BPD. Borderline personality disorder.
I know these symptoms. None of this is new to me. And yet, as I keep reading, an icy stab of fear grows in my chest.
The last time I visited them, my boyfriend wasn’t dead.
Dr. Holdren had said my condition wasn’t one linked with violence. Which means she’s either a terrible doctor or Dr. Koftura hid my diagnosis from her.
Because being borderline means you hurt. Yourself and others.
My hand on Justin’s, turning the wheel.
My phone pings twice.
Text from Justin: I can help you.
Text from Justin: We need to talk.
29
I sneak out of my office when I’m sure no one is in the hallway, and rush past Maria’s door just in case she’s waiting to hear my door close before whipping hers open in the hope of a post-mortem. Before I leave, I manage to grab my lecture notes for the final class of the semester and my flash drive, shoving both into my bag, along with my phone.
My stomach growls because I’ve forgotten to eat again, and I tell myself I need to stop and get something to eat for fear of low blood sugar adding to my erratic twitchiness of today. I don’t want to go to the Starbucks in Kilcawley, and opt instead to get something at the Taco Bell on the corner of the campus where it meets Fifth Avenue. I grab a bean burrito and a Coke, a silent homage to Annie, and rush out to the road to start my walk home. I’d texted Annie to let her know I was on my way, and she’d replied to confirm that she was able to schedule my appointment with Dr. Koftura for 4pm today. She’d offered to pick me up, but I’d said I’d prefer to walk. Healing ribs or not, I wanted to think outside in the freezing air, away from the industrial white walls and central heating closing in.
I hoover down my lunch as I walk, suddenly ravenous as the salty, greasy food shoots dopamine through my synapses. The soft tortilla and mix of beans and rice hits my stomach like a lead weight, but the shaky sensation in my limbs abates as soon as I bite in. Fifth Avenue is deserted, as most of downtown Youngstown is these days. A few cars are driving on the street, and with the sidewalk riding up right next to the road, I move as far to the side as I can to avoid slush and debris splashing up onto me. The wind is bitter, which is good for clearing my head, but I still have to move my scarf to cover my face as soon as I’m done eating.
Up ahead, there’s a car swerving between the lanes of scattered vehicles.
It catches my attention, because no one ever seems to be in a hurry in Youngstown proper. Except to get back to the suburbs.
The tires of the car squeal, its body a vomit-like mottled shade of grey and brown. The rust and dried salt lines on its sides and under the wheel wells blend perfectly with the faded paint. A distinctive peeling patch of paint on the roof and hood, picture-the-Virgin-Mary-in-the-damage style, tells me it’s a Chevy from the GM plant.
I also notice, too late, that it’s heading towards me.
The car swerves onto the sidewalk, and its front wheel pops up onto the top of a fragment of the uneven cement where the freeze and thaw of Ohio winters has split it into shards. It misses me by a fraction of an inch, and only because I tripped on the same crack in the sidewalk as I tried to run away from the street, propelling my body forward with the force of my fall.
I hit the pavement in a graceless slump, with the same pigweed and thistle I’d admired only a week or so ago shoving their hard stalks against my cheeks. A burst of air leaves my lungs. I turn in time to see the car right itself on the road and continue at breakneck speed. I can’t make out the license plate except for a few beginning letters and numbers—maybe an L, followed by a 3 or an 8—and there’s no time for me to glimpse the driver behind the salt-coated windows.
You’re getting old, some dank hole in the back of my brain blathers out. Time for glasses.
As I stand up and brush myself off, I actually think that someone might pull over and ask if I’m okay. But then I remember this is Youngstown, and that nobody helps each other here.
Well, not completely nobody. I text Annie, my mind frantically trying to make sense of what has just happened, with my hands jittering with shock. I ask her to pick me up. Yes, I’m okay. I’ll explain when you get here.
She’s with me in what feels like less than a heartbeat—“Find Your Friends” she calls out and tries to crack a smile, but immediately throws it over when she sees my face.
