Find Me (7 page)

“How?”

“Let me see your hands.”

I held out my hands and he started rubbing my palms. His skin was warm and soft and I knew I should have been disgusted or afraid, but instead I felt calmed. He pressed the lumps of bone at the base of my thumbs and the rough swirls on my palms. He asked me to cup my hands and peered into them like I was holding something precious.

“Your right hand is what you have when you're born,” he said. “Your left hand is what's been given to you.”

On my right hand, the heart and head lines were straight and smooth. On my left, those same lines were broken and wavy.

Soon I would learn that Marcus always wore masks. The Grim Reaper, the Incredible Hulk, Richard Nixon, Michael Myers, Ronald Reagan, Darth Vader. Monsters and dead presidents were his favorite.

One night, he showed me why.

We were in the bathroom, sitting in the tub, the shower curtain printed with cartoon bears closed around us. We sat with our knees pulled to our chests, our toes touching. He asked if I wanted to see and I said that I always wanted to see. He peeled away the werewolf mask and I saw the shriveled eye, the lid drooping, the iris peeking out like a raisin. On this eye, there were no lashes. It didn't blink like the other eye did. The skin around it was a thick, puckered swirl.

I wanted to touch, but I kept my hands in my lap. The tub was smooth and white. The fat bar of soap in the dish smelled of lavender.

“The cat got me,” he said.

As a child, he was left alone in an apartment in Dorchester and his father's cat, Annabelle, attacked him. The cat was named after his own mother, or the Biggest Bitch That Ever Lived. His father would go for days without feeding her. She pissed in sneakers. She stood on her hind legs and ribboned the wallpaper with her claws. He was three when it happened. He remembered the heavy heat of her body, the needling teeth. His parents found him wailing and blood-wet. The scars on his face reminded me of the whorls on tree bark.

“Fuck that cat,” I said in the bathtub.

Ms. Neuman was not married. She worked as a receptionist in a dentist's office and was always home by five. She bought us new clothes at Bunker Hill Mall and we would wait months before snipping off the tags, the evidence of their newness, of how much she was willing to spend. She painted our nails a shade of electric blue called Aruba. She gave us a weekly allowance, twenty dollars each, and we did not have to do anything in return. She had cupboards filled with chocolate cupcakes, the rich insides stuffed with cream, and Kool-Aid, which looked like red dust in the bottom of the glass.

We went to school at Clarence Edwards Middle. That year, there were presidential elections and scientists invented a vaccine that protected patients against five different diseases with a single shot. That year, the building exploded. That year, we learned about exponents and fractions and the Latin words for “happy” and “nothing” and “I run.” For the first time in my life, I did my homework.

After school, Marcus and I went to a drugstore and bought hair dye called Chocolate Cherry. Ms. Neuman was particular about cleanliness, so we squeezed on the color in the backyard. We put on the plastic shower caps that came in the box and sat under a tree, our scalps itching. We were both thirteen, on the cusp of teenagehood. Our bodies were still thin and hairless, but I knew mine was starting to change. Just six months before, on the farm in Walpole, I woke in the night with a dreadful pain in my stomach and blood on the insides of my thighs. Marcus had a white tuft at the top of his hairline, soft as animal fur; it had been with him for as long as he could remember.

We rinsed our hair with a garden hose. We took turns bending over and shutting our eyes and feeling the cold splatter. Marcus stood with his legs parted, the water rushing between his feet. The dye turned our hair the color of grapes and stained our fingernails.

“That,” Ms. Neuman said when she saw us, “is not a color found in nature.”

That was the point, we wanted to tell her. We were in camouflage, both of us hoping to pass undetected by the world we knew before.

Marcus is the closest thing I have ever had to a real brother. I knew him just long enough to love him. I have not seen him in many years.

One night, Ms. Neuman woke us at four in the morning and brought us downstairs. All the lights were out. The TV was blaring. She sat us down in front of it. The local weatherman was talking about the highs and the lows, the chance of rain. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a black toupee.

