The Girl Without a Name

by Sandra Block

  I push the button to the twelfth floor instead.

  * * *

  “I knew you’d come,” he says.

  Dr. Berringer is collapsed in the pink chair. I sit down beside him. He doesn’t say anything for the longest time. We just sit side by side, watching the window like we’re watching waves at the beach. The wind is wreaking havoc on the little world below us. Buffeted trees, overturned garbage cans, traffic signs jerking. A utility truck pulses a yellow light up to the sky as it tends to a downed power line.

  “Zoe.” His voice is hoarse, a plea.

  I don’t answer.

  “I know I don’t deserve it, but I need to explain something to you.”

  I still don’t answer.

  He sighs and shifts in the chair. “I was raped, when I was thirteen.” Pausing, he scratches under his neck, his expression invisible in the dark. “Family friend. We were all on a camping trip, and we were off looking for wood.” His voice is flat, without emotion, retelling someone else’s tale. “I could have handled him now, but at that age, I was skin and bones, and…” He takes a deep, pained breath. “You know how these things go. I don’t have to spell it out.”

  I nod.

  “After that, I just wasn’t the same. I don’t know how else to explain it. There was the before me and the after me.” His hands are gripping the wood arms of the chair. “For a while, I was just angry. At everyone, for not guessing what happened. At the asshole who did it and still had a round with my dad at the bar.” He looks down at his hands, like he’s looking for something, a drink maybe. “I got over it in time, as much as you get over these things. Drank too much, of course. You know all about that.” He lets out a harsh laugh.

  I want to mirror him and offer him a laugh back, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

  “It changed me, Zoe. I wish I could go back and make it never happen, but I can’t do that. And I can’t change who it made me.”

  I pause. “A pedophile?” There is an edge to my voice.

  “Sounds like an excuse?”

  “Yeah, a bit.”

  He tattoos a rhythm with his fingers on his thigh. “Maybe it is. Maybe so…but then again, I don’t know. I can’t help it.”

  I turn to look at him. “So you’re saying being raped made you want to rape these girls?”

  “No, no!” he breaks in, focusing his gaze on me. “I’m not saying that at all. I’ve only been with her, Zoe. With Candy. I know it sounds crazy, but I love her. I want to marry her.”

  Goose bumps crawl on my arms. “But she’s a child.”

  He scratches the edge of one blond sideburn, sprinkled with gray. “Not really. You never really knew her.”

  “It’s rape, plain and simple.”

  “No, Zoe,” he insists. “I’m gentle with her. I would never hurt her. Never, never, never. Not in a million years. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. I’m good to her. Not like some asshole out there would be.”

  I stare at him in dismay.

  “Someone who’d take her into the woods, hold her down in some dirty ferns until she can’t even breathe. I would never do that to her. Never.”

  “It’s rape.” I say it softly. “You may not be brutal or vicious about it maybe. But these are young girls.”

  He stares out the window.

  “And maybe you were only with Candy, but she’s not the only one caught up in this. What about Janita? What about Eliza Sapierski? And the others? Young girls, Dr. Berringer.”

  “Tad,” he corrects me.

  “They don’t want to have sex with you.”

  “No, you don’t see it, Zoe. We relax them first. I make sure of that.”

  My stomach sinks. “You mean you drug them?”

  A long silence follows before he answers. “Nobody hurts them, Zoe.”

  I can’t hear another word. My ears can’t take it. My brain can’t take it. My heart can’t take it. “I can’t—”

  “I know,” he interrupts me, his face glum, guilty. “My wife didn’t understand it either. No one understands. I don’t expect them to.”

  We sit another minute, the wind whipping against the window. The utility truck crawls away. He stands and stretches his arms up high, like he just finished a long nap. He walks over toward the window, steps as graceful and measured as a cat, and leans his palm against the glass. Peering down at the wind-strewn chaos of the hospital grounds, he reaches down for something. Only when the window is lifted with the wind barreling through, the sudden noise like a plane taking off, do I realize he’s opened it. I leap to my feet as he sticks his head into the howling wind, dipping down like he’s trying to get a better view, before he turns back to me.

