The Girl with the Wrong Name

by Barnabas Miller

  Cyra has stripped down to her white bra, panties, and pearls. Andy still has his pants on, but the jacket, tie, and shirt are gone, leaving only his white V-neck T-shirt. They kiss, and they grab, and they roll around on the bed, but Cyra suddenly sits up and pushes him back an inch. He waits, looking unsure if she wants to stop, but it’s just the opposite. She reaches down and quickly unbuckles his belt, reaching for the button of his pants.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He laughs. “Slow down. We’ve still got some time.”

  “Oh, I think I’ve waited long enough.” She laughs, reaching again for his pants.

  “Hey.” He giggles, swatting her hands away. “What’s the hurry?”

  “Andy, it’s okay,” she says. “I trust you. I’m ready. You don’t have to worry.”

  The playful smile drops from his face. “Worry about what? What do you mean, you’re ready? What does that mean?”

  “What? No.” She smiles. “I just mean I’m not scared. Come here.” She slides down farther on her back and grabs his hips to pull him closer.

  “Jesus,” he snaps, pulling away onto his feet, shuffling the tea candles across the floor. His expression grows darker than any version of him I’ve ever seen. “Have you done this before? Do not fucking lie to me.”

  “What?” The first glimmer of fear appears in her eyes. “Andy, no. God, no, we said we’d wait. You know I’ve never been with anyone else. I’ve hardly even dated anyone else before I met—”

  “That little move just then,” he spits, “that was not someone who’s never done this before.” Within that one sentence, his rage and his volume jump from ten to sixty. “Are you pure?” he hollers. “Are you PURE, or are you a slut? Because if you want it like a slut, I can do that.”

  He collapses on top of her, crushing her flat against the blankets as his feet kick tea candles under the bed.

  “Andy, no,” she whimpers, trying to push him away. She digs her fingernails into the bottom of his T-shirt, ripping jagged holes in the cotton.

  (I was only five years old. Could I even process what was happening? I must have been too petrified to scream.)

  “Get off of me!” Cyra shouts. “Andy, get off.” She slaps his face.

  Whatever’s left of Lester Andrew Wyatt drains away, and all that remains is a monster. A black-eyed vulture with a blank, unreadable gaze. He grabs her pearl necklace and twists it around her neck till she gasps for breath, till the necklace breaks apart, and the pearls go rolling across the floor.

  He shoves her across the room, and I hear glass shatter on the other side of the door as he follows her out of frame. Then I hear something that sounds like a hard punch, and Cyra doesn’t make another sound. But it’s all out of frame now, all out of view. Seventeen years old or five, I would have done the same thing:

  I finally push through the crack in the door and step around to the other side. Andy is straddled over Cyra’s limp body as black smoke begins to pour into frame. She is covered in shattered mirror glass. A piece juts from her stomach. I finally scream.

  Andy looks up to camera with those soulless eyes and jumps to his feet, rushing toward the lens. But there’s a whoosh from behind me, and he freezes in place, suddenly lit up in a bright red-orange glow.

  I scream again as the camera pivots and backs away from the wall of flames that has broken out on the bed. The camera pivots again, and Andy’s face fills the frame. He looks lost and confused as smoke begins to billow all around us. I can see his eyes trying to process, trying to make quick decisions. And then the sound. That blaring siren sound, distorting in the microphone as a red light flashes on the ceiling.

  A smoke alarm. It’s the sound from the smoke alarm. And somehow that’s enough to make up Andy’s mind. He leans down over Cyra’s body, lifts her limp left hand, and pulls the wedding ring from her finger, stuffing it in his pocket. Then he pushes me aside, and I hear the door to Room Nine open and shut.

  He has abandoned me in the smoke-filled room with Cyra’s body. I crouch down to a close-up of her face, and there’s just enough visibility to see the deep red gash running down her left jaw. The smoke alarm drowns out every other sound, and then it’s only smoke. Nothing but a pitch-black screen.

  For how long? How long did he leave me there?

  fast-forward . . .