“Do you see him?” Ms. Neuman bent over and tapped the screen. Right then the man grinned and pointed at the weather map. A cartoon sun winked at us.

Marcus and I nodded. Our hair still smelled like ammonia and it looked like we had dirt under our nails. We could see the lacy edges of her slip peeking out from underneath her bathrobe. Her collarbone was raised and spotted with tiny moles.

She tapped the screen harder. “Would you believe I used to be married to this man?”

I looked at the man on TV, his fake hair slipping around on his head, and felt glad he wasn't living here anymore.

From then on Ms. Neuman did this once a week, always the same routine, like she thought we would forget about whatever happened in the night.

*   *   *

In Allston, on the western edge of the city, my first fosters, Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, both worked as security guards at an art museum. We lived in a brick house on Park Vale Avenue. At night, I would sit on the stairs and listen to them talk about all the strange and useless things they were tasked with guarding, like sculptures made from plastic sticks of butter or giant balls of string.

“The secret to life,” Mr. Carroll liked to say, “is to do whatever stupid-ass thing you want and call it art.”

I always thought it was funny, what they said about their jobs, because the neighborhood they'd spent their lives in was named for a painter, Washington Allston, or so I learned in school.

Allston was isolated, pushed away from the rest of Boston by Brookline, split in two by the Mass Pike, blocked from Cambridge by the Charles. The Horace Mann School for the deaf was nearby and sometimes I would see buses filled with deaf children roaming the streets. They had a particular way of looking out the windows, a slow, deliberate turn of the head, as though if they could see deeply enough, sound might follow.

The Carrolls had a son. He was in his thirties and lived near Fenway. He was a psychologist. The word “psychologist” made me picture the big-breasted school counselor who wore reading glasses on a lanyard and broke up fights, but when I asked Mrs. Carroll if her son worked in a school like mine, she laughed and told me that he worked at a university, that he was the owner of an advanced degree. There were framed photos of him in cap and gown all over the house. He was never looking right at the camera, like his attention had been captured by something just beyond the lens.

One day the son moved back home, into the second bedroom upstairs. Next to me. Something had happened with his job, something that couldn't be helped by his advanced degree, but no one wanted to talk about it. I would press my ear against the wall and listen to him moving around in his room. I learned that he liked songs sung in Spanish. He never had anyone over. His cell phone never rang. He watched action movies late into the night; I could hear the explosions of gunfire through the wall. In the mornings, when I was getting ready for school, I would find him in the kitchen, eating a bowl of sugar cereal without any milk. He wore square glasses, his eyes brown dots behind the lenses, and his teeth seemed crowded in his mouth. He wore polo shirts in different shades of blue. “The colors of the sea,” he would say, plucking at the collar of his shirt. At first, it was okay having him around.

We were alone one afternoon and he invited me into his room, which had been his since childhood and was preserved in his absence. I'd never been in there before. Posters of cities with cathedrals overlooking cobblestone squares were taped to the walls. Towers of books with linen spines filled the corners. He had a little contraption set up: two white electrodes hanging from thin wires, the wires connected to a laptop. He told me to sit on his bed. He put a white circle on each of my temples. Neurofeedback, he said this was called.

“Do you know what this does?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“It lets me read your thoughts.”

I was seven and I had all kinds of thoughts I didn't want anyone to read.

He sat in front of his laptop and pressed a button. I felt a tiny pulse on my skull.

“What am I thinking right now?” I asked.

“You're scared,” he said. “Don't be scared.”

There is a period of time in Allston, the eighth year of my life, that I still cannot remember. One day I was nine years old and away from Park Vale Avenue, living on the farm in Walpole. One day I was sitting at a school desk in a renovated barn and sleeping in a cottage dorm that overlooked a green field. I can't remember arriving there or leaving Allston. It was like waking up from, or into, a dream.

 

7.

