I received letters of every type, from every sort of person, for the next six months.
We were praying for you—
Wow, you grew up nice—
Think you can just ignore the people who helped you, ungrateful bitch—
It was part of the reason we’d moved again—this time to Ohio. Part of the reason I’d changed my name. So I could start fresh as an adult. Enter college as someone new. The gift of being a person with no history.
The twenty-year anniversary was less than two months away. Would there be more media coverage, regardless of whether they tracked me down? Was it still of public interest, all these years later?
“Have a good day, Olivia,” the clerk said, pulling my attention. My ID was in his outstretched hand. I slid it back into my wallet, then peered over my shoulder again, but the man was gone.
“Thanks,” I said to the clerk, keeping my head down as I strode for the automatic-exit doors.
He was there. Outside, waiting. Leaning against a blue car parked next to mine. Unwrapping, on the hood of his car, a breakfast sandwich that didn’t seem like it had come from the store. “Hey,” he said, all nonchalant, taking a bite. Taking his time.
The lot was otherwise empty. I unlocked the door, but kept the keys in my hand, an old instinct rising.
He chewed and swallowed, pointing his sandwich at me. “I know you,” he said.
“Don’t think so,” I said. He had the air of a journalist, if not the look. Not the clothes and not the car, from what I was accustomed to. But the way of casually lingering, pretending he hadn’t been waiting just for me.
“Olivia, right?”
I was already shutting the driver’s-side door. Mentally working through the moves to escape, tallying the seconds to get away. The time to start my car and accelerate out of the lot versus the time it would take him to do the same—and follow. I didn’t second-guess myself. I’d been born with a healthy dose of self-preservation, and I’d learned to trust my gut.
In my rush to leave, I didn’t give him another glance. Couldn’t say what he looked like if asked, other than: guy, white, average height and build. Perhaps he’d known my name to start, or perhaps he’d just overheard the clerk inside.
Whatever he was after, I didn’t have to speak—I knew that by now.
But how easily he could topple everything I’d built. The comfort of anonymity. All that I’d run from in Widow Hills. Here, the scars just scars—surgery after an accident, I always said, and that wasn’t a lie. My name was my legal name now. I stuck to the truth: Moved here from Ohio for college; fell out of touch with my family; came into some money when I was younger.
None of these things were lies.
People tended to fill in the blanks however they wanted. It was not my job to correct them.
TRANSCRIPT FROM LIVE INTERVIEW
OCTOBER 18, 2000
Yes, I found her on my porch once. I worked the six a.m. shift that day, had to leave just after five. My dog was barking, and it was still dark when I opened the door, but there she was. I remember I said, “Honey? Is your mom okay?” Because I couldn’t remember her name.
She turned around and walked back home. I didn’t realize she was sleeping.
I wish I’d told someone, but I didn’t know.
STUART GOSS
Resident of Widow Hills
CHAPTER 4
Friday, 8 a.m.
THERE WERE MANY BENEFITS to working in a hospital, in theory. Access to doctors and nurses, a behind-the-scenes look at how things worked, personal connections to book an appointment last-minute.
But what you gained in accessibility, you lost in privacy. Since I’d been with Central Valley Hospital, I visited doctors less, not more. The times I’d been sick, I’d stopped at the Minute Clinic instead. The doctors and nurses were people I saw every day. And I’d have to give a medical history, a personal history. I shuddered at the possibility of old details somehow making it into their system. Where they might notice that my arm had to be reconstructed and then fixed again as I grew, that there was a lack of full mobility due to the buildup of scar tissue around my shoulder. Where they might wonder why.
After the story ended, after the fade to black, these were the things that didn’t fit onto their carefully constructed page: the trauma of surgeries; the long process of recovery; the questions from the curious; the feeling of always, always being watched.
All I needed was a sleeping aid, possibly, to keep me in deep sleep. An easy remedy. Harmless.
The entrance to the hospital looked like a rich but rustic hotel, with log-cabin beams crisscrossing the walkway to the entrance. In the front, there was a greenway with a walking path and benches for employees and visitors to take lunch breaks.
I always parked in the back lot, partly to avoid the ER entrance and the corresponding waiting area. Bennett called me a germaphobe, but I had good cause: When I first started working here, I promptly got sick—a virulent virus I was sure would kill me. Or, at the very least, force me to never eat again.
Everyone said I’d build up immunity over time, but it hadn’t happened. That first winter, I’d come down with bronchitis, with a cough so vicious I’d bruised a rib. Since then: strep, something viral, a rash with no origin.
I still kept hand sanitizer in my bottom drawer. Stayed three feet away from visitors to avoid a handshake.
Bennett said I made people nervous, but I hadn’t gotten sick since.
That’s because you’ve built up immunity, he’d said. But I wasn’t willing to risk it.
Mostly, though, I came in through the back to be closer to the stairs and bypass the elevator, my least favorite technological advancement. Sliding doors, one way out, a steel box. I avoided the opportunity to take an elevator whenever possible, steering clear of small spaces for the obvious reasons.
From the back entrance, the only signs of life at this time of day were from the gift shop, a family of three clustered near the glass entrance, balloon in a child’s hand. I could smell breakfast coming from the cafeteria down the hall, but it was quiet before the breakfast rush.
When I unlocked the door from the third-floor stairwell, my hall appeared vacant. The wing was closed to patients, accessible only through a keypad beside a swinging set of doors at one end, or a key from the back stairs. This was less because of the offices and more because of the nurses’ lounge and medicine room.
It was early enough that most of the administration hadn’t yet checked in for the day, but still, it was hard to tell. People moved quietly. Everyone wore rubber-soled sneakers or clogs, and I’d adopted the same—because I was the only one you could hear coming, and I found my own presence unnerving.
My office was halfway down the hall, but turn the corner and you’d hit the nurses’ lounge and the central medicine room placed strategically across the way. I could see shadows passing quickly underneath the double doors at the other end of the hall, where the patients were.
I stopped just outside the lounge, peering through the small rectangular window, listening to the silence. A woman with curly auburn hair, her back to me, was reading something on her phone. The lounge was open to nurses in every department, but she was not someone I recognized; not someone who would know me.