  Something finally moves.

  play . . .

  The smoke thins out just enough, and Andy’s face comes through from an angle beneath his chin. The camera rocks from side to side. He is carrying me toward the lobby of K.O.P. The sounds of shouting men fill the halls. Firefighters. Those were the shouting men Andy remembered (I remembered) in the halls. Not a bachelor party; a brigade of NYC firefighters.

  Andy leans so close to the camera that he becomes a fleshy blur. “You will never tell anyone what you saw in there.” He shakes me so hard on the word never that I’m surprised my neck doesn’t snap. “Never,” he repeats. This time he shakes me so hard you can hear the microphone rattle inside the camera. Then he pushes through the front door of K.O.P. as daylight floods the lens.

  “I’ve got her!” he shouts to a squad of firefighters.

  And there, at last, is our “Heroic Teen.”

  The sky cuts through the center of the frame as I’m passed from a view of Andy’s chin to the chin of an NYC firefighter.

  “I got her out, thank God,” Andy pants. “I think she’s okay. But there’s another girl inside.” His voice breaks into forced tears. “My girlfriend . . . I couldn’t get to her in time. I couldn’t save her.”

  His lies fade to silence as I’m carried toward an ambulance and handed into one last man’s arms.

  My father’s handsome, stubbly face leans into frame. It seems at first like he’s trembling, but I realize it’s the camera that’s trembling. Theo-Cam is trembling. My father sets me down and throws a blanket over my shoulders. Dusty ash flies across the screen like flakes of gray snow. “Don’t be afraid, darlin’,” he says. “Don’t you ever, ever be afraid.”

  He wraps the blanket so tightly around me that it covers the lens and kills the sound.

  Blackout.

  I have no way of knowing what happened next because I can’t remember. Maybe I was taken to the hospital, maybe not. Maybe my father or a cop took me home. All I know is that I kept my promise to Cyra. Somehow or other, I got back home, and I hid that cassette in the Magic Story Box, where it sat dormant for the next twelve years.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I knew what Max and Lou expected next. They expected me to sit at that editing bay in a state of shock. They expected me to go totally catatonic, maybe conjure up some more imaginary friends to play with, anything to escape the awful truth we’d seen on the screen. But it was just the opposite. I couldn’t move fast enough.

  “Jesus, what time is it?” I demanded, kicking my chair out as I rose to my feet.

  “It’s almost one,” Max said. “Why?”

  “No, that’s too late. We need to move. We need to move fast.”

  “Thee, what’s wrong?” Lou tried to console me, but she didn’t understand. Neither of them had put it together yet. There was something I’d been trying to tell myself, something I’d been trying to do. A purpose. A reason for it all. And I finally knew what it was. I ejected the tape and tossed it to Lou as I moved for the door. “Lou, how fast can you can upload this to my cloud drive?”

  “All of it?” she asked.

  “Just the last two minutes.” I urgently searched my pockets for my iPhone.

  “I’d need to convert it first,” she said. “Then I can upload it to—”

  “Do it,” I interrupted. “Do it now. Send it to my drive, post it, Tweet it, send it everywhere. I have to get a cab.”

  “A cab to where?” Max shouted as he tried to follow me.

  “To the Ritz-Carlton,” I shouted back. I don’t know i
f he heard me. I was too far ahead of him, and it didn’t matter. I didn’t need Max just now; I only needed speed. There was no more time to waste. Please be dancing with him, Emma. Be dancing, drinking, toasting each other on that windy terrace, stuffing each other’s faces with cake, laughing with each other’s families. Anything but the suite. You can’t go back to that honeymoon suite.

  Flashbacks riddled my head like machine-gun fire as I barreled into the Ritz-Carlton lobby: “We went to the courthouse this morning, and we did the deed.” That’s what Emma had told me in the hospital. “I mean, not the deed,” she’d added. “We haven’t done that yet.”

  She still hadn’t slept with him. She’d been saving herself for this night, and she had no idea. She had no idea what was in store for her if I couldn’t find her in time. If I wasn’t already too late.

