The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  But there was really only one reason. I didn’t want Andy to be seen because somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain I knew there was nothing to see. “Can I ask you guys something?” I whispered.

  “Of course,” they said at the same time.

  “Was there even a Night in Question? Or did I make that up, too?”

  Max put his hand gently on my shoulder. “Just come out to the living room,” he said. “You need to talk to your mom.”

  “My mom?” I pulled back from him. “Why my mom?”

  “We won’t leave your side,” Lou said. “Not for a second. But she has to be the one to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Anger simmered inside me again. Not at Max or Lou, of course. Anger at the notion that my sanity might depend in any way, shape, or form on my mother.

  I was already three feet ahead of them, marching to my living room. But I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the man in my stepstool’s chair.

  It wasn’t Todd. It was Lester Andrew Wyatt.

  He’d lost the jacket and tie, but he was still in his tuxedo shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, as if he’d never gone home last night. Finding him here, of all places, was a slap in the face. His expression was grim, matching that of my mother’s, who stood beside him. Then I realized that the room was quite crowded, a virtual sea of grim faces.

  Dr. Silver stood by the coffee table. Todd sat on our black leather couch, hand stretched out to my mother’s. I’d never seen so much sadness in my mother’s face, not even that morning when I’d come home to her tears and folk music. Her eyes were visibly swollen from crying.

  Anger slowly gave way to fear. “Mom, what’s going on?”

  “I’m the one who asked Andrew to be here,” she said, trying to hold back more tears. “We spoke last night after your friends brought you home. He thinks you’re in trouble, and he thinks it’s my fault. They all think it’s my fault. And they’re right. I’ve done something unforgivable. I thought it was the right thing. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.”

  It was in my ear again: not so much feedback as a distant, wailing siren, warning of some approaching disaster. It was hard to hear my own words as I spoke. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Sarah,” she said. Her voice cracked at the end in a choked sob.

  Strange—at this moment, I missed the Ice Queen. I would have done anything to bring her back. But the Ice Queen was gone forever, like Andy.

  I don’t even know why I asked the next question, because the answer was dawning. Slowly at first, but quicker now, clawing its way up from under the floorboards in my head. “You know Sarah?”

  Mom nodded again, sniffling, avoiding my eyes. “She’s all I think about. She’s all I’ve thought about every day and every night.”

  My mind flashed to those headphones. The big, chunky headphones I’d never seen Mom wear before. I thought of them coming loose from her MacBook as she rushed to hug me that morning, letting that syrupy-sweet folk song erupt in the dining room. How quickly she must have slammed the laptop shut to stop the music.

  I bolted for her bedroom.

  “What are you doing?” she called out. “Theodore, where are you going?”

  Todd and Wyatt jumped to their feet, but I don’t think they even knew why. They only knew what I knew: that there was something my mother didn’t want me to see.

  Her laptop was asleep on her bedside table—the clunky headphones lying next to it, plugged in. I flipped the laptop awake, tugged out the headphone cable, and plopped down on the bed. I went straight to iTunes, but there were no recently played files.

  Not a music file or a video file. Then what?

  A slideshow. It had to be a slideshow.

  “Theodore, don’t,” Mom called to me as they all came rushing to the room. “Not like this.”

  I checked the recent slideshow files, and there was only one. A file simply titled “C.” I clicked on it and thrust out my palm. The simple gesture somehow froze them all at the doorway. I slammed down the spacebar and played file “C.”

  The first image fades up slowly as that saccharine folk song fills the room. It’s more than a snippet of the muffled song. Now I can hear every picked string of the banjo and every word those bubblegum Joni Mitchell wannabes are singing.

  This is the garden of make-believe

  A magical garden of make-believe

  Where flowers chuckle and birds play tricks

  And a magic tree grows lollipop sticks

  It’s not a folk song. It’s a children’s song. About a magical garden. The longer it plays, the more familiar it becomes. I know this song. The singers aren’t wannabes at all. They’re a pair of radiant, heartfelt voices singing to kids. So why does this song makes me physically ill?