  “I’m sorry, Zoe,” he says. “There is a crack in everything.” And then he jumps.

  I try to stop him. I do. I lean out the window and grab some fabric—a shirt maybe or his khakis—that slips through my fingers, and he falls. It doesn’t take long for a body to fall. Gravity is quick. There is a ghastly thud, some yelling outside, and then silence.

  I never understood that cliché, deafening silence. Now I do. I stand there, awash in it, with no idea of what to do next, when my phone rings.

  “Zoe, we found her!”

  “Who?” I say. My voice echoes in my ears. Who, who, who, who? The word goes on forever. Maybe this is what it’s like to lose your mind.

  “Janita! We got a hit off Donner’s phone, and we got him, Zoe. He wasn’t in New York City after all. Though it appears that was his next stop. He was in Niagara Falls, and we nailed him. And more importantly, we got Janita.” His voice is humming with victory.

  “How…how is she?”

  “She’s fine. Shaken up, but fine, all things considered. Are you okay? You sound kind of funny.”

  “Yeah.” I look out the window again. Police cars are racing down the street toward the hospital.

  “Hey, I got your message. And I need to warn you, Zoe. Dr. Berringer may be involved in this. That’s who Donner was calling. I don’t know all the facts yet, but you need to be very, very careful here. I’ll get the ECT stopped, but don’t say anything. Just stay away from him.”

  “Um, well…” I pace around the room. “He actually just jumped out the window.”

  The phone goes silent for a second. “Excuse me?”

  * * *

  Two hours later, we’re in the family therapy room with its dusty blinds and metal-framed baby animal posters. The twelfth floor is a crime scene now, so the therapy room has become an ersatz incident room.

  “I still don’t get what you were doing there,” Detective Adams says.

  I rub my skin, which feels weird, rubbery. The feeling I have right before the flu. “I just knew he’d be there.”

  “And isn’t it possible,” the other detective asks (Detective Gonzalez, she said her name was; I can’t figure out if Detective Adams is her boss or vice versa), “that you got so upset about the news that you pushed him out the window?” She leans in toward me, her lanyard banging against the desk. Hot-pink lace from her bra peeks through her button-down when she leans back. “I mean, I know that’s what I would have done. Is it possible that’s what happened?” Detective Gonzalez appears to be playing bad cop, a role more suited for Detective Adams. But I know he’s a good cop, so that wouldn’t work. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many cop shows.

  “No, it isn’t possible.” I think for a second. “I guess it’s possible, but I’d have to somehow lure him over to an open window, then overpower him and throw him out. He’s pretty tall, actually. Taller than me.”

  “You could have used the element of surprise.”

  I shrug. I think even she realizes this sounds improbable. “Maybe, but I didn’t. He jumped. I tried to stop him. I couldn’t.” I’d already been through this with them ten times. I already mimed exactly how he did it. I don’t have it in me to do it again.

  “How long did you know about the O-club?”

  “The O-club? I don’t know. Dr. Ber
ringer mentioned it a couple months ago.”

  “He did?” Detective Adams breaks in with obvious shock.

  “Yeah. That’s what he called Alcoholics Anonymous. For Omar, Oscar, and Ozzie.”

  Detective Gonzalez looks at me like I’m loony tunes. “The O-club?”

  “Yeah. That’s all he said. It was like his pet name for AA. I didn’t ask him much about it, figuring it’s anonymous and all.”

  They both stare at me a second.

  “What?” I ask to their stares.

  “The O-club is what they called their group, Zoe,” Detective Adams says gently. “The pedophilia ring.”

  My mouth falls open.

