The Girl with the Wrong Name (18 page)

A shaft of sunlight illuminates an empty chair. I recognize it instantly as one of the chairs from the Harbor Café.

“Andy,” my voice says from behind the camera, “not that I saw you crying, but . . . why were you crying?”

There’s no response from the empty chair. It is a long, boring, static shot. It’s like watching one of those awful experimental Warhol movies.
“Chair,”
he might have called it.

“Who?” my voice asks the chair.

Beyond the silence, there’s only the ambient sound of chitchat. At tables. On cell phones. Or on their Bluetooth headsets.

It was “Bluetooth or Psycho?”
One of Max’s favorite games.
Three seconds to decide if the annoying dude yammering to himself is an asshole talking hands-free on his phone or a raving lunatic.

Everyone in that café thought I was the asshole. They assumed I was talking to my friend Andy on the hands-free. But they all had it wrong. I wasn’t the asshole. I was—I am—the raving lunatic.

“Well, come on. She’s not even an hour late,” my voice tells the empty chair. “I’m assuming she’s a ‘Pretty Girl’?”

I can’t take it. I mash my finger down on the
stop
button.

I began scrolling wildly
through my video gallery, scrolling up and down, mumbling, “No, no, no . . .”

“Thee,” Lou said, stepping closer.

“No,” I snapped. “No, just give me a . . . Just wait.”

“Thee,” Max said.

“
NO
, Max! Just . . .”

I picked another clip from the next day. Thursday, September fifth . . .

Another Warhol movie.
“Rainy Street,”
he might have called it.

The camera bounces up and down, left and right, but the star of the movie is rain. Pounding droplets, a shower drenching brownstones and leafy trees.

“That’s ridiculous,” my voice says from behind the camera. “There is no possible way you’re camera shy.”

I can’t watch anymore. There’s no need.

Chapter Eighteen

It’s a unique moment, knowing that the two people whom you know best are scared shitless that they don’t know you at all. And I loved them even more for letting me freak out in silence. Both of them. We stood there for I’m not sure how long. I glanced back toward the open closet. Andy’s empty nest.

I wouldn’t have seen the footage for days. Maybe even weeks. Not until it was time to edit. But I didn’t even need the phone anymore. I had the playback in my head:

The way Emilio stared at us—at me—from across the street. He wasn’t being a protective father figure; he was watching me, baffled, as I talked to thin air.

The bouncer at the Magic Garden who refused to acknowledge Andy’s presence no matter what he said. The club rejects in the back alley who laughed as I talked to myself, swinging punches at no one. The way Max didn’t see Andy when he ripped open the closet that night, even though he should have been impossible to miss.

No one had ever seen Andy Reese. Only me. I thought Emma and Tyler had seen him, what with the way they kept warning me to stay away. But they weren’t talking about my Andy, were they? They were talking about Lester Andrew Wyatt, Emma’s thirty-year-old fiancé. All this time, I’d been hiding Andy away from my mother and my friends for so many different reasons.

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 for 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.