The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  “Is your name Sarah?” I asked.

  “No,” she barked. “My name is not Sarah. That’s the name he gave me. I just wanted a bed and some sleep. That’s all I wanted. But he saw me in the lobby filling out the paperwork, and he started talking to me and smiling at me and interviewing me like he liked me, you know? Like I was his girlfriend or something. He just creeped me out.”

  I nodded, that uneasy fire burning inside me again. She had obviously been waiting a long time to tell someone this story. It was a grievance or a confession or both. I think it had been quite a while since she’d had anyone to talk to.

  “The way he kept staring at me,” she said. “Like he knew me. He asked me my name, but I wouldn’t tell him, so then he just says, ‘Well, let’s call you Sarah for now.’ Like it’s that easy? Like this asshole can just give me any name he wants?”

  Sometimes he gave them temp names. Like stray dogs at the pound.

  He’d named her Cyra, not Sarah, I was sure of that. But who wouldn’t hear that as “Sarah”?

  “He told the old lady at the desk to give me Room Nine,” she said, “and I was, like, fine, Room Nine, good night. But then he follows me into the room. He would not leave me the hell alone. He wanted to talk more. He said I reminded him of some girl he knew when he was a kid. He said my face had this ‘purity’ that he really admired, and he wanted me to be his ‘ambassador’ or something. Everything was ‘Sarah’ this and ‘Sarah’ that. ‘There’s something special about you, Sarah. We’re going to take good care of you, Sarah.’”

  “Did you even know who he was?” Max asked, jaw clenched. He was finally getting a picture of the real Lester Andrew Wyatt.

  “Oh, I found out real quick,” she said. “He was ‘Mister Wyatt.’ All the girls called him that. But the more he called me ‘Sarah,’ the more I wanted to punch his perfect little teeth out. He finally left me alone and told me to go to bed, but I seriously thought he might try to sneak in and cop a feel. Plus, that room was giving me the heebie-jeebies. No way was I going to stay. I just wanted that freak to know something before I left. I wanted him to know my name. So I took out my pocketknife and I started carving my message into the floor, just to be sure he wouldn’t forget it when I was gone.”

  I reached into my pocket and dug out a crumpled Kleenex, handing it to her. “It’s clean,” I murmured. I was liking this girl more and more.

  “Thanks.” She dabbed at her eyes. “Anyway, my knife hits something hard while I’m carving. It was a freakin’ pearl. All charred up, trapped in a hunk of old soot, but a pearl. It had to be a miracle, right? A real one. Like some guardian angel up there was looking out for me for once. A pearl in a homeless shelter, and I found it fair and square.”

  I lurched forward and wrapped my arms around her. I couldn’t help it. She had no idea what she’d found, no idea what she’d just given me. Cyra’s pearls. My sister’s pearls. They had to be. Half the building might have burned down, Cyra might have burned away, but she had refused to fall completely through the cracks. Despite all my mother’s attempts to erase her, she had still left a piece of herself buried in the floorboards for me to find.

  “Were these all you found?” I asked, pulling away. “Just these two?”

  “I tried to find more,” the girl said, her arms rigid in my grip. She looked a little taken aback by my sudden show of emotion. “After I found the first two, I started digging all over the floor with my knife. Then that chick, Ms. Renaux, spotted me through the window and got all super-freaked. She started screaming at me, and then that big security dude ‘escorted’ me out.”

  I nodded. “Mac. Yeah. He’s scary.”

  She sneered. “He tried to be. But I’ve been sneaking back at night, through that window upstairs, scraping around for more till my freaking fingers bled. I just wanted to find enough to buy a plane ticket home. I swear, I wasn’t trying to rob anybody.”

  I placed the two pearls in her palm and closed her scraped-up fingers around them. “I want you to take them,” I said. “They were my sister’s, but now they’re yours. And take this.” I reached into my pocket, pulled the last sixty dollars from my wallet, and stuffed them in her jean jacket. Then I stepped to the curb and held my hand out for a cab. “I want you to take this cab to the diamond district on West Forty-Seventh Street. Find a late night shop where you can pawn those pearls, and go home.”