  “And you didn’t know about any of it? About his relationship to the girls? To Donner?” When Detective Gonzalez leans over again, a strong scent of perfume wafts up. “Because I would understand if you did. If you knew about it, but you wanted to protect him. He is your boss after all.”

  “No. I didn’t know anything about it. Not until I saw the text. I only knew what Detective Adams knew—”

  “Were you in a relationship with Dr. Berringer?” she breaks in.

  I pause. “I guess. He was my attending.”

  “Yes, I know. But anything more than that?” She gives me a knowing smile. “I heard he was all kinds of handsome.”

  “Yeah, and he was also all kinds of married. At least for a while. And he was all kinds of my boss. So no, we weren’t…”—I struggle for the word—“intimate.”

  “So if we look through his diary, we’re not going to find out that you two were more than that?” she asks.

  Detective Adams shuffles through some paperwork.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’ll find if you look through his diary,” I answer. “But in any case, I wasn’t sleeping with him.”

  She moves in uncomfortably toward me, encroaching on my space. I have to think this is straight out of the detective’s handbook. “The nurses said you two were rather close.”

  I shrug. “We were friends, sort of. But close, I don’t know about that. There’s close and there’s close.” Suddenly a thought strikes, and I turn to Detective Adams. “Why the O-club? Like the Story of O?”

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  “It’s erotica. Well, sort of. More like S and M and misogyny dressed up as erotica. You could Google it, probably. But don’t do it at work.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this,” Detective Gonzalez observes.

  “Not really. I took a feminist course in college. Sort of an easy course, actually, but I was taking Chem at the time, which was kicking my ass, so…” I trail off, and Detective Adams looks down at the floor and rubs his knee. Obviously I’m getting off topic here, but any trace of Adderall is long gone from my bloodstream at this point.

  “Dr. Goldman, I’m wondering about something else. The phone call from Donner. The phone just happened to be in Dr. Berringer’s lab coat for you to discover? Seems very coincidental, doesn’t it?”

  “I would say lucky more than coincidental.”

  Detective Gonzalez leans back and cracks her knuckles with great verve, a move that looks practiced, the brash confidence of which is offset by her pink bra peeking through again. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Okay.”

  “The Demerol.”

  “Right.”

  “You seem pretty well versed in how that would work. The Demerol making her sick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How do we know, for instance, that it wasn’t you that gave her the Demerol? You had the access. You had the knowledge of—”

  “That’s it!” I yell out.

  Both seasoned detectives jump. “What?” Detective Adams asks.

  “The scar. It’s not a zero; it’s an O.”

  Detective Adams scrunches his eyes half closed, the way he does when he’s thinking. “For the O-club?”

  “Yes. They branded them in the story, too.” I run my hands through my hair, dry and limp at this point. “He fucking branded them.” My hands are trembling. There is silence in the room then, an ugly, angry silence.

  “Dr. Goldman,” she says, “we were talking about the Demerol.”

  “I didn’t give her Demerol,” I say, losing patience. “I mean, why would I give her Demerol, then go tell everybody I thought someone was giving her Demerol, which almost got me fired by the way, then get a lab to prove it? Two labs, actually.”

  She pauses here and rests her elbow on the table too close to mine. A white piece of thread makes an S on her sleeve. It takes all my will not to pick it off.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to understand why we do the things we do.”

  “Yeah, but that’s sort of my job description,” I grumble. I’m not generally so grouchy, but I’m hungry and this woman is just plain being ridiculous in her pink lace bra. I have no idea what she’s driving at, and I suspect she doesn’t either. I yawn. I feel like someone unplugged me and I’m losing charge fast. “Could we maybe talk more tomorrow? I’m really tired.”

  “Yeah,” Detective Adams breaks in. “I think we’re done here, Angela. Dr. Goldman would have had to be one hell of an actor or just a goddamned idiot to have masterminded this whole thing, all the while keeping me informed with regular updates.” Detective Gonzalez shoots him a look. Bad cop turns into pissed-off cop. “And I mean annoyingly regular updates,” he adds.

