The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  “Clear,” I mumbled, trying to peer behind the bathroom door.

  “Are we clear?” she repeated.

  “Crystal,” I said. “But I’ve got to shower, Mom.”

  I opened the door for her. She turned away, and I began to close it, but then she whirled around and wrapped me in her arms once more.

  “I’m very glad you’re back,” she said, then let me go.

  I locked the door as softly as I could and nearly collapsed. Jesus Christ. I needed to calm my nerves. I ran to the bathroom and swallowed down the pills I’d missed last night, along with a couple extra. I ran the shower for Mom and Todd’s benefit. Then I flipped open my laptop and clicked on the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” filling the room with just enough noise to reach the hall. The song picked up right where I’d left it nearly every night.

  “Number nine . . . number nine . . .”

  I felt a rush in my ears, a throbbing that I suddenly realized was my own heartbeat.

  “Andy?” I kept my voice buried under the music, but loud enough for him to hear. “Andy, are you still here?”

  I dropped down to the floor to check under the bed, and that’s when I heard something rustling behind the closet doors. I jumped up, dragged open the closet, and found him lying between two towers of The New York Times. I wasn’t sure if I felt relief or horror. He’d obviously slept there all night just to stay hidden from my mother. He’d turned himself into a closet-dwelling pretzel for me.

  “Is she gone?” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “Not for long.”

  Andy’s marathon hideout had stretched the jagged holes of his T-shirt, which, combined with his messy hair, made him look like he was homeless, or a junkie, or in a band, or a homeless junkie in a band. I’d never seen his hair look anything but perfect, or at least perfectly un-perfect, but now it was dry and bushy—crushed into a sort of L-shape. And somehow he’d never looked sweeter or more innocent. It made me wish I could take back everything I’d said last night.

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to me—”

  “No, it was my fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have tried to kiss you. I don’t know what happened to me, either. I think I just wanted her so bad that I went a little crazy.”

  “No, I went crazy. I shouldn’t have accused you of keeping things from me—it was all just temporary insanity. No, you know what? Neither one of us is insane. Emma Renaux is insane. She’s the one who thought I was Sarah when I am obviously me.”

  “But Theo, you were right. I don’t think I’ve been totally honest with—”

  “No,” I interrupted through clenched teeth. “You said you weren’t lying about anything else—”

  “Wait, let me finish. I haven’t been honest with myself. You were asking all the right questions. What do I really remember about that night? What do I really remember about her? It was all I thought about after you ran away. I was folded up in that freaking closet, staring into the dark for hours, and I finally had to face it.”

  I swallowed. “Face what?”

  “There’s just . . . My head is just like that closet. Dark. Some of it is darker than dead. I’m not just forgetting little pieces, I’m forgetting whole chunks.”

  “Like how much?”

  I could tell he didn’t want to say it out loud. Once he did, he couldn’t take it back or deny it—even to himself. “Sunday morning,” he said. “It’s a total blank.”

  My stomach tied itself into a spiky knot. Because some part of me knew it already.

  “I wasn’t trying to keep it from you, I swear,” he said. “I just didn’t know. It’s like the time I blacked out from drinking when I was sixteen. I didn’t know I’d blacked out until I was walking around school the next day and people asked me what I’d done the night before. They had to ask me the questions before I realized I didn’t know the answers. Hasn’t anything like that ever happened to you? Haven’t you ever blacked out or fainted, or lost a chunk of time somehow?”

  I looked down at my sneakers, ducking under my hair. “Maybe,” I replied.

  “Theo, I don’t even remember how I got to the café on Sunday. I mean, I was there by eleven forty-five, but before that . . . It’s like everything just sort of stops before sunrise and starts again on the front lawn.”

  “A fugue state,” I mumbled.

  “A what state?”

  The Beatles song came to an end, and then it began again. Always set to repeat. “Number nine . . .”

