“She’s…” The girl wanted to cry, that was obvious. But she refused to, and I liked her for it. “Can we start again?” She stuck out her hand, and I shook it. “I’m Alice. Karen Clark’s—Wendy Doe’s—daughter. A few months ago, my mother went missing. Just walked out, disappeared. And that’s when my father told me…”
“It happened before.”
She nodded. “No one’s even looking for her anymore. The police, even my father, they think she’s… you know.”
I did know. All those years ago, a woman could erase herself with relative ease. It was a different century now, a future of facial recognition and streaming surveillance. To erase yourself from that picture would require something more permanent than a bus ticket and a new name. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “But if you’re thinking she came back here—”
The girl, Alice, shook her head. “I’m just trying to understand. Who she was. Why she might have…” She paused, and when she continued, her voice was steadier. “I want to know what it was like for her here. What she was like, when she thought she was someone else. I need to know something.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m not some teen runaway,” she said. “I’m eighteen, I can do what I want.”
“I do remember your mother,” I told her. “It was a lifetime ago, but I remember her very well.”
A lifetime ago, and here was the girl, her entire life the proof. A lifetime ago, before there was an Elizabeth Strauss, before there was an us, when there was only a Strauss and a Lizzie, when it still hurt to study the lines of his neck, to imagine the impossible, taking his hand. I loved him most, but Lizzie loved him best. How could we be the same person when this girl’s whole life lay between us? A lifetime ago I was somebody else. Wendy Doe was nobody, a fairy tale one neuron told another. But Benjamin was still Benjamin. Benjamin was a constant, axiomatic. I wanted the girl gone, but maybe it would be easier, with her here, to remember, to return to him. I wanted that, too.
I invited her to stay for dinner, and didn’t consciously plan that after dinner I’d insist she stay the night, but when the cartons were tossed and the dishes done, it seemed only polite. It was less intention than reflex. She was a tether to the past—you can’t throw a drowning woman a rope and not expect her to cling.
Benjamin’s law: you are the story you tell of your life, and every story has its want. I wanted. In the dark. In the bone and the marrow. It was, that day, nearly one year into the after, and my whole life was a wanting. The story I tell of my life: I was alone, once. Then I was alone again.
I wanted to go back.
II
LIZZIE
Day one. A windowless room. One table, two chairs. The standard battery of tests: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Wechsler Memory Scale, California Verbal Learning Test, Test of Everyday Attention, Stroop test (Kaplan variant), Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale, Personality Assessment Inventory, Depression Anxiety Stress Scale, Beck Depression Inventory-2, Dissociation Questionnaire, Thurstone Word Fluency Test, Digit Span Forward and Backward memory tests, Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, Rey-Osterrieth complex figure test.
Day two, same. Day three, same.
Strauss believed in knowledge by colonization, understanding a subject by spreading across every inch of its territory until it was wholly possessed. And so Lizzie measured and processed and tallied: average through above average results for all but the obvious subpar performance in episodic memory. Elevated indicators of trauma and depression. Semantic memory intact; areas of specialized knowledge included biology, gardening, medical terminology, food preparation. All what one would expect from a neurologically intact woman of mildly above-average intelligence who either had or was faking a dissociative fugue. The subject had been MRI’d, CAT- and PET-scanned at the intake hospital, but those doctors had been searching only for obvious dysfunction, cause rather than correlation or consequence. The Meadowlark was as concerned with function as with its failure, so Lizzie dutifully ferried the subject to the scanning wing. Wendy lay inside clanking machines, blinked up at a scattershot of images, let associations roam free, while, safe behind glass, Lizzie watched the techs watch the screens, map swaths of gray matter flashing fluorescent as neurons went to work. This part of the Meadowlark was known as the North Pole; brains here lit up like Christmas trees.
Lizzie had signed on to the fugue project because the reward of working side by side with a world-renowned genius had seemed to outweigh any risk and—though she would have preferred this were not a factor—because Wendy Doe had rooted herself in Lizzie’s brain. Not just the intellectual puzzle of her, which would have been acceptable, but the human fact of her, the woman untethered from life and self, a tragic figure that some part of Lizzie couldn’t help imagining herself swooping in to save. She didn’t know why Wendy had signed on, but given her disinterest in her own condition and any possible resolution of it, Lizzie suspected that upon discharge from the state hospital, there’d been nowhere better to go. The Meadowlark was Wendy’s last resort, and she was treating it—and Lizzie—accordingly.
Lizzie asked Wendy exhaustive questions about the past, but the woman never slipped from her story of no story. Lizzie showed Wendy pictures, played her music, offered her smells, recorded her responses. These figures would establish a cognitive baseline; subsequent tests at regular intervals would track its evolution over time. The tests were dull, the data crucial, though so far the only data point that compelled Lizzie was Wendy’s resolute lack of interest in her own past. Lizzie kept prodding her to speculate about who she might have been, what she might have been fleeing from or to, imagining that free association might guide her toward something true, but Wendy resolutely did not want to guess, did not want to imagine, did not want to know.
They had just finished a third variant of IQ test when Strauss peeked in. “Don’t want to interrupt, I just thought I’d see how it’s going.”
Lizzie’s posture straightened, and she could feel a false smile stretch across her face. “Great!” Wendy’s smile looked more genuine, and her echoed “Great!” almost sounded sincere.
“That’s my girl,” Strauss said to Lizzie, which should have galled her. She wanted to impress him—for practical reasons, but she could also feel it pulsing in her, the congenital need for approval. Her mother used to call her a born teacher’s pet—bewildered tone implying some kind of switched-at-birth scenario. Her father always countered that there was nothing wrong with currying favor from the people you respected—and it was true that those teachers who lost Lizzie’s respect never had cause to doubt her disdain—but Lizzie knew he simply loved her too much to see the flaw. Her mother had nailed it. Her mother’s disappearing act, which left Lizzie in ever more dire need of loco parentis approval, had turned impulse into pathology. It was not her favorite trait, but it had gotten her into Harvard, into her PhD program, most likely into the Meadowlark, and if it could get her out with Benjamin Strauss’s full-throated approval, then she would swallow the toadying shame of it, and when he stepped out again, leaving Wendy in “Elizabeth’s capable hands,” she would not berate herself for blushing.