… The Last Place You Look

October, 2011

The sticky note is taped onto the front of my inbox as I arrive at the ICU nurse’s station for the night shift. There is one word written on it—“pathology” in a petite cursive—so I know where I’ll be spending my first break. I leave the note where it dangles, instead gathering the paperwork that I’ve received over the four days since my last shift.

Handoff with Jewel takes thirty minutes; my previous patients were both discharged since my previous shift, so the charge nurse assigns me two new cases for my shift. The first is recovering from a stroke three days ago; the other is stabilized after a myocardial infarction this morning. Both patients are in stable condition; mostly medications and monitoring to be done, best case scenario. I relax, as it appears to be a mostly quiet night.

It’s not until half past ten that I go down to the hospital’s basement. The air is freezing; it reminds me of the end of Dante's Inferno, the center of Hell. I hate this. It’s been three months since the last time I was down here and a year since the first time. I've felt the need to make this journey after she disappeared upon release from jail.

I knock on the door, and Diego lets me in. “She’s been here since yesterday. Didn’t know you were off, sorry.”

“It’s okay. Let’s get this over with.”

He leads me to the back wall and slides drawer number twelve open. We look at the half-naked white girl staring at the ceiling. She appears to be in her late twenties, with shoulder-length brown hair and blank brown eyes. There’s a faded tattoo of a rose on her left breast.

“It’s not her. Thanks, Diego.”

October, 2012

I've been down to Pathology six times since. Each and every one of them look like her: pale skin, brown hair, brown eyes, and either late twenties or early thirties. Each has slight variations. It takes longer to recall each time, a little bit longer to recognize the differences.

On an off-day, I sip my iced tea and watch my cousins playing in my grandmother’s backyard.

She has opinions. “You don’t owe that girl shit. I warned you about that cracker.”

“Gigi, that’s enough. I don’t remember you saying anything when Neecey was getting beat regularly by Malcolm. It was just the one time. And that was all it took.”

She's said nothing when it was her son beating his girlfriend. And I’ve never heard anything about my stepfather beating on my mother—her daughter—either. Funny how that is. At least nobody’s dead from it.

“I don’t know why you hate men.”

“I don’t hate men, Gigi. I’ve dated men.” Not exclusively, but mostly. All but two.

“Then why were you with that crazy girl?”

“Because I loved her.”

I do love her, still. She looked so damn adorable the first time I saw her at the strip club. She’d turned as red as blood, both trying to look away and sneaking peeks at the same time. She was inexperienced but a willing student, eager to please. After years of dealing with men who thought I owed them everything, our relationship was a wonderful experience. She could be tender or firm, as the situation demanded, and she was patient in all the right ways.

The biggest issue we had, which caused far more problems than I realized, was how she tried to compartmentalize everything in her life. Work was work. Her family was her family. We were us. There was no real interchange between the three.

I met her father once. That didn’t go so well. And I understood, after that, why she had been so reluctant about them. I didn’t meet her mother while we were together, and only met her brother, Steve, toward the end.

But I wanted there to be interactions and did what I could to encourage it. But she felt awkward around my family, being one of the few whites present at get-togethers. And Gigi’s “cracker” comments didn’t help.

Once her lieutenant in the police force, Brandon, took her under his wing, we would occasionally spend time with his wife and kids, but that wasn’t easy either. If the two cops weren’t discussing work, she didn’t talk at all, making the couple more my friends than hers.

She also behaved oddly with Lily and Gladys, who were definitely her friends more than mine. They taught us how to play bridge. But we mostly talked about the games we’d played, not about anything personal.

She only opened up and acted herself when it was just the two of us. And as time went on, and she started drinking more and more, that happened less and less often. I hated when she became guarded and quiet, but I let her do what she thought she needed to do. For the longest time I thought it was my fault.

She was suspended from the force for two years—ultimately fired, but they had to wait on that. During that time, another nurse suggested that I check out Al-Anon. They taught me that I was powerless over alcohol. That I needed to detach myself with love. That the best thing I could do was nothing.

