by Sandra Block
“What?” I grumble. “Are you seeing Dominic again?”
He stares at me. “How the hell did you know that?”
I look back through the chart. “You’re whistling.”
“Ooh, nonverbal clues. Look at you being all psychiatric.”
“Yeah, well. I’m not in a whistling mood today unfortunately.”
“Why?” He pops a cherry cough drop in his mouth. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Candy. She’s catatonic again.”
He looks up from his chart. “That sucks.” The faintest triangle of a goatee is growing in under his lip. “Any more on the sister?”
“Still missing.”
“Too bad Daneesha’s gone.”
I grab another chart. “Why?”
“She would have known where Janita was,” he says, and walks off whistling again.
I flip through Candy’s latest labs. CBC doesn’t show any sign of infection, so Dr. Berringer’s right: An Infectious Disease consult will be pointless. Pulling out my phone, I hesitate. I know it could piss the detective off, but I do it anyway.
“Hi, Zoe,” Detective Adams answers, his voice resigned to my hundred weekly calls by now. “What’s up?”
“Just checking if you heard anything on the reward?”
“Not as of yet. How’s Candy?”
“Not great.” I pause. “In fact, she’s catatonic.”
“Oh no, really?”
“Yeah. And we’ve pretty much maxed out the meds. They’re talking about doing ECT this time.”
“ECT, what’s that?” he asks.
“Electroshock therapy.”
He lets out a long, high-pitched whistle. “No shit.”
“Yeah. I’m not loving the idea, to be honest. But we’re running out of options.”
The pause grows over the phone. “I best leave all that up to you guys. Docs usually know what they’re doing, I’ve found.”
I chuckle. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I tap my pen on the paper. “Maybe if we increased the reward?”
“Zoe, take care of Candy. I’ll call you the minute I hear anything.”
* * *
After rounds, I’m hanging out in the library, wasting time on the Internet. No hits on my Candy Facebook post, which I updated. The sun is setting out the window in creamy-pink streaks across the sky. Scrolling down to earlier Facebook posts, I see a Vine posted from Melanie (which Jean Luc has shared!). Because I am fond of torture, I open it. Six seconds of lameness, with them both laughing and Melanie feeding him sushi. Which he hates. Or claimed to hate. Her ring is blinding. I close out the Facebook app with an inward groan. What is Vine-worthy about feeding someone sushi anyway? My phone rings then, saving me from any further pangs of envy.
“Got a new one,” Jason says. “Bed Five. Possible steroid psychosis.”
“Cool. I’m on it.”
“Oh, and guess who else is back?”
“Tiffany?”
“You got it.”
“Oh, I can take her while I’m down there.”
“They didn’t ask for a consult yet, just wheeling her in. Giving her Narcan, I think. She looked pretty bad, actually.”
“Give her a few days,” I say. “Same old dance. They’ll stabilize her, send her to us, and two months later she’ll be back.”
“Aren’t you all jaded today.”
“Just realistic,” I mutter. Heading into the ER, I run into Damien, one of Mike’s fellow residents. The shift has just changed, so the place is buzzing. I always thought Damien was trying to date me on the sly and hinted as much to Mike. “Yeah,” Mike said thoughtfully, “he’s kind of a snake.” But they’re friends.
“Hey, how’s the big man?” Damien asks, referring to Mike. Damien is five feet four, so this is the joke. “Been stuck in Children’s hell for a while now, so I haven’t seen him lately.”
“He’s good.”
“You guys still…?”
“Yup,” I answer. “How are things going around here?” I gaze around at the usual suspects: nervous-wreck parents, athletic teenaged boys with arms twisted the wrong way, vomitting toddlers, and a crying high school girl who’s about to lose her appendix.
“Same old,” he says, gazing around, too. He takes a drink of coffee from a metallic travel thermos. He’s just starting his day while I’m ending mine. “Just coded a twenty-five-year-old.” He points to the curtain we’re standing in front of. “On some kind of drugs. I’ve seen her a couple of times down here. Had a seizure, went into cardiac arrest. Pregnant, too. Fucking awful.”
