by Sandra Block
She gives it to me, and I pin the paper to the corkboard in the kitchen. As we hang up, I sit back on the couch with Mike. He throws Arthur a piece of popcorn.
“So you think that’s her?” he asks.
“It’s got to be her.”
“You going to tell the detective?”
“Yeah.” I scratch my chin. “How to explain it without him killing me, however, is the question.” Mike chuckles and grabs the remote to unpause the television detective and let him resume with the final revelation of the killer and how he cleverly sussed him or her out (the farmer’s wife or the estranged grandson). Arthur nudges my hip with a new toy, a green monster that lost its squeak. I give the thing a halfhearted throw, and Arthur comes back proudly with it in his jaws, then flops to the floor and gnaws on it with the apparent hope the squeak will be somehow resurrected.
It turns out that Mike was right after all. It was the grandson.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I’m sorry to hear about Tiffany,” Sam says. “Addiction can be so hard. I’ve lost a few patients to it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I just wish I could have done something more.”
“It’s certainly a hard disease.”
We pause, him mindlessly tapping his fingers on his yellow pad and me watching the wind blow some leaves in a circle under a cement-gray sky. “We finally went through my mom’s stuff,” I say.
“That sounds like a good thing.”
“It was a good thing. And we didn’t mutilate each other in the process, which is also a good thing.”
Sam smiles. “And how is Candy?”
“So the plot thickens.” I explain the relationship with her sister and how Heaven called me.
His expression is as startled as Dr. Berringer’s. “What does the detective have to say?”
“He’s going to call me later this morning.” I yawn. I’m not used to eight-a.m. Saturday appointments, but it’s all he had available this week. We cover the basics—Adderall fine. Lexapro fine. Concentration okay, could be better. Life okay, could be better—the usual fare, until my twenty-minute follow-up has run its course.
“You know, Zoe,” he says as we stand up, “since you’ve been so stable, I was actually going to propose going down to every other week for now.”
I feel a shot of anxiety at the thought, but have to admit he’s right. He’s more of a security blanket right now than anything. And a few less co-pays wouldn’t hurt either. Pretty soon, I’ll graduate to every month, then three months, every six months. Yearly? And by that time, I’ll have graduated the psychiatry program myself. One full-fledged psychiatrist to another.
I pass by a smiling turkey decoration on my way out. It will be my first Thanksgiving without my mom. Though the last Thanksgiving with Mom was pretty miserable. Scotty’s date was some double-D blonde who talked like she just had a lobotomy, Mom spent the whole time in a recliner staring out the window, and my first-ever attempt at a turkey was so burned we ended up ordering pizza. Scotty’s cooking this year, so that’s something at least.
A handful of raindrops topple down from the sky as I head out to the parking lot.
Sam’s office is behind a nondescript storefront sandwiched between a guitar shop on one side and an ever-changing shop on the other. Last year it was a consignment shop. This year it was Patty Cakes, a cupcake store that died in six months. (And come on, who’s driving through a blizzard for cupcakes?) Now there’s a sign for “Crazy Heart Jewelry. Coming Soon!” Worst-case scenario, Sam could prescribe something for the hearts.
On the way to the car, I soak my foot in a freezing cold puddle. I’m removing my sock with a groan when my phone rings. It’s Detective Adams, which is a good sign—it means he’s still speaking to me.
“Yeah, hi, Zoe. Heaven’s story sticks. She showed us pictures, and it was definitely Candy. I have to assume the other girl in the photo was Janita.”
“Heaven’s in Buffalo?”
“No, we went to see her in Toronto this morning. She can’t get through customs with a record.” He rips open what sounds like a bag of chips, which seems appalling at this hour of the morning.
“She can’t come to the US?”
“No. Before 9/11 maybe, but not now.”
“So it’s definitely the girls?”
“Yeah, the picture was from Candy’s sixth birthday. You could tell it was her. And Janita looks a lot like that other picture she drew, actually.” Crunching sounds in the background.
“Did she have a birthmark?”
“Yes. And a cleft chin,” he adds before I can ask.
“Hmm,” I say, just holding back an I-told-you-so.
“You’d make a good detective, if you ever feel like a career change. Did I mention I’ll be retiring in five years? There’ll be a spot opening up.”
I laugh. “No thanks.”
Crunching rings out again. “Did she tell you about the baby that died?”
I think back to the conversation last night. “She did mention something about that. Said she lost her baby.”
“Uh-huh. Turns out she had a two-year-old. Thought Mommy’s pills were Skittles and died from an overdose. That’s when Candy and Janita went into foster care.”
I tap on the steering wheel. A few raindrops thud onto the windshield. “That’s sad.”
Lightning flashes through gray clouds ahead. “Did she tell you what the baby’s name was?” he asks.
“No, she didn’t. What was it?” The rain builds up, pelting the windshield now, as thunder bangs in the distance.
“Daneesha,” he says.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jason is whistling again. “What are you up to for Thanksgiving?” he asks.
“Going over to Scotty’s. How about you? You going down to see your parents?”
“Nah. Going over to Dominic’s.”