  I dug my hands into my sweatshirt pockets, catching my gnawed-off fingernails on the fraying threads inside. “It’s something my doctor has talked about. Sometimes, if a trauma is too acute, you can go into this state where you sort of erase the whole thing from your mind. It can happen to victims of abuse or violent crimes. Or to soldiers in combat. Even if you only witness something unthinkable, you can sort of . . . un-think it. Sometimes the cops will find a guy wandering around a bus station or by the side of a road, and he’ll have no idea how he got there or where he was before. Not like he’s forgotten his whole life—maybe just an hour or a day or a week. He doesn’t know; he’s just lost.”

  My mind began to race. Andy still had no idea what I’d called him before I knew his real name. He had no idea that I’d watched him for days, walking around the front lawn of the Harbor like—like what? Like he was in a fugue state. Not entirely sure what was missing or what had come before. He hadn’t even known what day it was until I reminded him. He only seemed sure of one thing: when and where he was supposed to meet Sarah.

  “Theo, I’m scared.” He threaded his fingers through the holes in his T-shirt. “I think it might be like you’re saying. I think something awful happened to her, and I think . . . I think I might have been there when it happened. I think it might have happened to us both.”

  I remembered the words I’d scrawled in my production book that morning. What really happened to him? What kind of tragedy? I knew it was something terrible. I knew it because I’d recognized the look in his eyes. I’d seen it in my own eyes whenever I accidentally glimpsed my reflection. Like some vital piece of code in our hearts had been deleted.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “I think you were there when it happened, and you’ve blocked it out—the places you went, the people you met. Andy, when Emma talked to me on that terrace, she said you were a saint. She said you were a good man, that you’d only ever tried to do good. You know Emma Renaux.”

  He shook his head, helpless. “I don’t.”

  “But you do; you just don’t remember. That has to be it. She has the answers. I’m telling you, she was weighed down by all this guilt. She said it wasn’t your fault. That I shouldn’t punish you, that she would fix it.”

  “Jesus, what is she talking about?” He pressed his palms deep into his eye sockets. He’d done this before, but only now did I know what that gesture really meant. It was a show of fear whenever he drifted too close to that gaping black hole in his memory.

  “Have you ever heard of K.O.P.?” I asked. “Keeping Our Promise?”

  He struggled for an answer. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “It’s a women’s shelter on Parker Street. Emma runs it with her fiancé, Lester Wyatt. It’s less than five minutes from the Harbor Café and Battery Gardens. Less than five minutes from where you first saw Sarah and Emma together.”

  “A homeless shelter?”

  “I think it could be, or maybe just a safe place for girls in bad situations.”

  He stared at me with wide, baffled eyes. “You think Sarah was living in a shelter?”

  “I’m not saying it for sure, but I met this girl at the party—Helena—and she told me Emma and Wyatt weren’t just celebrating their wedding, they were celebrating the shelter’s anniversary. She said they’d invited six girls from the shelter as, like, shining example
s, living proof of all the good K.O.P. does. She thought I could be the sixth girl because no one had met her yet.”

  Andy could only shake his head.

  “What if Sarah was the sixth girl?” I pressed. “She could have been staying at that shelter. She could still be staying there. Do you have any memories of that kind of place? Groups of girls, dorm rooms, anything like that?”

  His eyes drifted to the window, and I saw a glimmer of something.

  “Maybe.” He locked onto a thought. “A long hallway. It looks kind of like a dorm, a lot of doors on both sides. That fresh paint smell. Fresh white paint.”

  “We’re going,” I said. “After I deal with my mom, we’re—”

  I heard a faint beep from the floor.

  My eyes landed on the trash bag by the door where Mom had stuffed the puke-stained clothes. The sound had almost gotten lost in the music. I crawled over to the trash bag, held my breath, and braved the stench to pull the phone from my jacket pocket. Andy’s shirt was not in the bag; he’d been smart enough to remove the evidence. The phone was still connected to the button cam, but I tugged it free so he couldn’t see.

  Uh-oh.

  LULUCELL: You said you’d be here at nine. You promised. I’ll give you twenty more minutes, but I don’t know why.