Dread fills up my chest. “She died?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. We coded her over thirty minutes. V-tach right into asystole. Shocked the hell out of her.”
“Can I? What’s…what’s her name?”
“Oh, don’t remember. Terry? Tammy?”
“Tiffany?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Tiffany. Why? You’ve had her before?”
Trauma Team, Room One. Trauma Team, Room One beckons over the loudspeaker. “Got to go,” he says, putting his thermos on the table and looping his stethoscope on. “Say hi to Mike for me.” He trots off, following a troop of scrub-clad men and women chasing after a gurney.
I head over to Tiffany’s bed, pushing the curtain aside to a brightly lit room, like the room forgot the person in there isn’t alive anymore. The bedsheet is over her face, and I lift it up. It’s Tiffany for sure, eyes closed now, patches of hair missing from her yanking it all the time, sores on her face. Like she’s been dying for years and this was just the final step. Her foot sticks out of the sheet at the foot of the bed, her baby toe with a silver-moon pinkie ring, and a crack running through the crescent.
I cover her foot back up with a blanket and hear yelling followed by a flurry of nurses in Bed Five. Must be my steroid psychosis. I close Tiffany’s curtain and make my way over to my next consult.
* * *
Mike is not a graceful runner. He is a football runner, a wrestler-runner, not a runner-runner. But then again, I’m not exactly a gazelle myself. And I’m the one huffing and puffing, while he could seemingly chat through a marathon.
“So they’re thinking ECT?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I answer, my voice ragged.
“Maybe it could help.”
“Maybe,” I manage again.
Mike takes mercy and doesn’t ask any more questions for a bit. I called him earlier tonight, not fully in distress but close to it. After Candy, then Tiffany. I felt trapped in my living room with the fake fireplace and its well-planned precarious logs, and my cozy red couch. Like I was in a dungeon. I started pacing around, to no avail. I have hours like this, days sometimes, when my brain and my body don’t align and my limbs are a restless extension of my head. This is when I used to row, back in college and medical school.
But instead I called Mike, who suggested we go for a run. So I agreed, remembering Sam’s frequent admonition. I unwrapped my new, fresh-smelling running shoes from their box, tightened my laces, and met him at the park.
Sweat wicks under my shirt, and by the end of the first mile I realize I dressed too warmly. The afternoon thunderstorm emptied into an unseasonably warm night. As we keep going, I relax into the run. My footsteps pound out a rhythm, and the tight coil in my brain starts to unwind, ceasing its useless roiling and spinning. Never-ending circuits, mazes, flying thoughts. Candy staring out, dead-eyed. Tiffany’s pinkie toe ring. The xiphoid pointing out of Chloe’s chest. My mom’s purple puffy pillow. Spiraling over and over. Snippets of songs, conversations, thoughts. Probation. Probation. Probation.
“So did you ever find out any more on Berringer? And the drinking thing?”
I shake my head. Sweat sticks to my forehead. “Just what I found out on Google. And what Jason said. He hasn’t smelled like it lately, but that’s not saying much.” I still haven’t gotten around to telling him about putting him to bed that night. And truthfully, I probably never will. “I told you about th
at stupid sushi video, right?” I ask, to change the conversation.
He answers me with an eye roll. “And I was just so interested.”
I laugh. “Okay, okay. I get it.” As I run, I’m feeling better already. Lighter.
“You hear any more about the priest?”
“The priest?”
“I thought you said a priest,” he says, wiping off his forehead with his shirt and gracing me with a nice view of his abdomen.
“Oh yeah,” I say, “the Demerol guy. No, no more word. I think they’re crazy, though. It’s gonna be a nurse or something.”
We run in silence awhile, through the almond sheen of the streetlights against the pavement, the moon glowing through a seam in the clouds. A dog tears by on the lawn across the way, yipping madly.