  She stood there, clutching the pearls, her jaw slack.

  A taxi pulled up, and I opened the door. “Come,” I said, taking her hand and helping her in.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I replied. “Well, maybe just one thing. What is your name?”

  “It’s LeAnne,” she said. “LeAnne Stemson.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you, LeAnne. I’m Theo.”

  She smiled, her hard eyes finally brightening. “Theo,” she said. “What a cool fucking name.”

  I closed the cab door and watched her ride off.

  “The pearls,” Max said, trying to put the pieces together. “That’s the other thing you’ve sketched a million times.”

  My nagging panic returned. “I tried to tell myself about the pearls,” I said. “I knew they were buried in that room.”

  “The ring and the pearls,” Max said. “Thee, it’s all the stuff for your dream wedding. All that’s missing is the dress.”

  “Oh, man.” I clamped my palms on my head. “The dress . . . Max, it was the very first place he took me. I mean, the first place I took myself.”

  “Where?”

  I grabbed his hands, then let them go and waved for another cab. “He said she’d needed to change into ‘something fancy’ at her house for their date. But when we got to her house, it wasn’t her house, and we got all confused. I mean I—I got all confused. Because I knew it was the right house, but Sarah didn’t live there.”

  “Okay, now I’m confused,” Max said.

  “Max. She didn’t live there because it’s 2015. She lived there in 2003. 224 Bergen Street. It was my house, Max—our house. I tried to take myself home.”

  The woman I still only knew as “the mother” cracked open the door. She was dressed in a white robe and slippers. She kept the chain lock fastened. Her hair was pulled back, and her face was stripped of makeup, eyes staring at Max and me like zombies who’d come for her brains.

  Yes, it’s me! The freaky, homeless tweaker who was skulking around your house on Thursday night! The one who scared the crap out of your daughter. And I’ve brought a really tall, imposing friend with me! Oh, and yes, it’s midnight!

  Once she got a good look at me, she tried to slam the door shut, but I held it open.

  “No, please wait,” I begged. “I know it’s late. I know I scared you and your daughter before, and I am so sorry about that, but if I could just have two seconds of your time to explain? Please, it’s incredibly important.”

  “It’s really important,” Max echoed.

  She looked at Max. Thank God I’d brought a relatively normal-looking person with me this time instead of a hallucination. With his shave and his haircut, Max looked even less like a potential vagrant than he had before.

  “My name is Theo,” I said.

  “I thought your name was Emma,” she snapped.

  “Um . . . I sometimes go by my middle name,” I pathetically suggested, “but my first name is Theo. Theo Lane. My mother is Margaret Lane. My sister’s name was Cyrano Lane.”

  All at once she dropped her defensive scowl. She placed her fingers to her heart and a hint of pity flashed across her eyes. She remembered. She remembered the second I said the name. The right name this time. “She was your sister?”

  I’d been so busy frightening her, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might, in fact, be a kind person. I nodded, swallowing the lump. “This was our house,”
I said, knowing it to be true whether I recognized it or not.

  “I remember your mother,” she said. “She told me what happened to her daughter when I bought the house. But I never met you.”

  Of course not. Because Mom never brought me back after that day, did she? We’d probably stayed at a hotel while she went about the business of selling our life away.

  This could have been my house. Right now. This beautiful brownstone on this beautiful, tree-lined block on Bergen Street. It had been my house until I was five, but it could have been the home I grew up in.

  Who would I have been then? If I’d known about my sister? If my mother understood grieving? If I’d grown up in Brooklyn like I was supposed to? Would that girl have smiled more? Would she have quoted Nietzsche in her eighth-grade yearbook? Would she have had a more peaceful mind?

