Nameless

by Marni MacRae

  “Yeah, I figure it is. Let’s look for tracks and see what we can find.”

  “So, how old is this girl? Like sixteen, eighteen? Do I need to track down parents?”

  Lee takes point, holding his light up at shoulder height, cop-style, methodically running the beam back and forth along Jenson’s access road as he forges ahead. It feels like the weather is picking up. Gusts of cold night air are driving the rain down the back of my neck pushing me onto my brother’s heels to quicken his pace.

  “Don’t know. She looks in her twenties to me, but you may want to check missing persons. Honestly, I have no idea where she came from or anything about her. Pretty little thing,” I muse before I realize I said it aloud.

  Lee pauses and shines his light up into my face, blinding me and forcing me to raise a hand to shield the freakishly bright beam. “Dude! Cop or not I’m gonna put you in the mud!”

  “Sorry, man.” He lowers the beam to my boots but doesn’t turn back to the muddy track. “Pretty, huh? You know I’m gonna have to tell Ana about this. You’re doomed now.”

  “What I am is blind. And no need to tell Anabel anything.” My statement comes out sounding like a plea. A diehard romantic, Lee’s wife considers herself the matchmaker of the county. She’s forced enough dates on me for me to know, one hint of any interest on my part, and she’ll be at the hospital curling Eve’s hair for a wedding. “Seriously. Say. Nothing.”

  Lee chuckles and returns to swinging his light back and forth over the ground as he wanders farther up the track. “No can-do, bro. Ana wants nieces, nephews, a wedding to plan—hell, I want Ana out of my hair, and you, my friend, are my ticket to a weekend fishing trip. She’ll be so busy with you and pretty girl I can grab Gabe and make a run for the lake.”

  Crap. I know he’ll do it. He’s my brother, but any glimmer of escaping the wife for fishing and Lee would throw our own mother under the bus. I’ll have to deal with Anabel later. Right now I need to focus, find the tracks, follow them to their source, pray no one is hurt, and then pursue coffee and a hot shower.

  “Found something. Man, was she barefoot?”

  I slog through the thickening mud to where Lee’s light shines on a footprint quickly washing away in the rain. “Yeah. No coat, no shoes, her feet were pretty torn up. I have no idea how far she walked before I found her, but she was an ice cube when I touched her.”

  The memory of Eve in my arms brings on a wave of unexpected warmth. She had been cold and stiff and not a little frightened, for which I couldn’t blame her, but she had felt perfect against me. It had been hard to put her down.

  Lee is all business now. No thoughts of a fishing trip in the near future clouding his judgment. “They look small, almost like a child.”

  His voice is thoughtful as he steps around the footprint and continues moving slowly up the cornfield track. It isn’t hard to find the trail once we follow that first footprint farther along the sodden lane.

  Lee and I are both careful not to disturb the impressions, walking single file along one side of the road as the police issue mini-sun shines ahead, following Eve’s journey to its beginning.

  Hopefully.

  I don’t know why I named her. Impulse really. I can’t explain the effect she has on me, like a deep need to protect her. Not in a fatherly way or even a friendly way, but almost an ownership, as if she were mine and I am compelled to guard her, cushion the blows that are sure to come. If her memory doesn’t return, Eve will have a long hard journey ahead. My mind is already planning, organizing, setting out intentions to take under my wing a young woman who doesn’t know me from Adam—pun intended—and has already asked me to give her space.

  I blow out a breath and push the thoughts to the back of my mind. One step at a time, man. Find where she came from, contact her family, get some answers, then see if she will tolerate your interfering mug.

  “She turned here.” Lee shines the sun toward the interior of the expansive cornfield. Due south. “Or rather, she came from there.” He nods his dripping brim toward where the small childlike tracks emerge from the rows of new corn. “I’ll check in with Betty and make sure Jenson is on board with our stomping into his corn.”

  Leland takes a minute to contact the station through his shoulder mic, yammering in cop code that I know he tosses out just to try to impress me. Betty comes back clear as a bell, no “niners” or “victor 11’s,” just a sweet voice chirping on Lee’s shoulder like a pretty bird.