  LULUCELL: I’d ask where you are, but I already know. He’s not answering his phone, either. And please don’t bother lying about it this time.

  LULUCELL: So much for “ANDY,” your fictional documentary subject and the Missing Persons Case of the Century. Did you and Max cook that one up just to throw me off?

  LULUCELL: You know, if you had feelings for him, too, you should have just TOLD me when we were writing the letter. I guess “all bets are off,” right? Anything can happen now. It’s the big breaking story: Theo Lane Screws Over Best Friend For Other Best Friend.

  LULUCELL: You’re not the same person you were two months ago, you’re not. You’re not even the person you were last WEEK. I’m not trying to belittle what happened to you. I worry about you all the time. I think about all the terrible things that might have happened to you that night. But the Theo I knew would NEVER have used that to get Max’s attention.

  Those last texts hurt. Was I really doing that? Playing on Max’s sympathies to get more attention? No. No way. Lou had so many things wrong, I didn’t know where to begin. But how could I focus on her when the truth about Sarah was getting so close? Lou and I had the rest of our lives to straighten this out. The time to find Sarah was running out.

  Unfortunately, Sarah would have to wait for as long as it took to placate my mother.

  I could not, in good conscience, ask Andy to spend another minute imprisoned in my closet, so I did what had to be done. I convinced my mother that we clearly needed a “Family Day” to help “bridge the divide” between us.

  To my complete and utter shock, she went for it.

  Todd was, of course, delighted.

  I dragged them anywhere I could think of to keep them out of the house: a walk through Tompkins Square Park, a Billy Budd Browsing Bonanza at the NYU library, a late lunch at Todd’s favorite macrobiotic dumpling house.

  Again and again, I told my mother whatever she wanted to hear. That there were no secret boys in my life. That I wasn’t sneaking out to parties. That I would keep her abreast of all my comings and goings and check in constantly by phone or text.

  The plan worked to perfection. It not only gave Andy a chance to stretch out on my bed and catch up on sleep, but it left my mother exhausted by the time we got home.

  The tears, my puke, her robe pockets filled with used tissues, her binge on syrupy folk music, the confusion, the interrogation, the dumplings—by five o’clock, it had all stacked up, and her body finally quit on her. She fell into a deep sleep on the living room couch, her mouth open and distorted like some cowering figure at the bottom of a Renaissance painting. And, as happened on most weekends, Todd fell into a snoring nap reading his weekend Times.

  That’s when we made our move.

  Chapter Twelve

  I must have walked by the Keeping Our Promise shelter at least nine times in my life; I just never noticed. Nothing about the building stood out. Plus, a scaffold had been built over the whole façade (from the looks of it, pretty recently); everything was drenched in shadow. Maybe the anniversary had inspired Emma and Lester to spring for a facelift.

  I’m sure I’d seen a few girls smoking on the curb and thought it was a run-down public school. Underneath, it had that kind of look: bland and institutional. Tarnished metal letters—keeping our promise—were nailed against a stone wall next to the door.

  I pulled the iron handle. Then Andy tried. It wouldn’t budge. There was a dusty, crooked intercom. I hesitated, trying to plan exactly how I’d announce myself, but when I reached for the buzzer, the door burst open, knocking me aside. I stumbled back, grabbing onto the scaffold.

  “Don’t even think about touching me!” a boy shouted.

  He sounded frightened, and I saw why: a burly, hard-looking old guy with slicked-back black hair was shoving him down the steps. His dark windbreaker was tight around his gut, and three pounds of keys jangled from his belt loop. The boy was probably my age; he had that telltale fuzzy, failed mustache on his upper lip. His hair was short and spiky, buzzed on the back and the sides so you couldn’t miss the three tattoos around his neck, the name Victor in red-and-white graffiti sandwiched between two sideways crucifixes.

  Victor (I assumed he was Victor) puffed out his chest. His face was in Burly Man’s face, but his feet told the real story: they were back-stepping, retreating toward the curb. “I swear to God, bro, I will end you!”