My mind slows then, like it usually does at this point in a run. I don’t notice my breathing anymore, or my burning legs. Images pop up, and I don’t bother to bat them down. Candy. Daneesha. Janita. Candy’s purple leopard-skin purse. Effexor. Risperdal. Catatonic. Dr. Berringer’s bloodshot eyes. The night unfolding on the ghostly twelfth floor. Chloe’s sunken eye sockets. Jason’s budding goatee. Purple. Purple. Hospital art projects. Sisters. Art quilt. Candy’s art quilt: numbers, letters, suns. Daneesha’s quilt: FUCK THIS SHIT.
Numbers, letters, suns.
I stop. The soft wind whistles, swaying the pines. Numbers and letters—of course. A limousine took her!
“Holy shit.”
Mike stops short. “What? Did you pull something?”
“Why didn’t I think of it before?”
He wipes his sopping forehead with his sleeve. “Zoe, what are you talking about?”
“Numbers and letters,” I tell him. “It’s a license plate.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Donna is in a flowing, lemonade-pink outfit today, a break from her usual autumn palate. She riffles through the awkward, bulky files. It turns out she had one for Daneesha and a separate one for Candy. (“They just seemed so different to me.”) The newest art projects hang drying on a laundry line with clothespins. It looks like a kindergarten art room with morbid themes.
Detective Adams cocks his head at the line. “Looks like a handy way to hang yourself,” he says, half joking.
“The room is monitored at all times. And locked at night so that— Wait a second,” she interrupts herself. “I found it.” She pulls out the quilt picture with the scratchy noise of dried watercolors rubbing against each other. Candy’s quilt is just as I remembered: numbers and letters and suns, all in shades of purple. There’s no pattern I can discern, though.
“You think this could be a license plate?” he asks.
“It was a thought.”
He takes the paper and stares at it, like he’s trying to see through it. “It’s not enough digits, though.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too.”
“Did you guys see this one?” She pulls out a stack of blank index cards, held with a loose, red rubber band, and lays them out on the table in rows like a memory game. Numbers, letters, suns. All the same numbers and letters. A V D 1 4 7.
“If it’s a New York plate,” the detective says, “it’s going to have three letters and four numbers, unless it’s personalized.”
I lean an elbow on the table, next to a faded blue paint stain. “And what’s the sun supposed to mean?”
We pause, and the detective chews on his bottom lip, his eyes squinting.
“What if,” Donna says, “the sun represents something, like happiness? A feeling.”
“But that’s so vague,” I argue. “It could mean so many things.”
“Or,” the detective says, “it could just be the sun.” He shifts the cards into a line. “Put these together and we have three letters—let’s say VAD, for instance—with four numbers. Maybe there’s only three numbers, not four, because she couldn’t see one of the numbers in the glare of the sun.” He grins. “Huh? What do you think?” He looks so self-satisfied that I fear he might don a plaid hunting cap and pull out a pipe.
“It’s possible,” I admit. “Can you run through the numbers and letters?”
“We can get a partial at least, try some different combinations.” He shakes his head. “It’s going to take time, but we’ll try.”
I think for a moment, playing with a corner of one of the index cards. “I might have another idea.”
* * *
Candy is dazed but somewhat responsive when we come in to see her. So maybe Dr. Berringer is right. Tincture of time and she’ll come around. Or maybe the Effexor is breaking through. She’s still not speaking, but she’s not doing her bunny-nose twitch. And she’s making some eye contact and tracking.
I walk over to her with the cards in hand, the detective following me like an oversized shadow.
“Candy, I’ve got something for you,” I say.
She looks up at me, her cheeks flushed, still sweating.
“These are some pictures you drew. We were wondering if you could help us figure them out.”
She watches us intently but doesn’t answer.
“We weren’t sure what these meant.” I show her the quilt picture first, then lay the cards on the table. “We were thinking a license plate number maybe?”
She looks down at the cards without expression.
“We were hoping it might help us find Janita,” Detective Adams adds.
Her brown eyes open wider with the mention of her sister’s name, but she keeps staring at the cards, so long that the room feels stifling. I steal a glance at Detective Adams, who gives me a somber half grin. Well, we tried.