  “I need to see my old room,” I said, plain and simple. “Would it be all right with you if I looked at it really quickly?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head apologetically. “Not now. It’s after midnight. My daughter is fast asleep upstairs—”

  “Mommy, what’s going on?” The tiny peep of a voice came from the top of the stairs inside the house. I could see her through the front door. Her dark hair was ruffled from sleep. She wore a Little Mermaid nightshirt down to her knees and held a stuffed Little Mermaid doll in her right hand, rubbing her sleepy eye with the left. I realized now that she was probably closer to seven or eight than five.

  “It’s nothing, Josie,” her mom whispered, shooting me an annoyed glance. “Just some friends paying a visit.”

  Josie finished rubbing her eyes and then took a better look at me. “Emma?” she asked.

  “No, I’m sorry. My name is Theo.”

  Josie’s little ruby lips dropped open in shock, the kind of pure shock only children under ten could manage. “You’re Theo?” she said, letting her Little Mermaid doll drop to the floor. “Theo Lane?” she squeaked. “Why didn’t you say that on Thursday?”

  My brow furrowed. Her mother and Max stared at me.

  Before I could answer, she shot past her mother, grabbed my hand, and began dragging me up the stairs. “I can’t believe you’re finally here,” she whispered. “What took you so long?”

  I shook my head. There was no use trying to answer or make any sense of this. I just had to go with it. At least I knew that I wasn’t hallucinating. I glanced over my shoulder. Max and Josie’s mother gaped up at me as we climbed the carpeted staircase with its polished wooden banister.

  Josie pulled me toward her room. The door at the opposite corner of the hall swung open, and a beefy man in a T-shirt and pajama pants stepped into the hall.

  “Carol, what is going on?” he grumpily shouted down the stairs.

  “Nothing, Daddy,” Josie answered, as if this were perfectly normal. As if her nonchalant tone might throw him off the scent.

  “I have no idea, Dale,” Carol shouted back. She and Max thundered up the stairs. Josie pulled me to her room, flipped on the light, and my hand went limp in hers.

  Daisies. Four walls covered in bright, daisy wallpaper.

  “It had flowers everywhere,” Andy had said. “Daisies.”

  White on yellow on white on yellow. On and on. Petals everywhere, except for the ceiling, which was covered in old Little Mermaid stickers. They’d been there so long that they’d blended into the paint.

  The window facing the alley was open, but the window facing the street was shuttered closed, just as I’d seen it from outside, hiding the big crack in the window.

  “We loved the wallpaper,” Carol said from behind me. “We decided to leave it for when we had kids. Honestly, the only thing we really moved was the bed. We never got around to those stickers, but it sure made Josie love that Little Mermaid, huh, sweetie?” She patted her daughter’s back.

  “Theo,” Josie said, taking charge, “only you can come in. Mom, Dad, Cute Giant, you have to wait outside.” She pushed at her mother’s waist until Carol was in the hall and then shut us in quickly.

  I stared at all the flowers, willing myself to remember this place. But I couldn’t. “How do you know my name?” I asked.

  Josie pulled me down to the floor with her and whispered, “I didn’t tell anyone else. Not even Mommy or Daddy. Just like it said.”

  “Like what said?” I whispered back.

  “The box,” she replied.

  “What box?”

  “Your Magic Story Box, silly.”

  She slid herself under the bed as I flattened myself down to see what she was doing, heart racing, literally floored. I heard the music fade up in my head.

  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 . . .

  Josie carefully placed her fingernails between the planks of the wood under her bed and removed three of the floorboards. “I only found it last year,” she breathed. “We are super lucky I could read it.”

  She handed over a hinged wooden photo box about the size of a shoebox. There was a large, dusty, yellowed label on top. The neat handwriting was in all caps:

  theo’s magic story box

  Under that, in smaller writing, it read:

  This is Theo Lane’s secret story box. No one else can open this box but Theo Lane.

