“Done.”
“I’m sure Andy will be thrilled,” Lizzie said.
“Fuck Andy.”
Lizzie grinned. “He wishes.”
“Fuck you, too,” Gwen said, and then they were laughing, like they used to, like there was no one on the planet but the two of them, and Lizzie thought maybe this could be enough.
WENDY
How he looks at me
Like I’m a car that won’t start, and if he opens the hood, examines every valve and piston, he’ll find the problem.
Like I’m an insect pinned in place, and if he angles the magnifying glass just right, he’ll watch me burn.
Like I’m a piece of furniture, without will or consequence.
Like I’m a mosquito bite, begging, scratch me, please. Like I’m a mountain, and he wants to climb me. Like I’m a dog, and—it’s a miracle!—I can speak.
How he looked at me when we met: like I was human.
Everyone before him had treated me as a set of problems to be handled. A thing, broken. Everyone before him would say, Now I’m going to check your blood pressure or now I’m going to take an X-ray or now I’m going to insert the speculum, now you’re going to feel the pinch. No one asking my permission, only narrating my future on my behalf.
There was something about the way he said my name, as if it was a name rather than a label. It made me feel newly real, and I thought, am I the kind of woman who needs someone else’s permission to believe in my own existence?
I had by then been this woman, in this body, for a month. Hospital first. Mental hospital, worse. Then women’s shelter, two nights, then the third night when I couldn’t stop crying. These tears were happening to me. I was not making them happen. I was calm—but only in a secret inner corner no one else could see. The body made its noisy fuss and was carted back to the hospital, a pill forced down its throat, and soon the body was as calm as I was, and we both fell asleep. When we woke up, the body was strapped down. It screamed.
Time floated. I swallowed more pills. The pills made a fog. Sometimes I talked to myself, to see if my voice would sound as far away as everything else.
His voice didn’t slice through the fog so much as dissipate it. He painted two pictures for me. First, the Wendy Doe who stayed in the hospital. Not for long, he said. The bed cost money, the oversalted soup cost money, the state could find cheaper ways to house me, and would—back to the shelter, then, or maybe the street. “You’re not a prisoner,” he said. “They can’t keep you, and trust me, they don’t want to.” This Wendy Doe had no means of legal employment and no claim to unemployment or disability or any other official payout from the state, because in the state’s eyes, Wendy Doe did not exist.
In the second picture, he said, I would have a room of my own. A bed, food, an allowance, freedom to do as I liked, for as long as I liked. I only needed to agree to let myself be studied. He said we would be collaborators. “Spelunkers,” he said. “Exploring the mysteries of your mind.” He called me a fascinating case. He said he monitored the news for possible subjects, but I was the first in months he’d deemed worthy of further study. I asked if he thought he could help me remember. He asked if I wanted him to.
“No.” I liked that he seemed unsurprised.
“Good,” he said. “Frankly, you’re of no use to us once you get your memories back.”
I liked that, too.
I wanted to be a spelunker of my own mind. Maybe I was the kind of woman with a thirst for knowledge, I thought. Or maybe I was the kind of woman who would shape myself into what this man wanted me to be.
“Let’s achieve greatness together,” he said. Maybe it was a lie, him looking at me like I was a person, but I don’t think so. I think I was real to him then, for the last time. A real person is someone who can choose, even if she’s choosing to give her choices away. A real person can say no or she can say yes.
I said yes.
LIZZIE
It wasn’t all paperwork. Wendy Doe had no source of income but the largesse of Strauss, who was happy enough to extend it as long as Lizzie governed its use. Absolute freedom to come and go as she liked, but if she would like to go anywhere requiring a vehicle, Lizzie was her ride. It left Lizzie feeling part chaperone, part lady-in-waiting, part probation officer, and left Wendy feeling resentment she didn’t bother to disguise. It also meant Lizzie could spend an afternoon at the mall or the movies on the institute’s dime, and count it as work. Today’s mission: new clothes, enough to replace the shapeless, missized hand-me-downs Wendy had accumulated in her month bouncing between state institutions. Maybe she would feel less like a mental patient, Wendy said, if she had some better jeans.
“I feel like I’m in a very downscale Pretty Woman,” Lizzie said from her corner of the dressing room as Wendy extricated herself from a strappy pleather tank top and buttoned herself into a conservative chambray shirt. “Or any rom-com ever, I guess.” They’d been in the department store for two hours, as Wendy sampled one sartorial self after another: punk, goth, grunge, girly, high fashion, tomboy, comfortable and un-, glaring, with each costume change, at her reflection, as if daring it to weigh in—to indicate that Wendy had finally hit on a stylistic manifestation of her abandoned essential self. Now Wendy ripped off the button-down, pulled on a sweater the color of a sunset.
She spun slowly in front of the mirror. “This would look better on you.”
“I was just thinking that.”
“So buy it.”
Lizzie shook her head. The stipend she got from the Meadowlark wasn’t insignificant, especially given that she was currently living rent-free, but the complications of said rent-free lodgings weren’t insignificant, either. Lizzie was hoarding every dollar she made for an eventual sublet and the freedom from maternal oversight it would ensure.
“Then how about we let the Meadowlark buy it for you?” Wendy suggested.
Lizzie eyed the price tag, winced, and told Wendy the clothing allowance she’d been given was for Wendy alone.
“Have you ever met a rule you didn’t blindly follow?” Wendy asked.
“I don’t blindly follow anything.”
“Uh-huh.” Wendy exchanged a grin with her reflection, then put on the coat they’d bought earlier that day and began buttoning it over the sweater.
“What are you doing?” Lizzie whispered.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“I’m sure there are cameras in here.”
Wendy shrugged. “What can they do, arrest me? You think jail would be that much different from the institute?”
“Yeah. Actually, I do.”
Wendy looked at her carefully, then laughed. “Oh, I get it.”
“What?”
“You want me to. It’s the closest you can get to scratching the itch. Pleasuring your inner delinquent.”
“Bullshit.” But Lizzie remembered an afternoon with Gwen, half her lifetime ago, an aging drugstore attendant, an overpriced lipstick, a halfhearted effort to dissuade, and Gwen’s diagnosis as she pressed the stolen lipstick into Lizzie’s palm, Lizzie’s fingers closing over the cool plastic, Lizzie’s pulse, quickened. Gwen’s theory that Lizzie needed this, the safety of moral superiority sprinkled with the rewards of vice. Fifteen years had passed. Gwen had transformed herself into a wife, a mother—was it possible that Lizzie was still exactly, pathetically the same?