The Girl with the Wrong Name (20 page)

I wedged my palms deep into my eye sockets and tried to shake off the confusion like Andy always—

Like
I
always do.

It’s true. When I’m confused, I shake my head like a wet golden retriever and I press down on my eye sockets. It’s what I do when I’m trying to remember.

“Okay,” I said, feeling an unexpected surge of energy, “Okay, so every time Andy told me something, I was really trying to tell myself something. So what was I trying to tell myself? That Cyra existed? That she died in that fire at K.O.P.?”

“That’s what we need to figure out,” Lou said. “We can’t see anything in your footage. You’re the only who knows what Andy said. We’ve got to start at the beginning—the first time you saw him.”

The “beginning” was long before I saw Andy. I’d been trying to tell myself this story for years, starting with the Cyrano de Bergerac obsession (something my mother never acknowledged, of course). Hearing those Magic Garden songs in my sleep had sent me tumbling into a nightmare, but at least I’d woken up from The Night in Question with one more clue in my head: the number nine. Still, Lou was right. Something much bigger had triggered Andy’s arrival. Something changed last Sunday. Something set me off on this insane journey . . .

“The
blurb
.” I slapped my thighs. “Emma’s picture in the
Times.
I’d just read about her wedding when I first saw Andy through the window. That’s when I started making my new movie.”

“That’s good,” Lou said. “That’s when you started telling the story. Okay, so remember, you were writing Andy’s lines, so what did he tell you? Where did he take you? We’re looking for other stuff like the ring—stuff that’s real, stuff that had to come from your memory.”

My mind went straight back to Room Nine. I knew I’d been trying to tell myself about the fire, but what about all that horrible stuff under the rug? Was that real, like the ring? Or hallucinated like Andy Reese?

“All those claw marks,” I muttered.

“Claw marks,” Max repeated. I recognized the tone; the nurses and Dr. Silver used it with me. He was clearly ready to dump “claw marks” in the hallucination bin. I was seconds away from agreeing with him, but one thing about those claw marks was different from every other experience I’d had.
I
wasn’t the one who’d heard those sounds in Room Nine. Helena had
heard them. And Helena also told me that someone named Sarah had run away from the shelter . . .

“I think the claw marks might be real,” I said.

“Where are the claw marks?” Lou asked.

“At K.O.P. In Room Nine.”

“Well, then, that’s where we’re going,” Max said. “Do you still have your sweats here?” He stepped to the wooden cubby with my clothes.

“Now?” I asked. “You’ll really go with me now?”

Max turned to me. “Thee, if you think I can wait till tomorrow to see if the ‘claw marks’ are real, then maybe you are crazy. Nobody waits to see if the ‘claw marks’ are real.”

I almost smiled. Almost. “Okay,” I said, jumping up and grabbing my sweats from Max. “We go now, but Lou, I need your help.”

“Name it,” she said.

“You’ve got to stay with my mom. When we walk out, we’ll tell her that Max is walking me to the vending machine. But you need to take her home and keep her company tonight. I don’t want her to feel any more alone than she already does.”

Lou nodded. “I’ll do it,” she said. “But you’ve got to let me know what you find
when
you find it.”

“Done,” I said.

“So we don’t hate Mom, then?” Max asked.

“We don’t hate Mom,” I echoed, and saying the words freed some invisible weight from my shoulders. “How could I? She needs more help than I do.”

“What about this K.O.P. place?” Max said. “Will we have trouble getting in?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “We just need to hope that Andy Wyatt went to his office today, and that his room got really stuffy.”

Chapter Twenty

Having a basketball stool as a best friend comes in handy when dealing with fire escapes. It only took one graceful jump for Max to grab the ladder and pull it down into the alley. We scaled our way to K.O.P.’s second floor. Max’s keychain flashlight barely lit the way. I held my breath as I stepped up to Wyatt’s window.

The Fates, having been exceptionally cruel for days (weeks? Months? Twelve years?), finally did me a monumental favor. They provided a heat wave. They made Wyatt uncomfortable and distracted enough today to leave his window gate unlocked, just like Helena said he often did.

Max helped me through, and we snuck down the stairs toward Room Nine. Being back here, I realized just how much I’d been hallucinating. Everything looked duller, more dismal—difficult for such a dull, dismal place. Clearer, but less vivid. I checked in Helena’s room, but it looked like she’d stayed out for the night. Two more steps and we were standing right back in front of my least favorite spot on earth.