At the end of December, I turn twenty. A new decade, but of what? When our Floor Group cleans the Common Room, we keep the TV on, so we can hear about the recovery. As a result, we don't spend much time cleaning. We stand around the TV with our sponges and spray bottles and brooms, watching. The windows are streaked with fingerprints, dust has settled along the floorboards, but the world around us is coming back to life. The president is in the White House. Hospital populations are shrinking. Garbage trucks are rumbling down streets. Snowplows are clearing roads. On TV, they make a noise that sounds like thunder.

We watch blue salt scatter across sidewalks. We watch a city bus dock by a stop; we watch the doors snap open. We watch a subway car bolt through a tunnel. We watch people line up outside a grocery. This is somewhere in Michigan. The grocery is surrounded by a lake of milky ice. In the line, there is an energy; I can feel it coming through the screen. It connects one person to another, like they are all holding a long rope.

These people belong to the same category now. They are the survivors.

The divide between us patients and the outside world has never seemed greater. Watching the recovery is like watching a new TV show play out: the narratives of the characters evolve, branch in new directions, while ours stays the same.

“Outside! Outside!” a patient shouts in the hallway.

During an Internet Session, I look at photos of abandoned places. There's an empty power plant in Belgium, where the walls spiral up like a giant snail shell, slick with neon algae. A hotel in Colombia that sits high on a mountain, overlooking the Bogotá River, a lush garden growing on the roof. An underwater city in Shicheng. Michigan Central Station in Detroit, where rivers of rubble and silt flood the hallways. Holy Land USA in Waterbury, Connecticut, where tiny buildings are packed onto ridges, the eyelike windows looking out at the vines climbing walls and the crosses crumbling into the earth.

These places were not created by the sickness, just as the gap in my own memory was not created by the sickness. This was all done long before.

“Time is passing,” N5 says on the morning of my birthday, sucking blood into a syringe. “The world is moving on.”

“
We
aren't moving on,” I say.

“That's right,” says Louis. “We're getting left behind.”

After she's gone, Louis stands on his bed and starts jumping up and down. The mattress bobs. The frame shudders. “Happy birthday to you,” he sings.

I often wonder what Louis was like before the sickness, if he was a good husband, if he was faithful to his wife.

I climb up and jump beside him. I can almost touch the ceiling. I think the bed is going to come apart. For a few glorious seconds, I feel our togetherness return and believe we are going to be launched far away from here.

At breakfast, a cupcake topped with a white curl of icing is waiting for me in the Dining Hall, sitting on one of the long tables. All the Floor Groups have crowded around the table, along with Dr. Bek and the nurses. They applaud when Louis and I walk in. I play my role. I give a little wave. N5 hands me a plastic fork.

“Go ahead,” she says.

I take a bite. The center is still frozen. The icing is cold and sweet and hurts my teeth. The twins come over and present me with a toilet paper lei. I bend down and let them loop it around my neck. Dr. Bek stands beside me, a gloved hand on the point of my shoulder. I see a flush in the high ridges of his cheekbones.

I don't tell anyone that my birthday is a guess made by a doctor at Brigham. The month is right, but the date could be a fiction.

Dr. Bek fails to mention the last birthday the Hospital celebrated, back in October, was for a man who became symptomatic a week later and died. Instead he leads the patients in a round of “Happy Birthday.” The nurses join in, the lyrics a rumble inside their suits, followed by the patients. I'm stuck inside the tornado of sound, trying to look happy to be alive. As the room swells with our voices, I think about how, if I'm carrying the sickness inside me, I will one day forget Dr. Bek and all these singing people. I will forget the meaning of the words “birthday” and “patient.” I will forget how to use a fork. I take another bite of the cupcake and wait for the party to end.

*   *   *

I spend the rest of the day alone in the Common Room, passing time by looking out the window. There are no pilgrims, too cold now for even the most devoted. The plains gleam with ice. I know the world around us is changing, but the view from the window is the same.

On my last birthday, I worked a double at the Stop & Shop and got a free M&M's cookie from the bakery and stole an extra bottle of Robitussin. I drank half of it in the bathroom, which seemed like an okay thing to do because it was my birthday, and I spent the rest of my shift in Produce, standing beside a pyramid of lemons and feeling the rapid twitch of my heart.