  I raced to the elevator and poked like mad at the button for fourteen, trying to will my way up to the Rise Bar and Terrace. Even at one fifteen in the morning, people were hopping on and off like a goddamned merry-go-round. My stomach twisted into tighter knots each time the doors slid open and closed.

  “We’re just going to have a little makeup wedding night with the family at the hotel,” she’d said.

  Oh, please, Emma, let that still be true. Please, please be dancing.

  It had all started with her picture, with her wedding announcement in the Times. Yes, I’d been searching for “Sarah,” embroiled in my crazed psychodrama with Andy, but where had that search really led me every single time? It had led me to Emma’s engagement party. To Emma’s rehearsal dinner. To Emma’s wedding. And I’d ruined them all.

  I remembered what “Andy” kept saying in my ear at the wedding (what I kept saying to myself): “We can’t let it happen to another girl, Theo. Do you understand? Tell me you understand.”

  I didn’t then. I did now. I understood it completely.

  All this time I’d thought destroying Emma’s wedding was just a tragic side effect of my mission. But it wasn’t a side effect at all.

  It was the mission.

  The doors finally slid open on the fourteenth floor. I shot out of the elevator and searched for signs of her thousand-dollar highlights or his ski-slope nose. What I found instead was Charles and Sally Renaux, sipping on mint juleps at the bar.

  “Where is she?” I asked, butting my way between them. There was no time for etiquette or explanations. “Where’s Emma?”

  It took them a moment to recognize me, and once they did, they scowled. “They’ve retired for the night,” Mr. Renaux answered gruffly.

  “No,” I moaned. “No, she can’t. She can’t do that.”

  Mr. Renaux put his drink down. “My dear,” he said, oozing with condescension. “What exactly is it we can do for you now?”

  “Just tell me where the suite is,” I demanded.

  Sally Renaux smiled. “Well, honey, I really don’t think they want to be disturbed just now.”

  “Tell me where it is!” I barked. “She’s in trouble!”

  I must have spooked her because she blurted it out. “Fourteen-twelve.” Maybe she was just drunk. Or maybe some part of her, too, knew that Lester Andrew Wyatt was not a saint. “Why? What’s wrong, honey? Why are you so—?”

  I was already running. 1412, 1412, where is 1412? Take your time, Emma. For God’s sake, just take your time . . . But I already heard the screaming. I heard it from down the hall. Screaming so familiar it froze me like a child again.

  “Are you pure?” his unmistakable voice echoed down the hall. “Are you PURE?”

  I raced the final feet, shouting her name. I pounded on the door with both fists. I pummeled it, kicked it, hurled my side against it. “Emma, it’s Theo! Emma?”

  But I was drowned out by the sound of glass shattering. And then the loudest scream of all. And then silence.

  All the doors on the fourteenth floor began to open as my head fell against the door. “Somebody call 911,” I said, but I’d lost faith already. “Call 911,” I repeated, but I knew. I knew that deathly silence. It was the same sound I’d heard in that hallway all those years ago. The sound that came after he’d thrown her against the mirror, after he’d ended her life with one jagged piece of glass. It was the sound of a person who’d suddenly ceased to be.

  I was too late. I’d failed my mission. It had all been for nothing.

  I heard another faint whimper through the door. Was he crying over her now? Crying over what he’d done to yet another woman he supposedly loved?

  No. It was a woman. I knew the sound of Emma’s cries.

  “Emma?” I spoke through the door. “Emma, is that you?”

  “Theo . . . ?” It was her voice. Thin and hoarse, but her voice.

  “Yes, it’s me!” I shouted through the door, heart racing again. “It’s Theo. I’m here, Emma, I’m right here. Open the door!”

  “Theo?” her voice whimpered from the other side.

  “Emma, let me in! Andy!” I hollered. “Andy, the cops are on their way right now. They’re already coming for you, so you better get the hell away from her!”

  “No,” Emma cried through the door. “No, Theo, no police. I can’t—you can’t let the police in here.”

  “Emma, please,” I begged. “Please just let me in.”