“Somebody almost ran me over,” I shout above the roar of a diesel truck rambling by and the wind ripping across the vacant field next to the Taco Bell. A drip makes its way down my cheek, and when I reach up to wipe away what I assume is a tear—can a person really cry without knowing?—my finger is stained red. Cut by pigweed.
Annie is a tight whorl of anguish and annoyance. “What happened?” she asks, her voice just a shade below shrill. I’m waving my arms frantically and pacing up and down the same two blocks in the sidewalk, trying to process what happened.
I’m fairly sure I look like a mad woman, which means I’ll blend in with the normal Fifth Avenue Taco Bell crowd.
I explain how the car ran up onto the curb. As I tell her what the car looked like, and that I think I may have caught a few pieces of its filthy license plate, my heart bumps along like an asphalt truck.
“Are you okay?” Annie asks as soon as I’m finished, an echo of her text. Of her last twenty texts, for that matter. She tries to put her hands over my arms and force me to stand still for a moment, but I shrug her off.
“Somebody wanted to run me over, Annie!”
“What?”
“They’re trying to hurt me,” I tell her, fairly convinced after all my pacing.
“Who is? I don’t understand.” Annie moves her hand to my hair, trying to brush away my bangs to look at my forehead and manifesting a tissue out of the pocket of her coat like a soccer mom, but I turn away from her fretting and blotting.
“I’m fine—just a few scratches,” I say dismissively, and swat her hand away. “But you need to listen. This was deliberate. This car tried to run me over.”
“Why? I don’t understand,” she repeats.
“Because of Justin,” I say.
At the mention of Justin, Annie sets her mouth in a firm line. “No, it’s not possible.” She reaches out again to touch my arm, and this time I let her. “Nobody knew you’d be here. This isn’t the way you walk home.” I try to nod along as I listen to her rational thinking. “And Justin is dead,” she adds, quietly.
“I got another message from his phone,” I tell her, and reach into my pocket to pull out my phone and show her.
Annie scrolls through the green bubbles on my screen for a few moments, reading the messages. “Help, my ass,” she mumbles.
Her breath comes out in steamy clouds as she talks. I’m freezing. It’s gotten even colder outside since I started walking home.
“What’s this message from you?” Annie bends down to try and catch my gaze, which I’ve directed at a patch of crabgrass breaking through the cracks in the sidewalk. “Why did you reply to them?”
She doesn’t sound pissed at me. It’s worse.
She sounds hurt.
I pull a floppy fish routine, trying to force sense out of my actions so that it’ll come out my mouth, but my mouth just gapes open instead.
“Never mind,” she stands up and starts to walk to her car, which is pulled into a patch of driveway in the empty lot next to the Taco Bell. Her bright orange hat bounces up and down like a homing beacon as she strides across the rubble.
I follow her, chin tucked against the wind, and come up on her just as she’s unlocking the driver-side door. Old habits.
“My gut tells me this wasn’t some coincidence,” I argue.
My stomach gurgles audibly, right at that moment. Damn bean burrito.
“Is that what it’s saying?” Annie arches an eyebrow, so far up it disappears into the nubbly rim of her hat. Then her face turns softer. “Look, I’m so sorry this happened and it must have
been scary as hell, but you and I both know Youngstown drivers are awful, along with Youngstown roads being awful.” She jabs her hand in the general direction of the potholes riddling Fifth Avenue like a pockmarked teenager. “Isn’t it possible this has nothing to do with Justin, or Dr. Koftura, or the messages? That it was just an accident?”
No, it’s not. I’m not letting this go.
“We thought Justin’s crash was an accident, but it wasn’t, was it?” The tenderness in my ribs aches, and I picture the blotches of blue turned to yellow bruises across my chest where the seat belt held me in.
Something flashes across Annie’s eyes.
“Why did you reply to those texts? Morgan, why do you keep doing things that we agreed you wouldn’t do?” She reaches out with her hands and shoves me backwards. “You need to hold it together. You can’t start seeing things that aren’t there. You need to listen to me!”