  “You boys go ahead, Carl says not to mess his field up too bad. I promised him you would be extra careful.”

  I can hear the smile in Betty’s voice. Old enough to be our grandmother, Betty has been holding down BVPD’s call center since before either of us was a twinkle in our daddy’s eye. She’s been playing hard to get with Carl Jenson for almost as long. Still a sight even in her advanced years, Betty is used to turning heads and getting her way when it comes to men.

  “Hansette called in, says the young lady is having tests done. Doc Eston asked us to wait until morning for a report.”

  Betty sounds like she agrees. As if we’re bothering Eve by trying to help her. Old school minds like Betty’s have immense amounts of patience. Tomorrow or the next day seems proper enough to “go bothering the young lady.” Never mind the young lady is sitting in a hospital bed with no idea of who she is, or if someone else is injured out here, or where said young lady might go once released from the hospital. I sigh and pull my coat’s wet collar up to shield against more gusts of rain driving down my already soaked back.

  Lee clicks the mic, delivers a coded confirmation then turns back to me and gives a nod to carry on.

  Leland is a good police officer, a great father and family man, but sometimes, all I see is my kid brother, playing cops and robbers like we did when we were young. Shooting imaginary bullets—pow, pow! Overacting every scene. You’re dead man! Take that, you filthy thief! Strutting the lingo and the gear—We got a four-niner-sixer in progress, bring in the tank and heavy armor!

  As we squelch through the mud, keeping our eyes on the straight-as-an-arrow trail leading us south, I wonder how much we ever really grow up. I mean, my favorite pastime had been Lincoln logs and erector sets. Now I own a construction company. Just bigger boys now, with bigger toys.

  Not ten minutes later the tracks change. The beams of our lights show trampled earth and the tiny green shoots of corn pressed into the earth in a larger patch as if Eve had been lying down or had stopped to rest. I pick out a pair of small handprints pushed deeply into the dark soil and start pacing a slow circle around the site hoping to find the direction she had come from before she stopped. There’s no car, no debris of any sort here. No shoes or jacket, slip of paper or sign to say “this is who I am, this is where I am from.” Just mud and corn and a feeling of emptiness.

  “There’s nothing leading to this spot. No car tracks, no foot prints. You see anything?”

  Lee swings the beam of his light in a full circle around the imprinted earth and crushed seedlings. He stands in one spot, careful not to track up the area and shakes his head as his light covers the ground I just scoured.

  “Nothing. Like she was dropped from the sky.” His voice is bemused, and then the light shines in my face again. “Hey, man, your girl isn’t an alien, is she? I mean department resources being abused for alien abduction catch and release might roadblock that raise I’m due.”

  I shield my eyes and turn away from my brother. The rain has soaked through my clothes to the skin and has picked up in its insistence of chilling me to the bone. I’m in no mood to indulge Lee in banter and growing frustrated and concerned with this obvious dead end

  “Her feet had been torn up pretty bad. She didn’t get that damage by walking through a field. She must have walked through woods or brush, over rocks maybe.”

  Lee circles the imprinted area to where I stand. “Jenson’s field borders state land to the south, there’s quite a bit of forest out that way straight into the next
county. Maybe she walked out of there.”

  “That’s more than four miles from here, at least.” I shake my head and watch droplets fall in the beam of my lowered light, joining its brethren as it journeys into the soil to encourage a future of grain. Miles and miles of grain.

  “If she came from the south, then we’re going to need more men. No telling where she came out at, or even if she was on state land to start with.” I’m beginning to feel a bit defeated, with hopelessness tickling along the outskirts of my cluttered mind. Where do we start?

  Lee turns and starts back the way we came. “Leave that to me. It’s time to report in and get the department behind the search.” Lee glances over and gives me an appraising once-over, “You need to head home, shower, get some dinner and go see if your girl is awake. Take Hansette in with you and see if you can get any details out of her. Any little clue may help and she already knows you. Tell Doc Eston what’s going on and get him behind you.”