  I sneak him a smile.

  Detective Gonzalez stands up, visibly irritated. “I’m just doing my job, Frank.”

  “I know, I know.” His voice is appeasing.

  “Hey,” I say, standing up, too, as the debriefing appears to be over. “Can I see her real quick before I go?”

  He glances at Detective Gonzalez, who shrugs her approval.

  “Sure,” he says. “I’ll come with you.”

  We walk down the hall to her room. It’s just past midnight, and it feels like my legs are a hundred pounds each. Detective Adams knocks, and the policeman guarding the room looks up from his reading, a three-month-old People magazine, covered with reality stars that have been married and divorced by now.

  “How’s she doing?” Detective Adams whispers.

  “All good here,” he whispers back. “The girl really wanted to sleep with her sister. So I figured it was okay. We probably won’t get much out of her right now anyway.”

  “Yeah, that’s okay,” Detective Adams agrees.

  The dim, tawny-yellow light suffuses the bed, Candy stiff on her back, eyes fluttering, and Janita asleep and clinging to her sister with one leg thrown over her in protection, the O-shaped scar just visible on her ankle.

  And for the first time in the case, I think things might just turn out all right.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I know he was your patient.” I didn’t plan to say it, but the words just come out. Two weeks later and I’m sitting on Sam’s couch.

  He takes off his glasses (new, modern, square, black ones; I like them, but I miss the old tortoiseshells). “I can’t talk about that. You understand that.”

  I nod. “Yes. I do.”

  He slides his glasses back on. “And if I were his doctor, confidentiality stands, even after death.”

  I build a tower out of the magnet bits on the shiny black block, pinching it up high until it shrivels over. A new toy. The Zen sandbox has been stashed away somewhere. “Did you know about it, though? What he was doing?”

  He lets out a sigh. “Listen, Zoe, I can’t talk about Dr. Berringer. Just as I wouldn’t reveal any details about you to someone who asked.” He smooths his goatee. “But I will tell you this. I have a responsibility for the well-being of others. So if my patient revealed his intention to hurt someone—his wife, for instance, or children—I would have to tell someone. I would be obligated to tell the authorities.” Putting his palms together, he stares right at me. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I think I do.” Lightness fills my chest then, a surge
of relief. I didn’t realize how much the question had been weighing on me. “You know, I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay.” He leans back from his desk, opening his posture.

  “I liked him.”

  He spins his fake Montblanc on his yellow notepad. “Dr. Berringer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not surprised. He’s a likable guy.”

  “No, I mean like, like. Not that I would have ever told him. I barely even admitted it to myself.”

  “And that makes you feel…?” he asks, letting me provide the word.

  “Guilty.”

  He nods.

  “Stupid, bad judge of character, shallow—you pick the adjective. That’s how it makes me feel.”

  He shrugs. “People like that can be very charming.”

  “Charming…as in narcissistic?” We both know the psychiatric code word for charming.

  “Maybe. Mind you, I’m not saying anything about this patient,” he reminds me. “But people like this can be very attractive. They’re the favorite priest, the coolest football coach.”

  The one who scores all tens on his evaluations, I think. Who has the nurses wrapped around his pinkie. Who makes all the mothers swoon.

  “It’s the person no one suspects,” he goes on. “They leave a lot of damage in their wake. A lot of guilt for a lot of people who think, ‘How didn’t I know?’” He taps his pen on the pad. “But how could you know?”

  “I should have known.”

  “It’s a tragedy, Zoe. But it’s still his fault. You can’t take any blame for not figuring it out sooner. Nobody did.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And,” he continues, uncharacteristically interrupting me, “you saved that girl’s life. You told me how high he had the ECT jacked up. Who knows what would have happened?” His voice is furious. “And just so you know, ECT can be a very helpful tool for the right patients, in the right hands. I’ve seen it save lives. But he misused it. That’s all there is to it.”