Then it all came back.

First, the piercing siren sound, then all of it the same as before: the emptiness, the pressure, the airlessness. But this time, there was a difference. There was Max. And Max was real. He swung open the door to Room Nine like it was any other room. I stood there frozen like the five-year-old child I’d been when whatever happened . . . happened.

“Aren’t you coming?” Max whispered, holding the door open for me.

I nodded. Even if Lexapro and sleep deprivation were still having their way with me, Max was here to help. I took his hand. The door fell shut behind us. We were alone in the dark with nothing but a narrow wand’s worth of light from Max’s keychain.

Someone had stapled the blue throw rug back to the floor.

I felt sick.

“Where are the claw marks?” Max whispered.

I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I just pointed at the rug beneath my feet.

What had taken every last ounce of my strength took Max less than five seconds. He ripped the rug from the floor, staples flying out on all sides, and tossed it to the corner. Then he aimed the narrow beam where the rug had been.

The floor was blank.

No . . .

It seemed blank in the dark, but as my eyes began to adjust, and his flashlight steadied, I saw them, those chaotic slashes, the unnerving words still carved at the center.

My name is not Sarah. My nam

I felt a crippling mix of terror and relief. Relief that it was actually there, that it was at least one thing I hadn’t imagined. Unless . . .

“Max,” I whispered nervously. “Do you see it? Is it really there?”

“You think a
girl
did that?” he asked bluntly. I almost laughed. Only Max could have made me laugh in that moment. “Like, with her nails? You can’t seriously believe that.”

I became hyperconscious of my own gnawed-off fingernails, still catching on the loose threads in my sweatshirt pockets. It was too dark for him to see those tiny droplets of dried blood on the floor. “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

“Dude,” he said, “she
really
wanted someone to know her name.”

Her name. I hadn’t even thought of it until Max said it. Sarah was the name my battered brain had conjured up. It was the name I thought everyone had been saying, but it wasn’t her actual name.
Is that what she’s trying to tell me now? That her name isn’t Sarah, it’s Cyra?

No. That was crazy talking again. There was no way she had carved out those words, because she had died in a fire twelve years ago—that
was real, that was true.

Max drew closer to me. “Is this the part where we start talking about ghosts again?”

“No. No ghosts. But Helena said she heard most of the scratching late at night. I think if we really want to know who did it, then we need to wait.”

He waved the light over the mattress, the bare walls. “Wait in this creepy-ass room till the middle of the night to see who’s clawing these creepy-ass marks in this creepy-ass floor?”

“Max.” I dug my fingers into his arm. “You brought me here because you know that I need to know the truth. I’m telling you, I’ve had this panicked feeling clawing at my chest all day like something is still wrong—like I still need the answers to all the questions now. Not tomorrow,
now
.”

“Clawing?” Max flashed the light in my face. “Seriously? You had to go with ‘clawing’?”

I squinted, shielding my eyes. “Please. Will you wait with me? I can’t wait here alone.”

He took a deep breath and flicked off the flashlight, blanketing us in darkness. “Okay, we’re waiting. I’m going to wait on this creepy-ass mattress over here.” He lay down on his side, then flicked the light back on, fixing it on me like a night watchman.

I parked myself next to him at the edge of the bed. “Max . . . ?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think there’s any way I could ask you to share this twin bed without it evoking any clichés of—?”

“Just get in.” He held up his arm.

I jumped down and spooned myself against him, wrapping his arm securely around my waist. We lay there in silence for a moment. I began to feel the adrenaline wear off as the deep exhaustion of Lexapro detox kicked back in.

“Hey, Thee,” Max whispered. I could feel his warm breath on the back of my ear. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Okay,” I answered tentatively.

“When you invited me to the wedding. Was that your idea or Andy’s?”

“Definitely Andy’s,” I mumbled.

“But Andy is really just you, right? Your subconscious.”

“Let’s not talk, Max. Someone might hear us.”

“Okay. I was just wondering if Andy said anything about me. Like, if he had any strong opinions pro or con.”

My body twitched when I thought of the embarrassing things Andy had said about Max.

“He had very strong opinions,” I said. “He also wore the same T-shirt for seven straight days and slept in my bedroom closet.”

“Okay, but opinions pro or con?”

I couldn’t muster the energy to answer. I had to close my eyes for a moment. If only to escape the conversation.