The adrenaline leeches out of me like a bloodletting. I look up at my best friend, and resignation wraps around me. I don’t want to tell her about Maria. I don’t want to tell her about the checklist of dangers I read to myself only an hour ago.
And, really, I don’t have to.
We stand there, among the mutant lawn weeds and shards of broken asphalt mixed with used condoms and cigarette butts. A plastic Walmart bag flaps in the breeze, its smiley face putrid in the winter light as it leers at me.
And then I let Annie pull me into her rangy but strong arms and search over my face and body like a mother does after her child returns from being lost. She opens the car door for me and buckles me into my seat, like you would a toddler, and as we head back to my apartment, Annie says, “I’m going to keep you safe, Morgan. We’ll figure this out together.”
At the time, I completely believed her.
30
Our plan is for Annie to drive and potentially run interference, while I head into Dr. Koftura’s office as a patient. Annie didn’t have any trouble making an appointment for me today, especially after she explained who I was to the intake nurse on the phone, and why she was making the appointment.
It seems I’m developing quite a reputation at Dr. Koftura’s office.
With my appointment set for 4pm, when the backlog of the day’s appointments is bound to be catching up, I know there will be a significant wait between when a nurse would take me back to an exam room and when Dr. Koftura shows up to examine me. I hope I’ll be long gone by that point.
When Annie and I arrive together at the office next to St. Elizabeth’s hospital, the same emo-cute receptionist is there to check me in. Same disinterested attitude—which is perfect.
In the waiting area, Annie and I sit down and mime reading well-worn People magazines until we hear my name called. It’s a nurse I’ve never seen before, and this time I’m grateful for the apparent turnaround Dr. Koftura has with her staff.
The nurse who takes me to the exam room is short, with a round, pudgy face and a microscopic ponytail encased in a pink scrunchie. The scrunchie matches her scrubs, which have pink daisies dancing across both top and bottom. Her shoes look well-worn and comfortable. Her name tag, which has blue and pink star stickers dancing at the corners, says she’s Molly.
She’s no Nurse Debbie, but she’ll do.
I know the layout of Dr. Koftura’s office almost intuitively at this point, after years of shuttling between the waiting room and the warren of exam rooms, which made it easy to draw a map on my new marker board Annie’d brought home earlier. Walking with Nurse Molly, I feel a small burst of satisfaction mixed with hope, because it’s clear I got the schematics right. We turn a corner and pass by Dr. Koftura’s office and the patient bathroom.
The office door is closed, and my little bubble of positivity evaporates. If they’ve fixed the lock on Dr. Koftura’s door, I won’t be able to get in. Annie and I had talked about whether I’d have the option of picking the lock, but we had to dismiss the idea almost outright. There’s far too much traffic down the hallway, and even though I’m like any other malingering foster kid in that I can pick a lock the way other children say “I love you,” there’s no way I could do that without getting noticed. So we are banking on my being able to just walk into the office, take quick pictures of Justin’s file, and then head out the exit as if I’d never been there.
Dr. Koftura can charge me for being a no-show at our appointment.
As the nurse and I pass the bathroom door, it’s now or never.
“Can I use the bathroom quickly before my appointment?” I ask. I make an apologetic face, and Nurse Molly smiles in return.
“I’ll wait out here,” she says, and gestures to the bathroom directly behind me.
I rush into the single bathroom, lock the door, and whip out my phone. There’s no time to lose. I text Annie one word—Molly—and wait.
When we’d discussed this portion of the plan, Annie was quick to remind me that she’d been the understudy for Ursula in our high school’s production of the Little Mermaid. “I’ve got skills,” she’d said. Well, I think, here’s hoping.
I put my ear to the door and listen to try and decipher what’s happening outside. There are faint murmurs, and the sound of footsteps. And then I hear it: frantic voices, and a group of people running. I open the door, and manage to just glimpse Molly’s tiny ponytail bobbing its way around the corner and into the lobby. Annie’s voice vibrates through the thin walls. “I need Nurse Molly! Please help me. I need Nurse Molly!”
