Lizzie wasn’t sure how to react to this. The woman gave her a careful look. “Are you?”
“What?”
“A guinea pig.”
“I’m…” She shook off her nerves. If this was her first test, she intended to pass. “I’m Lizzie Epstein, a research fellow at the Meadowlark Institute. I work under Dr. Strauss.” She extended a hand, but it went unshaken.
“You want to tell her?” the woman asked Strauss.
“You seem to have a firm grasp of your own narrative,” he said.
“Not that you’re taking notes on how I frame it.”
“Not that I would ever.”
“Because I haven’t agreed to let you study me.”
“Not that you ever would.”
Lizzie was stymied.
“Three weeks ago, a woman was found on a Peter Pan bus with no means of identification, including her own useless brain,” the patient said. “The state named her Wendy Doe and diagnosed her with dissociative fugue state. Defined as, quote, sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s customary place of work, with inability to recall one’s past. Unquote. Usually trauma induced. Frequently faked. Though not in this case. Says me.” She turned to Strauss, sardonically proud student awaiting her gold star. Lizzie liked her already. “Did I get that just about right?”
“Just about.”
“I’ve been in the paper,” Wendy Doe said. “On the news. I’ve been on Jerry Springer. No one recognizes me. Impressive, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” Lizzie said, and was sorry, more than she’d expected. She sometimes felt like life was a series of losses—grandmother, father, and in the less corporeal but still permanent category, all the friends, rooms, cities she’d ever made the mistake of loving just enough to miss when they were gone—and she’d done her best to design a life that would be a bulwark against the inevitable. She allowed nothing to feel essential except that which she could control, but this woman—Lizzie’s age, Lizzie’s build, Lizzie’s coloring—she could easily have been Lizzie. Everything gone, including herself. And no one, apparently, had missed her. There was a long and noble tradition of modeling brain function via study of malfunctioning brains, but this was a tradition Lizzie had never wanted any part of. She preferred to study carefully controlled damage of her own creation. Another reason to opt for rats. It was much harder to look at them and see herself. “That must be difficult. No one’s been able to help you remember?”
“Why would I want that?”
“I just assumed—”
“I get my memories back, I snap out of this fugue thing, and I forget any of this ever happened, that’s how it works, right?” The patient turned again to Strauss, who nodded.
“Traditionally.”
“Why would I be eager to erase myself? Does that seem like something you’d want?” This she directed at Lizzie, who shook her head, though it was impossible for her to imagine wanting to live without a past—impossible to imagine there would be a her without it. Maybe that was Wendy Doe’s point.
Once back in the car, Strauss asked what she thought.
“Of the case?” Lizzie scrambled to remember what she knew of dissociative fugues. “The patient shows no obvious signs of emotional trauma, but—”
“No, of the subject. She’s yours, if you want her. Well, yours and mine, but I’m assuming you don’t mind a bit of supervision.”
“I do rats,” Lizzie said, stalling, panicking.
“Indeed, you did. I know this because I read your application. Do you know what else I read there? A stated desire to, quote, blaze beyond the boundaries of pedestrian scientific inquiry and chart a revolutionary course.”
She cringed at the echo of her own absurd ambition.
“Did you mean that?”
Lizzie nodded, because absurd or not, it was also true.
“Do you think you’re going to do that by reanimating your rat project?”
“Am I going to do it by assisting you, and studying a woman who could get her memory back any minute, sending us smack into a dead end?”
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s a risk. She could also refuse to be studied—unlike your rats. Or some relative could dig her up. She could turn out to be faking it. Anything’s possible.”
She flipped through the file, stalling. According to the records, Peter Pan’s lost girl had bounced around city facilities for nearly a month. First a hospital, then a mental hospital, a homeless shelter, the mental hospital again, while social services waited for someone to come looking. The Philadelphia PD, the FBI, the reporters at the Inquirer and (more dogged when it came to this brand of tawdry) the Daily News, all had failed to turn up a viable claimant. Maybe forgetting her life was simple retaliation, Lizzie thought. Maybe life forgot her first.
“Or we could hit the lottery,” Strauss said. “Discover something no one else knows. Together.”
There was no way to calculate the odds without a firmer grip on the subject’s status, and there were two equally viable possibilities: One, Wendy Doe was lying. Remembered everything, walked out of her life for reasons valid or otherwise. Two: Wendy Doe genuinely remembered nothing. She was a walking dream state, and whatever happened to her now, the things she said, the choices she made, would simply evanesce when she woke up. If Wendy Doe was telling the truth, there was no Wendy Doe.
“You know what I saw in your application?”
“What?”
“Someone who wants to be exceptional, but doesn’t quite believe she has it in her. Someone too invested in the past, too worried about the future, to take a true risk in the present. Someone who’s realized her life is small and wants to change that.”
“You read all that in my application?”
“I read all that in the first five minutes of meeting you. I’m a very insightful man. Maybe you’ve heard.” He grinned, boyish, and she couldn’t help liking it. “Take the night, think about it. If, in the morning, you still want rats, then rats ye shall have.”
“For the record, I’m not here to start a new life,” she said. “Just a new research project.”
“Hmm.” It sounded diagnostic. “Have you ever been in love, Elizabeth?”
“What?”
“Is that an inappropriate question these days?” Wendy Doe’s file sat on the dashboard. He rapped a fist against it, twice. “My advice? Find something here that you love to the exclusion of all else. I can see how sincerely you want to want this. That’s good. Want it for real. That’s better.”
* * *
The house still felt like her father’s house. Here was the crooked magnolia in the yard, the only tree halfway suitable for climbing. Here was the mezuzah, chastising her for never acquiring one of her own. Here was a welcome mat, unwelcome touch that her father—for reasons both aesthetic and constitutional—would never have allowed. She had a key, but rang the bell anyway, a reminder she was technically a guest here. She did not have to stay.
Her mother was draped in a lavender caftan and had eyeshadow to match. They exchanged a polite hug. The house smelled ineffably of Epstein.