I dreamed of fire.
It spread across Room Nine in a bellowing tornado roar. It was a giant beast of black smoke, hovering over the ceiling, wings spread wide, talons made of jagged glass. It breathed out blue rings of flame that forged a fiery circle in the center of the room. Caged inside that circle was my sister Cyra, her raven hair even longer than in the pictures. She was on her knees, digging at the floor with her bloody fingernails, each piercing scratch dragging me further and further from sleep . . .

My eyes slowly fluttered open.

I knew when I was dreaming and when I was awake. I knew the flaming beast was a dream, but those scratching sounds—the ones that had woken me up—they were real. And so was the girl making them.

“Cyra . . . ?”

Max woke with a start and punched his keychain flashlight on.

We weren’t alone.
My God, it’s her.

I wasn’t hallucinating, because Max leapt off the bed. The girl gasped and snatched up her own flashlight, aiming it straight at our faces, momentarily blinding me. I caught a brief glimpse of her eyes, but her dark hair fell over her face as she jumped up from the floor and ran out the door.

“Cyra!” I called out, stumbling after Max. “Cyra, wait!”

I got to the door just in time to see her turning the corner at the end of the hall. Max was already chasing after her. I pumped my legs for all they were worth. At least I was wearing sneakers this time. I heard her feet skittering up the stairs as we got to the end of the hall.

“Cyra!” I called again. “It’s me! It’s Theo!” But she wouldn’t stop. “Max, she’s going through the way we came!”

Max took the steps in threes and fours. He was through the window by the time I got to Wyatt’s office. I ducked my head out and reached for the fire escape bars, watching from overhead as Cyra dropped from the ladder, hair swaying in the wind as she landed on the pavement and bolted for Parker Street.

Shit, shit, shit.

Max was already leaping down after her. I followed as fast as I could. Once his feet hit the ground, he reached for my waist, lifting me down to the sidewalk. He was off again, but my lungs were on fire.

“Max,” I gasped, “I take back everything I ever said about basketball. You have to stop her. She still doesn’t know who I am. Go.”

“On it!” Max raced out ahead of me. I watched him draw closer and closer to her as she neared the entrance to the West Side Highway. He reached for her hand and latched on, snapping her back toward him. He had her.

She struggled to break free, harder than I had even struggled against Tyler. I stumbled toward them, clammy and woozy. I could finally make out the details of her face under the streetlights. I doubled over, hands on knees, trying to catch my breath.

I’m an idiot.

It wasn’t Cyra. Of course it wasn’t Cyra. There were similarities in her face and hair, but she was definitely not
my sister’s ghost. And we’d run her down. We’d freaked the shit out of her. We’d made her cry. I wasn’t just an idiot; I was a very bad person.

“I’m not a thief,” she said between sobs. “I’m not. Here, take them back. Please just take them.” Max loosened his grip on her. With her free hand, she reached into her jean jacket pocket and handed him something so small I couldn’t make it out. We both leaned closer. Two tiny, pearl-shaped orbs sat in his wide palm. One black and one white. The white one was an actual pearl, but the black? A black pearl?

I picked them up and held them to the streetlight. “Where did you get these?” I asked, amazed.

“In the floor,” she said between sniffles. “They were buried in the cracks. I wasn’t trying to steal anything.”

My mind sailed back to the sound of Andy’s voice in my ear.
They’ve fallen through the cracks. They’re all buried under the floor, burning.

Pearls. Not women,
pearls
. That’s what he’d been trying to tell me. No. That’s what I had been trying to tell myself.

I knew a little about pearls. I knew jewelers sometimes held them to a flame to check if they were genuine. Because real pearls didn’t burn.

It wasn’t a black pearl in my hand. It wasn’t a black pearl in my hand. It was a pearl that had been charred in a fire, but survived.

“You can keep them,” she said. “Just please don’t turn me in.”

Max finally let her go. “We won’t,” I promised. “Please don’t cry.”

“We didn’t mean to scare you,” Max said.

“I thought you were someone else,” I explained.

“Well, I’m
not
,” she said, swiping at her tears. “I’m me.”

It sounded like something I might have said. The faster, angrier me. I studied her face again. Girlish, but jaded. She couldn’t have been much older than nineteen, but she looked like the world had already trampled her to the ground. Or if not the world, then at least a guy or two.

“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.