  A story box. Under the floorboards. Her pearls and my box, all buried.

  I’d been trying to lead myself to this box for days. Now I could only stare at it like it was wired to explode. I brought my hand to the lid, but couldn’t bring myself to open it.

  “What are you waiting for?” Josie whispered, propping herself on her elbows under the bed. “Is it really magic?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. My throat was bone dry.

  “Well, open it,” she said. “No one else can open it but you. Okay, I might have peeked. But I don’t get what’s in there. They aren’t stories.”

  I held my breath and lifted the lid.

  Digital videocassettes. Old mini-DV cassettes. Of course Josie didn’t know what they were. They were obsolete. They were all lined up in the box like files in a drawer, except for one. One had been tossed on the top, facing up. The label stared back at me in red marker:

  September 1st, 2003

  THE BIG DAY!

  Leaving 224 Bergen Street was a blur. I think I kissed and hugged Josie more than I should have. I know I thanked her for keeping my secret, and I promised her I’d be back soon. I think I hugged Dale and Carol even though they wished I hadn’t. I think I dragged Max out to the street, feeling dangerously wobbly, and told him to call Lou because my hands were too shaky to dial. It’s possible none of those things happened except the Josie part.

  I do remember my three-sentence exchange with Lou. “Do you have the keys to the editing room at school?” I asked.

  “Yeah, why?” she said. “What’s the story?”

  “I think I might have the whole story in my hands.”

  After that, I remember the emotions. Gratitude: that all of Mr. Schaffler’s video equipment was crap from the late ’90s. Comfort: sitting down at the editing bay with Max and Lou on either side of me. Fear: in their eyes and mine, as if they were spotting me as I stepped onto a mile-high tightrope.

  I inserted the tape, glued my finger to the control keys, and pressed play . . .

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The screen flickers to life. So, finally, does she.

  My sister. Cyrano Lane. No longer a still image, but a living, breathing, stunning creature in a glorious close-up. Her face is made up to perfection, her hair tied crisply in an elegant French braid. She holds a red marker in her mouth like a cigar. The frame swivels and shakes, tilting left, then right, then half obscured in darkness.

/>   “Damn,” she complains, dropping the marker from her mouth. “I think I need to make the buttonhole just a little bigger for the lens. Thee, you won’t be mad if I rip your peacoat buttonhole just a teensy bit, will you? I’ll buy you a new one tomorrow, but this is, like, the biggest day of my life. Cool?”

  “Mm-kay,” a tiny voice replies from off camera.

  My tiny voice.

  “Cool, thanks,” she says. The frame pulls back from her face, revealing her bare, slender shoulders and clavicles, then the string of white pearls dangling from her slim, delicate neck, the largest pearl hanging at the center of her chest. And then the sunny wall of daisies in the background. This is our room.

  She reaches out of frame and brings back a silver mat knife. She plunges it toward the lens, cutting into the dark wedge that obscures the frame until the shot is whole again. Then she looks off to the side and smiles. “Now that’s what I’m talking about. Okay, if I sewed this thing in right, it should tilt up perfectly to see everything we want to see. It’s wired into the camera in your pocket, so it might be a little hot against your side, okay?”

  “Mm-kay,” I reply again, jovial and eager to please.

  “This little spy-cam cost me about a billion dollars, so let’s not go slamming into any walls.”

  “I won’t,” I promise.

  “Okay. Let’s try this sucker on.”

  The shot goes into a wild blur, flashing past Cyra’s face, across a sea of Little Mermaids on the ceiling, past flares of sunlight, past a TV screen that shows a mirror image of the shot, past the quickest glimpse of my five-year-old face and my arm slipping into a navy blue sleeve—all of it set to the rumble and boom of the jostling microphone. And then finally back to Cyra’s beautiful face.

  She peers off to the side again, checking the TV monitor. “Aha! Ha, ha! We have Theo-Cam, ladies and gentlemen.”