I’m a second away from picking the cards up when she reaches out, sluggishly, like a robot. Slowly, methodically, she arranges the cards in a new row.
D V A 1 4 Sun 7.
Then she sinks her head back in her pillow, spent with the effort of engaging with us. Or maybe the effort of remembering.
The detective writes the combination in his notebook, then scoops up the cards and puts them in a baggie from his briefcase. “Evidence,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say to Candy.
And she doesn’t answer, but her eyes meet mine. Her stare is strong, angry, like Daneesha, not Candy. Then she closes her eyes and falls back to sleep.
* * *
My grandfather clock gongs out nine chimes. Otherwise, Arthur, Mike, and I are sitting in companionable silence watching the newest PBS mystery. The true killer (I think it’s the farmer’s wife, but Mike is set on the soldier’s estranged grandson) is about to be revealed. Right then, my phone pings with a notification. I grab the remote to pause the TV.
“Aw, come on,” Mike objects, “I was finally getting into this stupid show.”
“Yeah, well, remember how you kept doing that to me,” I remind him, “with Downton Abbey?” I check my e-mail.
“Downton Abbey? Please. Pausing that was just a kindness.”
YOU HAVE A RESPONSE ABOUT YOUR MISSING LOVED ONE.
“Hey, it’s the Black and Missing website,” I say. Mike moves closer, reading over my shoulder as I zoom to the website. The response is under Candy’s picture.
Zoe,
I think this is my daughter. Her name is Candice Jones. Please call me, and we can discuss it and the reward.
“Huh,” Mike says. “Odd that she was remembered after the reward was posted.”
“Agreed,” I say. I tap my finger on the remote, chewing on my lip.
“Just call,” he says. “I’ll make some more popcorn.” Arthur trails off behind him. I think he actually knows the word popcorn. Somewhat leery, I dial the number.
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is Zoe Goldman.”
“Oh, child. Thank the Lord. Thank the Lord, you called me back. I been praying on this moment since I saw the picture. Thank you, Jesus, thank you.”
“Oh…great. Um, it’s about Candy?” I ask, taken aback by the effusive response.
“That’s right. Candy. I think that
’s my daughter you got posted up on that website. Candice Jones.”
“Okay, and who am I speaking with?”
“Heaven,” she answers. “Heaven Jones.”
I sit up straighter and catch Mike’s eye, pointing to the phone. “Heaven,” I mouth to him. “Your name is Heaven?” I ask her.
“That’s right. My momma named me that. I used to hate that name, oh my Lord, but now I like it. Now it suits me just fine.”
The pendulum swings on the grandfather clock. So Heaven is real. “How did you find out about the reward?”
“My friend told me all about it, honey. She tell me somebody found Candy. Put up a reward and everything. Praise be to Jesus.”
“That’s right, I—”
“Is she all right? You said she in the hospital? She okay?”
I pause. “She’s okay,” I lie.
“Oh, thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. I thought I never see my babies again. How about Janita? How she doing?”
“We don’t know. We’re actually trying to find Janita.”
“Oh.” The word is laden with unease.
“When was the last time you saw them, Candy and Janita?”
“Oh, girl. It’s been more than two years now. I was drugging. Had to give up both my girls when I lost the baby. But I’m done with all that now. I’ve been saved.”
“Okay. Good. That’s good. So where are you now?”
“In Toronto,” she answers. “Living in a nice house. God blesses me every day. Now I just wanna get my girls back when they ready.”
Toronto, just a short drive over the border to Buffalo. “Do you know, did Candy have a scar on her ankle? If you remember?”
There is a pause as she considers this. “You know, I wasn’t the best mom. I wasn’t always there when they got hurt and all that.” Her voice goes low and serious. “But I don’t think she had any scar on her ankle. Unless she got it in the last couple of years.”
“Okay.” I get up and search for something to write on, miming a pen to Mike, and he hands me one. I grab the vet receipt from when Arthur had his stomach pumped after eating a huge bag of M&M’s. “Let me take down your information so I can have the detective call you back about that reward.”