  I shrank further into the shadow of the scaffold. My hand felt clammy on the cold metal. Andy stepped in front of me as a buffer.

  “Let’s stay calm, friend,” Burly Man warned in an even tone. He spoke with a heavy Staten Island accent. “There are no boys allowed past these doors. I think you know that by now.”

  “This is bullshit, man!”

  “Kid, you are violating an order of protection right now,” Burly Man said. He’d clearly dealt with a Victor or two before. “Maybe you want to give me your probation officer’s name so I can clue him in?”

  “Yo, eat me, Tony Soprano! You don’t know me. You don’t know shit about me!”

  “I do know this is a women’s-only facility. And I know you can’t be within thirty feet of her, so unless you’d like my boot in your ass, you better get it moving.”

  Victor hocked up a loogie and spat it at the steps near Burly Man’s feet. “Pinche maricón.” He raised his pained eyes toward the second-story window. “Helena!” he howled. “Baby, you gotta stop this! Come down here and talk to me. I’m sorry! I told you it won’t happen again. I’m done with all that! Lena-Niña, please.”

  My heart actually went out to him. He was repellent, but he loved Helena so much that he was calling to her balcony like Romeo. Where exactly did you draw the line between Hopeless Romantic and Psycho Stalker?

  “Helena!” he called again. “BITCH, GET YOUR SKANK ASS DOWN HERE, GODDAMN IT!”

  Okay, that’s where you drew it.

  Burly dropped his nonchalant cop routine and charged down the steps, just far enough to launch Victor into a full sprint down the street. Once Victor had vanished, Burly huffed back up and threw the door open with all the frustration he’d kept in check. He didn’t even notice us in the shadow. It was luck; the door swung closed slowly, and something in me jumped for the handle.

  “What are you doing?” Andy whispered.

  “I’m going in,” I whispered back.

  “After that? We should wait.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “No way. I’m going with you.”

  “Are you kidding? You heard Burly. No boys allowed. You want to start another scene lik
e that one?”

  “Theo, please,” Andy snapped. He sounded just like Victor. “I don’t want you in there alone. This place is already creeping the hell out of me. No way Sarah is staying here. No way.”

  “Andy, don’t worry. This is like the safest place a girl can possibly be. I’ll be fine.”

  He took a deep breath and gave in. “Fine. Fine, I’ll let you go in alone. But if she’s really in there . . . if you really find her . . . then you’ve got to bring her out here to me. She might not want to see me after whatever happened that morning, but she’s got to at least give me a chance to talk to her. You’ve got to convince her to talk to me.”

  I could see all the fear and anticipation in his silver-flecked eyes. “Andy, if she’s in there, I will bring her to you. I promise. Five minutes. Just wait for me.”

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  I watched him watch me as the door swung shut between us.

  The lobby walls were bare all the way to the high ceilings. Dirty cloth tarps and paint cans were strewn across the floor, but only half of the room had gotten a fresh coat of white paint so far—

  My toes clenched inside my sneakers.

  Andy had definitely been here before. “That fresh paint smell,” he’d said. “Fresh white paint.” It was one of the few details he’d remembered. Late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, he had been in this lobby. But how?

  There was only one possible answer: Sarah had snuck him in. Jesus, she was here.

  “Are you in any grave or imminent danger?” a woman’s voice barked at me.

  I jumped. I hadn’t even noticed I was standing slack-mouthed right in front of a bulletproof plexiglass sliding window, like you’d find at the post office. Wrinkled paper signs and announcements were scotch-taped all over the office inside—a contradictory mix of inspirational messages (if you don’t like being a doormat, then get off the floor!) and wanted signs with dead-eyed sketches of rapists and murderers (have you seen this man?).

  “Young lady?” the woman pressed. Her voice was raspy; I could smell cigarette smoke. I tried to focus on her sour, heavily lined face. Her wig was an unfortunate shade of red. A nameplate on the desk beside her read, delores danello. “Are you in any grave or imminent danger?”