I sit up in my chair. “Shut the front door.”
Jason raises one eyebrow. “You can say the word ‘fuck,’ you know.”
“Seriously, Dominic’s house? As what? His good friend?”
“Boyfriend.” He shrugs, a smile tugging his lips. “He came out to his parents last week.”
I turn back to my review book. “That ought to be a comfortable meal.”
Dr. Berringer joins us to round then. “How about we start with Chloe for a change?” he asks.
She sits in her bed, reading a long letter with pages of flowery handwriting. She has gained two more pounds, which is a leap for mankind when it comes to Chloe. Five more and she can be an outpatient. It’s a one-eighty-degree turnaround from her hunger-strike stance.
“Don’t even say it,” she warns us. “I know what the scale says, and I don’t want to dwell on it.” She has on thick, black eyeliner, which means she must be feeling a millimeter better.
I mime like I’m zipping my lips and earn a black-eyelined eye roll. “I’m happy for you. Am I allowed to say that?”
She allows herself a smile. “You want to know my secret?”
“Sure,” I answer.
Dr. Berringer busies himself with her chart, giving us space, and Jason stands by him.
“I made the decision that I had to get out of here. Even if I didn’t feel well, I had to pretend to feel well so I could get out of here.”
“Fake it ’til you make it kind of thing?”
“Whatever you want to call it,” she says.
“We don’t have to label it. Just keep it up.”
Another eye roll.
We spend another few minutes going over her various therapies, talking about her latest family visit, then it’s off to the next patient.
“What do you think she meant by that?” I ask Dr. Berringer, once we’re well down the hallway. “Pretending to feel well?”
He shakes his head with a cockeyed grin, his own version of an eye roll. “You know what, Zoe? I’ve given up trying to figure out that girl.”
While this may be true, it seems an odd admission for a psychiatri
st, and I’m still pondering this when we get to Jason’s patient Manuel, a sixteen-year-old who moved from Puerto Rico as a freshman. Decided to kill himself when his parents read text messages from his boyfriend and discovered he was gay. Luckily, he went the pill route. One good stomach pumping and he was no worse for wear, but he earned himself a stay at the County. Jason shared his own coming-out story with him. When his mother didn’t speak to him for a year. Manuel called him “simpatico.” Jason fairly glowed. For the very first time, I could see why Jason went into psychiatry.
“Manuel,” Jason says, “how’re you doing?”
“Good.”
“Did you see your parents yet?” Dr. Berringer asks.
“Yeah, they come in this morning,” he says with a heavy accent.
“How’d it go?” Jason asks.
He shrugs. “Not too bad, actually. They say they not exactly happy about it, but they going to get used to it.”
A semi-happy coming-out story. We spend a few more minutes with him, plan out his pending discharge, then make our way over to see Candy. She had been lethargic but responsive all weekend and through this morning, when I saw her. But when we reach her room, she is lying stiffly on the bed, moaning.
“What…how…?” I stammer. “This morning she was—”
“Not like this,” Dr. Berringer answers, madly flipping through her chart. “Did someone give her sedation?”
“No. I didn’t order any.”
“Jason?”
“No. I didn’t hear she was agitated or anything.”
“Aaaagh,” she moans, repetitively, her mouth cartoonishly open. Not like she’s in pain, more like a motor.
“She was so much better this morning,” I say.
“Aaaagh. Aaaagh. Aaaagh.” It sounds like a mantra.
Dr. Berringer shines a penlight in her pupils and lifts up her head to test for meningitis. No sign of stiffness there. He crinkles his lips, like he just tasted something sour. “This is a fluid state, Zoe. Things can go up and down in an hour.”
“Yeah, but…” I shake my head, at a loss for words.
“Hit her with some more Risperdal. If it doesn’t work, we’re trying ECT.”
“You think it’s time?” I ask.
The room answers with her moaning.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The little girl bounds up to me, her sparkly red-beaded cornrows swaying around her head. A smile fills up her face, and she cradles a mound of pills in her hands, so many they are slipping through her fingers.
“No!” I call out. “Daneesha!”
But before I can stop her, she pops the whole handful in her mouth and starts chewing.
She chews forever, her dazzling smile fading, dimming. I watch her helplessly then, as her chewing slows.
“Daneesha?”
She stares at me with confusion and sadness, her head falling, her knees bending, collapsing to the floor like a dropped puppet. I run to her, try to lift her up, but she’s too heavy.
“Dr. Goldman,” she whispers, her lips glazed with blood.
I lean in to hear her. The bitter scent of the pills hangs around her mouth.
“Dr. Goldman?”
“What?” I am an inch from her face.
Her eyes are flickering shut, but she opens them wide for one second. “Find my sister.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I’m halfway through some god-awful cafeteria chili when my phone rings. I don’t recognize the number.
“Zoe? It’s Dr. Koneru.”
I take a quick swallow. “Oh, hi!”
“I’m calling about that picture you brought me. You remember, with the scar?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You know, it was bothering me, this picture. I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d seen it somewhere before.”
“Okay?”
