don’t have any definite evidence. But he looked like crap today, like he could have been hungover. And I could swear he smelled of alcohol.”