  “What are you going to do?” I have to admit that dry clothes sound alluring. The siren call of hot coffee is tempting me to go ahead and do as Lee asks, but I can’t abandon the search without knowing he has a plan. I’m praying he isn’t going to say he needs to wait for daylight. If someone’s out there hurt or trapped, waiting might be their death sentence.

  “I’ll head back to the station and grab some maps of the area. We grew up here, but I’m going to need to get some extra hands and permission for any private property we may need to cross. We’ll start with the roads, scour the ditches and pavement for any sign of an accident, make our way toward the state piece down south and hopefully by then your girl will have given you some clue as to what we’re looking for. We may need to talk to the rangers in that jurisdiction, team up and form a search. But honestly, bro,” Lee pauses at the edge of the track before we turn to head toward our vehicles, “with no one really missing and no information to go on, I can’t guarantee we can do much.”

  It’s a good plan. I already had a feeling the department’s resources could only go so far. Lee’s right. We need more information. But one thing is certain—Eve wasn’t dropped from a spaceship, she came from somewhere, and a girl doesn’t head out to walk barefoot for miles, enduring injury and losing her memory without cause.

  I know that even if Lee can’t help, I’ll keep trying. Sooner or later I’ll find where Eve came from, what caused this mental injury and keep her from ever having to endure something like this again. There you go again, nosing in where you aren’t invited.

  Invitation be damned. Eve is not “my girl” as Lee insists on calling her, but I feel in my bones I’m supposed to protect her.

  Chapter 5

  I’m sitting on a stiff bed, covered in a long sheet of thin paper, in a small room with strange-looking devices hanging from white walls.

  Everything feels slightly off. Like singing a song you know well, but some of the words have been changed. I have come to accept that I am a mystery to myself. I even have an idea of what I’m going through—amnesia. I understand the condition brings on memory loss, particularly of personal memories.

  The struggle I am dealing with at this moment while I wait for the doctor, who apparently was not waiting for me, is that I know so much, but there are still gaps. How can I know who Eve is in the Bible, but not know what a cell is?

  Nick had kindly taken the time to explain that it is a phone that he carries with him, but that didn’t clear anything up for me. I can picture a phone in my mind. It is a large heavy object with a device that you hold to your ear to listen to a caller and that device is connected by a cord to the phone itself, which in turn has a cord that runs to a socket in a wall that connects to the greater world to enable that call. It is most certainly not small enough to carry in a pocket, but Nick showed me his “cell,” and I had to accept yet another discovery of something I thought I knew, yet don’t know fully. I resisted asking why the cell didn’t have any buttons. It was just a rectangle with a smooth glass surface that lit up showing a picture of a little boy holding up a fish. Nick had explained the boy was his nephew.

  Do I have a nephew, a family, someone missing me? My mind is all over the place. Just when I think I have a handle on how I feel about everything, another question pops up that makes me want to cry again. Then I go through the process of steeling myself to accept what I don’t know, to forge ahead and be strong. I am exhausted, drained—even the drive to know me, to get answers is waning. The stiff bed I sit upon calls to me to lie down, escape into sleep, if only for a moment.

  I let my eyes droop closed and release a breath I hadn’t known I had been holding. For a moment, I relax and try to turn off the clamoring thoughts. I indulge a brief moment of weakness and let tired tears run down my cheeks. Then, wiping them away with fingers finally thawed from their earlier frozen state, I steel my spine once more and ready myself for the next round.

  I’m dressed in a loose, thin gown that wraps around me with ties in the back. The air in the room tickles at the skin exposed there, and I almost wish I had my wet, muddy clothes back. My thoughts return to their previous ramblings as I attempt to categorize my surroundings. Looking at the devices on the wall, the sterility of the space, I wonder why I know what a doctor is, what a hospital is, but this place doesn’t feel right.

  A light knock on the door precedes it opening and an older man enters. On his heels, the nurse in the bright pink uniform breezes in and comes to my side, she fiddles with one of the instruments on the wall behind me and then lifts my left arm as she wraps a black, stiff material around my bicep.