  The first picture floats across the screen. An old photo of my mother in a hospital bed. She’s barely recognizable at first, so young, elated, and chubby-cheeked. She holds me, all pink, mushy, and newborn. A rugged individual with a stubbly, square jaw leans in next to her, his wide hand resting on one of my minuscule shoulders. He grins at the camera like a proud father.

  Because he is my proud father. Probably no older than twenty. So handsome and so young, just like Mom always said. I’ve had exactly two images of his face to hold onto my whole life, but now I add a third and a fourth and more. As the photos travel across the screen, zooming and panning and cross-fading, my father shows up time and again. He and my mother are flushed with bigger and bigger smiles, as I grow older from slide to slide.

  There’s a shot of them holding my tiny hands as they walk/lift me through my earliest steps. A shot of them laughing uproariously in freeze-frame as I splatter his face with mashed peas from my high chair. A shot of me in a tiny ballerina tutu, twirling safely under his strong fingers. (When did I ever own a tutu?)

  I know I should feel waves of joy seeing myself as a happy-go-lucky child with a bright and innocent smile. A child who still hasn’t read any Dostoyevsky or Eugene O’Neill. A child with a father. But as I pass the age of four or five in the pictures, my features take an unexpected turn. I grow uneasy as the song plays on.

  If you sing for me (la la-la-la-la-la)

  I’ll sing for you (lu lu-lu-lu-lu-lu)

  If you cry for me (hu hoo-hoo-hoo)

  I’ll cry for you (boo hoo-hoo-hoo)

  If you scream for me (Ahhhhhhhh!)

  The girl in the pictures . . .

  She’s me, but she isn’t me. She’s another me. A me from an alternate universe. She has my dark hair and Cupid’s-bow lips, but a sharper nose. My pale cheekbones, but better defined. She’s the Pretty Girl version of me.

  I watch her turn seven or eight, and my father is still in the pictures. There’s a shot of her proudly presenting him with a colorful drawing, then a close-up of her artwork. It’s a classic child’s rendering of a nuclear family—father, mother, and daughter all lined up side by side, holding hands on a tree-lined street under a blue sky and a quarter yellow sun. She has signed her art in childlike print at the bottom right corner:

  Cyrano Lane.

  That was my sister’s name. Cyrano Lane. The sister my mother never mentioned in my presence. The sister who only exists in a slideshow full of photos I have never seen until this moment. Cyrano—my obsession, my favorite character of all time, a character I’ve tried to portray all my life. Cyra for short. I know that instantly. Not Sarah, Cyra. I couldn’t remember her name, but my mind had done its best to sound it out. Cyra. Because what girl would want to go through life named Cyrano? No, that’s not true. Cyrano is a beautiful name. An unforgettable name. At least, it should have been.

  I watch the slides as Cyra turns twelve or thirteen, and then a newborn baby makes her debut appearance, wrapped in a hospital blanket. There’s a new pink ball of mush in my delighted mother’s arms—a gift fo
r my elated father and my older sister.

  Cyra holds me up proudly to the camera, and we become the stars of all the photos. She holds me swaddled in a blanket in front of a colorful wall of old books. She pushes me down a long street of brownstones in my stroller. She holds a daisy out for me to sniff as we sit in a vast field of overgrown grass. She shows off her glistening blue-green Little Mermaid costume as I reach gleefully for one of her crepe-paper fins.

  The song’s final two lines echo through the room, and it sparks a memory. Not a distant memory, but a recent one. It’s the couplet I saw at the bottom of that club’s webpage:

  So come on in without a fuss

  ’Cause the Magical Garden is waiting for us!