  There was an endless silence, but the door finally cracked open just enough for her to see my face.

  “Theo,” she said. There were tears in her eyes, but her voice was numb. I think she was in shock. And then I saw the blood. Blood on her chest, blood on her bare stomach. She was only wearing panties and a camisole.

  “Jesus, what did he do?” I cried. “What he did to you?”

  “No,” she said, dazed. But I pushed my way through and slammed the door behind me.

  “Andy!” I growled. “What did you—?”

  Andy was sprawled out on the blue-and-gold carpet. But I shouldn’t say “Andy,” because Andy was gone. It was only Andy’s body, flat on the floor, surrounded in a pool of blood. His blood this time. Not Emma’s. A gold-framed floor-length mirror had left tiny shards of shattered glass all over his pants and his blood-soaked V-neck T-shirt.

  I finally turned around and saw the weapon in Emma’s trembling hand: a shard of mirrored glass, stained with blood. She was definitely in shock, still clutching the glass so tightly that it cut into her palm and forefingers.

  “I had to,” she breathed. “He just . . . he snapped. He turned into another—”

  “I know,” I said. “Emma, I know.” I reached for her hand and cautiously pried the glass from her rigid fingers, letting it drop to the floor. Then I grabbed a room service napkin from the bed and wrapped it tightly around her palm.

  “It was self-defense,” she said. “I didn’t have . . . I had to, Theo. He would have—”

  “I know,” I said, locking my eyes with hers. “I know exactly what he would have done.”

  “But the police,” she said. “The police will never believe—”

  “They will.” I pulled out my iPhone. Lou must have finished uploading the video to my cloud drive by now. “When they see this, they’ll believe you. Everyone will believe you.”

  I turned back to Lester Wyatt, splayed out on the floor in a bed of his own blood—the bed he’d made for himself. I couldn’t grieve for him. He didn’t deserve it.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My camera fades to life in a shade of pale indigo. It’s the spring sky in New York City, just after Magic Hour (as some mildly annoying filmmakers call it).

  Date stamp: March 15, 2016. Time stamp: 7:21 p.m.

  I am shooting a new documentary project, a movie about all the people who have come out tonight to see my movie. We’ve all gathered together for an outdoor screening on the roof of a women’s shelter called Keeping Our Promise—a place I now hold very near and dear to my heart. A place
where I made some of the best friends I will ever have: Helena Reyes, the star of my last two short films; Emma Renaux, my surrogate older sister; LeAnne Stemson, who brought me a string of pearls as a gift for the premiere. (Fake pearls, of course, but just as meaningful to me.)

  They’ve all come for the premiere of a film I’ve been cobbling together over six months. It was not easy, given the abundance of source material: over a hundred hours of digital video from a very old box that had been hidden under a little girl’s bed for many years.

  It’s a film about two sisters: Cyrano and Theodore Lane. They had apparently captured tons of video in their much-too-brief time together—none of it very extravagant, nothing big budget; just mundane little snippets of real life. Trips to the candy store, brainstorming a groundbreaking new mac and cheese recipe, acting out Goldilocks but with lightsabers.

  Each clip alone might have seemed boring to anyone other than Cyrano, Theo, and their mother Margaret. But when you put all the clips together, they formed a story. A story of two girls who understood the preciousness of all the moments they were bound to forget. The times we loved each other with ease, without thinking, without doubting, without caring what the future might hold. Maybe we were just eating string cheese on a Thursday afternoon after school. But the sight of that cheese getting momentarily sucked into my sister’s nose—that was precious.

  I know: mac and cheese, string cheese. We very much enjoyed cheese.

  As the movie begins to play, I grab the seat farthest in the back. My mother and Todd sit to my left. Mom squeezes my hand for luck, and I squeeze back. We have totally mastered mutual hand squeezing. It will still take us a while to work our way back to awkward hugs. Baby steps . . .

  I hold out my iPhone camera and pan across the backs of my audience’s heads until I land on the profiles of Max and Lou, sitting to my right.