“So I was looking through my files, and I found one that was very similar. From a girl who died of an overdose two years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yes, how can I…?” I hear her fumbling with the phone. “Can I text you the picture?”
“Sure, that’d be great.”
Her voice echoes onto speaker. “Wait, I can’t figure out this stupid phone. My daughter said ‘It’s so easy, Mom,’ but it’s not easy at all. I like to just push the buttons and you talk to someone. I don’t need all of these apps things—”
The phone quacks in my ear. “Wait,” I interrupt her. “I think it came through.” I examine the picture. There’s no doubt. Same circle, same scar. “Is it on the ankle?”
“Left ankle. Just like your girl.”
Some nurses walk by with fried chicken, the smell wafting up from their trays. “Do you have a name on her?”
“Yes I do. Eliza Sapierski. Sixteen years old.” She gives me her date of birth and medical record number. “She was Jane Doe for a long time until someone called the hospital looking for a missing girl. She was an overdose, so I don’t think the police worked very hard on it.”
“Who ID’d her?” I ask, shifting in my chair and somehow spilling chili on my sleeve in the process.
“It was a cousin, I think. The girl was adopted.”
“Adopted?”
“Yes, that’s what I have written down. It’s my own file system I keep. I don’t have that much information, but you can get the chart from Medical Records if you need it. I’ll text you her photo at least.”
I have an hour before we round, so I throw away the rest of my chili and decide to make a trip down there.
Medical Records is a stuffy little room, full of anguished doctors in cubicles laboring over piles of charts. And of course, we doctors always leave them until the last minute, when we’re fifty charts late and about to lose privileges, before venturing down into this circle of hell. It could be a scene from a Bosch painting.
An officious, middle-aged woman with a diamond-shaped birthmark on her cheek grabs my slip with the patient’s information. “Eliza Sapierski,” she reads off, and takes a quick look at her computer screen. “We’ll have to get these in Archives.”
“Archives? Really? It was only two years ago.”
“Archives,” she repeats.
“How long will it take to get it from Archives?”
“Ten to fourteen days,” she says as if she’s given this answer a hundred times already today, which she probably has. I take my sheet back and slump down in one of the chairs. A GI doctor nods at me and continues his rapid-fire dictation.
I give Scotty a quick call, and he confirms he’s found nothing on the scar.
“Just some scar fetish sites came up. So thanks a lot for that one.”
I laugh.
“And I got ahold of some more banks, too.”
“Banks?”
“Yeah, you know, for the Treasury bonds.”
The GI guy fumbles through another chart, whipping through pages, dashing off signatures. “I thought you were done with all that.”
“Yeah, I just gave it one more try. Called some places in Syracuse. They said they have a record of his account but can’t do anything without his death certificate.”
“Hmm. I have no idea where that would be.”
“Yeah, me neither. I’d probably have to get another one from city hall, and that’s going to be a fucking nightmare.”
“And so continues the hunt for the phantom Treasury bonds.”
“Yeah,” he says with such utter dejection that I could hug him through the phone line.
“Well, keep up the good fight,” I encourage him. As we hang up, a doctor plops an armful of charts onto the desk behind me. Grumbling, he cracks open a chart. I decide to call Detective Adams to let him know about Eliza Sapierski.
“Zoe!” he answers. “Got an update on Candy.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says, crunching again. The man must live on potato chips. “I got in touch with the adoption agency that Candy and Janita were processed through. It’s a place
called New Promises, in Toronto.”
“Where Heaven’s from,” I say.
“That’s right. It appears they were sent to a foster family in Toronto and adopted soon after. But then the trail goes cold.”
“Who adopted them?”
“Brown. Linda and James Brown. But the number they gave us is disconnected. So we’re still looking. Isn’t easy. There’s fifty-seven thousand Browns in Canada.”
I grab my patient list and write some notes on the back. New Promises. Linda/James Brown. “But I don’t get it. They just lost track of them?”
“It appears so. The woman at the agency said it’s not that uncommon. Sometimes a family moves, and they don’t really keep tabs.” Someone calls out his name, and he shouts back at them. “Zoe, I have to get going.”
“Wait, before you go,” I say. “I found something, too.” I tell him about Eliza Sapierski and the scar. “I can text the picture to you, if you want.”
“Go ahead. I can have someone look into it, but honestly, Zoe, it’s not a lot to go on. A similar scar. There could be a million reasons for that.”
“Maybe. But it’s weird, isn’t it? And she’s adopted, too.”
“True. But it’s still not much of a link.” His name is called out again, this time with annoyance. “Okay, I really do have to go. Just caught a case. But I’ll let you know if anything comes up.”
* * *
The answer jumps out at me while I’m sitting in the library.
An 18-year-old-woman comes in with moaning and confusion. She had been depressed and was recently started on Lexapro. She was also on Elavil for migraine prevention. In the ER, her heart rate is found to be elevated at 120 beats per minute with a low-grade fever. She is diaphoretic and appears anxious and agitated.
Serotonin syndrome.
I know the answer before I even look at the choices. Not catatonia. Serotonin syndrome. I dial Dr. Berringer’s number as fast as my fingers can dial.