  “The Magic Garden.” Mom’s voice drifts in from the present. “That show always stopped Cyra’s crying when she was a baby. I think it was the way those two girls sang in unison.” I don’t want my mother to speak, but I need every word. “Cyra got so excited when they reran the show on Nickelodeon,” she goes on. “She was too old by then—sixteen or seventeen—but she wanted to share it with her baby sister. She sat you down for every episode, tried to teach you all the songs. God, it always made you so happy, Theo.”

  The next song begins with a bouncy guitar. My head is spinning too fast—my whole body vibrating.

  You don’t need a key, so follow me

  There are no locks on Story Box, on Story Box, on Story Box

  The stories are here. They’re all in here

  From Crafty Fox to Goldilocks on Story Box, on Story Box

  There are no locks on Story Box, on Story Box, on Story Box . . .

  “You’d act out the stories together,” Mom says now. “You always loved making up stories, Theodore. I think you got that from her.”

  Brain running too hot. I glance at my mother, but I miss some of the pictures. When I turn back, the whole family is posing for graduation photos. There are barely any shots of us from Cyra’s high school days, and the next two pictures show me why.

  Decked out in a beautiful white strapless dress, Cyra proudly holds up her diploma. Close-up of the diploma: it’s from Phillips Exeter Academy. My sister went away to boarding school. The same boarding school as Emma Renaux and Lester Wyatt.

  And right on cue, his photo appears. Andy Reese wears a totally uncharacteristic blue blazer and khakis. Cyra’s arms are wrapped around his waist. Then all three of them are posing arm in arm: Cyra in the middle, Andy on her left, and a spritely little eighteen-year-old Emma Renaux on her right.

  They were a threesome. Just like Lou, Max, and me, only not like us, because Cyra and Andy are so plainly in love.

  The final Magic Garden song plays.

  See ya, see ya

  Hope you had a good, good time, da-dum

  Hope you have a good, good morning, mm-hmm

  Hope we get to see you again

  The slideshow ends on a final image of Cyra, radiant in her white graduation dress, her diploma tucked safely under her arm. My gut tells me it was the last picture of her ever taken. Before the fire. Because there was a fire, wasn’t there?

  Heroic teen loses girlfriend in fire.

  After I returned to the living room, they waited. Six people standing there, wondering what I’d do. Encircling me.

  I felt a hand on my back. Lester Andrew Wyatt’s hand. I whirled around and saw a tear rolling down his cheek.

  “That’s the first time I saw any of that,” he said, his voice choked with some sort of emotion, though I wasn’t sure what. He leaned closer to my ear. “This is what I wanted. This is the moment I wanted us to share. Just a moment for you, me, and Cyra.”

  I couldn’t believe he was crying and I wasn’t. I had an overwhelming impulse to bat his hand away. I still wasn’t sure what he was to me—not sure what was real or what I imagined or what I remembered.

  I turned to my mother. “Why did you hide these from me?” I asked.

  She brushed a crumpled tissue over her quivering lips. “I hide them from myself, too,” she said. “I only take them out twice a year, on her birthday and on the anniv—I’ve never even put them on the computer before. I only kept prints, and I kept them hidden in my closet. But Todd found them. He made this slideshow for me and gave it to me on her birthday. I think he was hoping the music would do for me what it did for Cyra. September is always so hard.”

  The fall semester stress.

  Todd didn’t say a word. What could he say? He’d broken my trust in a way that could never be mended. He’d gone all these years keeping my mother’s secret.

  I didn’t feel shaky. I didn’t even feel angry anymore. I mostly felt pity.

  “Those pictures should have been in frames,” I said to my mother. “They should have been in frames my whole life. I should have passed them in the hall every day. We should have looked at them together on every one of her birthdays.”

  “I know that now,” Mom said, hiding her face behind the tissue.

  “You erased her.”

  “No.” She shook her head, knowing that was exactly what she had done.

  “You did. You just . . . crossed her out.”

  “It was the only way I could function. It was a mistake.”