I went for three months, meetings every other week. And it suddenly occurred to me that it was nothing but bullshit. Inaction is still an action. Allowing the alcoholic to drink, regardless that all passive behavior that one does in the meantime to rationalize that you’re not enabling them is still allowing them to drink, and doing so affects you directly.

The best thing to do is to be assertive, in my opinion. If you’re going to walk away anyway, then you might as well make them be the one to choose. Choose the person or choose the alcohol. Besides which, as I learned from intervention groups, ultimatums and such should be done with a group around you. If the drunk tries to retaliate, you have help. If they try to retaliate when you “detach with love”—or worse, when you return from such a detachment—then you only have yourself to blame.

So we—Brandon, Lily, her brother, and I—intervened. And she chose the alcohol over us. It was a fifty-fifty shot, I knew that going in. But it set a boundary. And I detached. She’s the one who chose not to do so with love.

April, 2013

I've made six more trips to identify bodies—or rather, to make sure whoever it is isn’t her. Brandon told me that I don’t have to do it. Her prints are in the system, so if she shows up they’ll identify her eventually. But I need to check anyway, for my own state of mind.

There are more overdoses turning up—the opioid crisis is becoming bad. One addiction is as bad as another. We see the results in the ICU as well; sometimes we’re afraid that we might have been responsible. But we do our best.

This latest time, Diego asks me, “What exactly are you looking for?”

“I don’t know anymore. An answer, maybe?”

“An answer to what question?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Over two and a half years, I have looked at fifteen bodies. Fifteen white women with brown hair and brown eyes. Looking for someone who didn’t have old tattoos or piercings. Looking for someone who had an old scar on her right arm. Anything else might have changed in that time. Maybe she got herself inked up to celebrate her prison time. Maybe she got herself pierced, or shaved her head, or lost an eye, or so many other “what ifs” that I just don’t want to think about.

There’ve been a couple of times I thought they were her. Sometimes I think I wanted the body—needed it—to be her. Closure. Completion. Maybe that’s the answer to Diego’s question. Maybe that’s the answer to my own.

Steve—I will never use that stupid nickname—and I have started meeting for coffee and occasional meals. He’s invited me to his therapy group; I went once, and at least they don’t preach that passive-aggressive nonsense. I am a queen. I am powerless to nothing and nobody. And anyone trying to convince me otherwise is nobody I need to concern myself with.

For two siblings, they are so different. She is fire and ice, piss and vinegar, life and death, order and chaos. He is a rock in the river, a leaf in the wind, a star in the sky.

I love her, but I hate her. I hate their parents. I like him, so far. There’s something about the way he talks, and the way he listens, that I enjoy being in his presence. He's not his father’s son, that’s for damned sure. Just like I'm not my mother’s daughter. I know that for a damned fact.

June, 2013

I arrive at the start of my shift, the last of my four on, and I meet with Rosalie for the handoff. One of our patients is the same as the past two days, so his update is a matter of course.

“The other patient’s new. She came up from Emergency this afternoon.”

“What’s her story?”

“Police brought her in. Multiple fractured ribs. X-ray says it looks like five, all on the left side, but they’re still waiting on the radiologist to confirm and determine if there’s any other internal damage. She also has facial damage, but that looks superficial. They’ve got her on a drip, and she’s still unconscious.”

“What’s the punching bag’s name?”

“No identification yet. Transient.”

We walked in to the new patient's room. Her cheeks were swollen, her eyes blackened and closed. Her head was otherwise hidden by bandages.

“Any tattoos or other injuries?”

“No, no tattoos that are listed. Same for injuries.”

I approach the patient. There’s a scar on her right arm, between her wrist and elbow. I never knew what caused that.

“I need to be reassigned.”

“What’s the matter, Cynthia?”

“I know her. I— I can’t be anywhere near her.”