I rush over to Dr. Koftura’s office next door and grip the doorknob, offering a silent prayer to any and all deities that it will open. The knob turns with my hand, but I can’t push the door open. I can’t tell if it’s locked, or just jammed, so I press my shoulder against it and give a hard push. It doesn’t budge. I try again. The door shimmies slightly and begins to swing inside.
Annie’s voice is more subdued now, with other voices intermingling as they say things like, “Take a deep breath,” and “Can you tell me what day it is?” I catch footsteps coming down the hallway, and give one final shove on the door, turning the knob as hard as I can. It bursts into Dr. Koftura’s office, and I almost fall in, quickly regain my balance, and shut the door before the person coming down the hallway can notice. Looking at the edge of the door, its sticky situation is obvious. The maintenance solution to Dr. Koftura’s lock trouble was to half-heartedly replace the entire door jamb, and I thank my lucky stars that the door wasn’t locked when I tried to get in.
The office is deserted—I’d briefly considered that perhaps Dr. Koftura was inside and had locked the door behind her—but just as I stand up and begin to scan the room for where Dr. Koftura likely keeps her patient notes and files, I hear the door knob turn.
Those footsteps must have been Dr. Koftura’s.
The door sticks again as she tries to open it, and I use the time to move into the only hiding place in the office—underneath her desk. I want to yelp as I squeeze my still broken body into the small space, and try to hold my breath when I hear Dr. Koftura enter, muttering a few curses under her breath about the incompetent maintenance workers. My mind follows the sounds she makes and tries to track her location inside the office. I hear her walk over to the window and pause, like she’s looking out of the window, and then come around to her desk. She must be standing where the two chairs are situated for patients and family members. Telekinesis would be a handy psychologist’s trick right about now. Go away, go away, go away.
The floor creaks, and I imagine her leaning over the desk, scanning the room, because she knows something is wrong. If she catches me here, cowering in her footwell, then my days passing as a normal, sane individual will be shot to hell. Regret tinges my mouth like a cheap mouthwash.
But then I hear her snatch something from the top of her desk. The scrape that vibrates over the wooden surface of the desk makes it sound like a coffee mug, which is odd because I’ve never seen Dr. Koftura drink anything over all the years I’ve known her. Her footsteps travel briskly
out of her office, followed by the thud and clunk as she works the door closed behind her.
I’m okay, I tell myself, and let out a huge breath after holding it for so long. It’s hard to wriggle out of the small space, and I wince as my elbow catches on the prong of her chair and my torso jerks backwards unexpectedly. Finally, I’m standing up and my hands fly over drawers and cupboards, searching for a piece of Justin’s history.
There are bookshelves upon bookshelves filled with medical texts and journals, aligned with a row of horizontal filing cabinets. Pulling open the middle drawer, thinking that M is in the middle of the alphabet, I’m greeted with years and years’ worth of files. I flip through the M’s from top to bottom, but fail to find a single scrap of evidence that Justin was ever a patient of Dr. Koftura’s. I move a little back into the Ks and a little ahead into the Ns, just in case something was misfiled, but still nothing.
Time is ticking away with sickening speed. I’m begging for some sort of brilliant insight of where the damn file might be, when I move around the back of her desk and my eyes land on a middle drawer I’d missed the first time because of how it blends in with the top wood panel. It’s not quite a hidden drawer, but close enough.
I open up the drawer, and the gasp of disappointment that leaves my mouth is audible. It’s clear with only a quick survey of the contents that there are no hidden files in here. Just a few rolls of mints, some pens, and Dr. Koftura’s prescription pad.
Wait, I tell myself. I reach out and shift the pad over with a pen I’ve grabbed from her drawer. I’d watched way too many Law and Order reruns in grad school. Moving the top pad over, another one appears beneath it.
There are two prescription pads.
One endorsed for Dr. Jana Koftura.
And the other endorsed to Dr. Jawinder Koftura.
I don’t have time to consider why Dr. Koftura still has a prescription pad for her dead husband. I only have time to pull out my phone, take a picture of both, and close the drawer.
It Was Always You Page 16