  I blinked slowly, still without a hint of tears. “Forgetting your umbrella at the restaurant is a mistake. Forgetting to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ is a mistake. But forgetting . . .” It got harder to find the words I wanted, but at least I found the words I needed. “You made me forget my sister. I see her in these pictures, but I don’t remember her at all. I don’t remember a thing about her.”

  “I don’t think that’s entirely true.”

  Ah, that weaselly voice could belong to only one man: Dr. Silver. It was perfect that he’d chosen that moment to finally chime in. “I think you may have recently begun to remember her, but you’re having difficulty processing the trauma.”

  I glanced at my mom, at Todd, at Max, at Lou. All of them kept their eyes on Dr. Silver. “What trauma?”

  Dr. Silver’s eyes were on me. “Theo, do you have any memories of the fire?”

  I frowned. Funny, I’d never seen him in anything but a striped dress shirt and khakis. Now he was wearing jeans and a red zip-up fleece. Nothing but the closely trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and glasses to prove he was the shrink in the room. He appeared to be waiting patiently. He’d have to wait until the end of time, because I had no memory of any fire.

  On the other hand, I did remember something Andy had said to me. (Imaginary Andy, that is.) He said sometimes we don’t even know what we’ve forgotten until people ask specific questions. Doctor Silver had asked a specific question. Maybe that was why I could feel the heat burning the lining of my stomach, making my face sweaty and flushed, making my (nonexistent) scar burn.

  Andy had lost Cyra in a fire on September 1, 2003—that much I knew. But now I understood the missing piece.

  I’d been there, too.

  I dashed back into my mother’s room, back to the laptop. Nobody said a word as I Googled Lester Andrew Wyatt again. I’d been such a harried basket case the first time. I’d been running barefoot through the streets, reeling from the discovery of two Andys, not even sure of the year. Tears had blurred the microscopic text on my iPhone screen, and Wyatt had been so close on my tail, I’d let a photo of the fire tell me the whole story. But now, I could actually read the text of the Times article.

  Now I understood what made Lester Andrew Wyatt such a hero.

  It was just four paragraphs. Four paragraphs that could have saved me from the past four days. Four paragraphs in the classic Times font that told the story of Sunday, September 1, 2003. The story of two eighteen-year-old do-gooders who were deeply in love.

  Andy and Cyrano had just graduated from Exeter and had spent the summer helping to build a women’s shelter on Parker Street called
“Keeping Our Promise.” It was a passion project funded by George Wyatt, Andrew’s father.

  Cyrano had simply wanted to give her five-year-old sister a tour on a beautiful Sunday morning. But the electrical work hadn’t been fully completed, and a fire broke out in one of the rooms (I didn’t have to guess which room). The three of them were trapped.

  Wyatt spoke from behind my shoulder as I read the article. “Do you remember now?”

  The answer was no. I knew this was the part where I was supposed to surrender to suggestion. Yes, I remember now. But I wouldn’t. The fire was only part of what I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten my own sister. And some of the people hovering around me now were responsible for that.

  “There was so much smoke,” Wyatt said. “Everything was crumbling down. The walls, the ceiling . . . There was no way I could have gotten to both of you in time. ”

  I realized what he was trying to say and shut my eyes.

  “Cyra knew,” he said. “She knew it had to be you, Theo. She wouldn’t even let me try another way—all she cared about was getting you out. By the time I went back for her, it was too late. The fire department was there by then. They tried to go back for her, but . . .”

  I forced my eyes back open.

  “Half the building was gone by the time they put it out,” he said. “We kept what we could, but it took us two years to rebuild.”

  If half the building had burned to cinders, I couldn’t imagine what had happened to my sister’s body, and I didn’t want to ask.

  “Theo, we’ve all had a talk this morning,” Dr. Silver said quietly. “Your mother and Andrew and Max and Louise and I. And I think I’ve pieced together what happened here.”