  “Let’s just get your pressure while the doctor and you chat,” she says.

  I turn to see her pumping a small black bulb in her hand and feel the cuff on my arm tighten. Blood pressure. The thought pops into my head, and I relax slightly and turn to look at the doctor.

  The doctor gives me a kind smile and settles onto a stool next to a shelf against the wall. He glances at a chart in his hand then back to me.

  “All right, my dear, let’s start with your name.”

  * * *

  Tests.

  I’ve lost track of the different kinds and how many. Some have already been done, like the blood tests, and some are scheduled for later.

  The pretty nurse, whose name I learned is Laurel, took blood from a vein in my arm, then inserted and taped an IV line on my hand. I know it’s called an IV because I asked. Laurel was kind enough to name it for me, to explain it would give me fluids if I was dehydrated or medication if the doctor deemed I needed it. It made me feel…restrained.

  Laurel took three vials of blood. I don’t know why she needed to take so much. How many tests could possibly be done on blood? She had rattled off a list of exams yet to be done while taking my temperature, then left me alone in my room to wait.

  I feel overwhelmed. The room I was given is clean and sterile, with machines lined against the wall behind my bed. They beep and whir and record my blood pressure, my pulse, my blood oxygen. Although Laurel had patiently explained their functions and why they needed to be attached to me, I feel trapped. Lines run from my arms to the machines, tethering me and terrifying me with their needles that pierce my skin, their noises that fill the small space around me. I wish I had never come here. I wish I had asked Nick to take me anywhere else. I wish I could remember who I am. The more potent desire reminds me that the tests are necessary if I want to reach that goal. Memory.

  The doctor gave me no answers. He was kind and seemed genuinely concerned, but he merely asked me a few questions and took some notes. Assuring me he would return, he spoke to Laurel just out of earshot and left. It has been two hours and twelve minutes. He hasn’t returned.

  The large clock on the opposite wall ticks away the minutes, and with each tick, I struggle against the urge to pull the lines from my body and run. To where? I have nowhere to go. I have no one to run to. This room is the safest place for me and yet how can a haven feel so threatening?

  “Hi, sw
eetie. I brought you something to nibble on.” Laurel pokes her head through the large hospital room door that had been left ajar. She gracefully pushes against the wooden door with her hip and carries a tray laden with tiny bowls covered with plastic lids to the table beside my bed.

  “The cafeteria was closing for the night so I put together a few snack items to get you through until breakfast.”

  Laurel smiles warmly and swings the table on its swivel arm over my legs. The bed had been adjusted to raise the back up to a sitting position. Although earlier I had been tired and considered diving into the safety and denial of sleep, I hadn’t been able to figure out how to lower it back down. The frustration of one more thing I am ignorant of burned the exhaustion from me, and I spent the last hour staring at the clock.

  “I brought a little taste of everything, perhaps one may jog a memory. Taste and scent are powerful stimulators of memory, but if nothing else, at least you can begin putting some weight on your skinny frame.”

  She gives me a wink and reaches over to squeeze my shoulder.

  “I brought you a glass of milk and a Pepsi. Let me know if you need anything else.” Laurel glances at each monitor that is attached to me and smiles. “Your numbers look great. Enjoy your food and just buzz me when you’re done.”

  As she reaches the door I feel a surge of panic. I wish I hadn’t pushed Nick to leave. Being alone makes everything seem so deafening. The monitors, the questions still racing through my head, the emptiness that taunts me with everything I see feeling so foreign. I had thought facing this on my own would help me find my balance, some inner strength, but instead, it fills me with a powerlessness. Without someone to ask questions of, I will never get answers, I will just be alone, and let’s face it. Scared.

  “Wait.” I hear the panic in my plea and calm myself as Laurel turns back to me, her hand on the door. “Can you stay and talk to me for a little while?” I know she is working and probably can’t visit, so I add hurriedly before she can refuse my desperate request, “I have so many questions about my…um…health.”