Laura van den Berg - Find Me

The doctor returned and pumped morphine into her IV. Her eyes were the color of milk. Three hours later, she was dead. From the corner of the room, the envelope stuck between my gloves, I watched her body go still and stiller, and even then it did not look restful, like sleep. I never got to ask how she found me or who my mother was or why she left me at Brigham. I never got to ask what was so wrong with her, or with me.

On my way out, the doctor stopped me in the hallway, his gloved hand brushing my shoulder, and told me the address was the last thing she wrote before her memory disappeared.

I entered a small, dark room where people in hazmats were waiting to scrub my suit with neon white paddles frothing with a liquid that looked like water but was not water. The suit was part of the Last Rites package, forever mine. Outside, the town car was waiting to take me to the address, a brownstone on Warren Avenue.

The key unlocked an apartment on the first floor. I followed a carpeted hall into the bedroom. Framed photos of people I did not know had been arranged on the wall in a shape that looked like a puzzle on the verge of completion. The suit made a cracking sound as I knelt and reached under the bed.

I found a white shoebox. I pulled it out and raised the lid: a single photograph surrounded by curls of paper. A Polaroid, the edges worn soft. In the photo, a woman stood on a ship deck, the sunlight caught in the brown sheen of the wood. She wore khaki pants and a white blouse, turned translucent by the light, so I could make out the tan bra straps pressing against her collarbone. She was holding a pair of binoculars and looking straight into the camera, as though the photographer had just offered her a challenge. Hair the color of coal poured over her shoulders. Her eyes were stuck deep in her skull. Her lips were parted slightly, and there was a tiny oval of darkness between them. Behind her I could see the blue expanse of water.

I started reading the strips of paper, the details Christina must have tried to preserve before she started forgetting.

Scorpio, allergic to raw apples, afraid of not very much.

She kept you one month before—

Her first and only love is water.

She made it through childhood without vomiting once.

We have not spoken in seven years.

Hates heights, likes to be low, close to the earth.

She has no patience for anything!

You are her only child.

Regrets — we have many.

I flipped the photo over. Your mother, 1997 was written on the back. This was shot two years after I was born.

I took the photo with me. I left everything else behind.

I slipped into the backseat of the town car and the driver peeled away. I unzipped my hood. Warm, bleachy air gusted into the suit. I always imagined my mother only glimpsed me at birth, only held me for a minute or two, my body still slick with her insides, before handing me over.

According to Christina, I was wrong: she had a life with me and, after thirty days, she decided that she did not want that life.

The sun was coming through the back window. No matter how many people died, no matter how far the sickness spread, there was always the sun, a fact of our existence that seemed both miraculous and chilling. I looked again at the photo. If I concentrated very hard, I could remember one detail about my mother. A scent, something close to fresh-cut grass. Now there was an image to fill in what memory had failed to catch. All I was missing was a name.

* * *

Two days after Christina died, a man knocked on my door. He was dressed like a pallbearer underneath his hazmat: a black suit with a red carnation tucked into the lapel. His hair was shorn close to the skull. He carried a black briefcase. He was the third thing.

This man had come to invite me to the Hospital. He said I was among the small portion of the population who, despite exposure to the infected, didn’t get sick. That I, and others like me, had a resistance. I might be in possession of a genetic abnormality that could lead to a cure; the formula could be waiting right there in my blood. He pointed a gloved finger at my chest as he said this. When I said I didn’t think I was the kind of person who could help with such a thing, he told me Louis Pasteur cured rabies by injecting the virus into the brains of mad dogs.

“All avenues, no matter how unlikely, must be explored,” he said.

My basement apartment was warm and dark. Trash collection had been suspended and black garbage bags were piling up in my little galley kitchen, swollen and reeking. Outside I could hear a police vehicle rolling down the street, an announcement being made through a megaphone. The hazmat suit was slung over the couch and I had started to think of it as company.

Sometimes, at night, I would put the suit on and walk around my apartment and listen to the peculiar sound of my breath. Or watch reruns of The X-Files on my laptop, which always left me wishing for a partner in crime. I’ve never liked the things girls my age are supposed to.

In my favorite episodes, a virus caused by aliens takes over human bodies and a death row inmate with psychic powers channels the ghost of Scully’s father and in a suburb called Arcadia a monster eats people who break community rules about lawn decorations. In the suit, I felt like not a person but a creature, the kind of thing that could turn up on an episode of The X-Files.

The man told me the sickness usually killed within seven days, but in rare cases there was a lengthy incubation period, so the deal was a ten-month stay in the Hospital, long enough to be sure I wasn’t infected, and then I would be released. People like this man were knocking on doors all across the country and offering 149 other Americans the same plan. Not a single person refused.

It was true I touched one of the infected, back when the sickness was still new. A neighbor wobbled into the backyard. From my doorway I watched her plop down and grab at her eyelids. I called 911. I went outside. We didn’t know much about the sickness then, didn’t know it could be spread through any human contact. I asked if she wanted to go home and she looked at me and said, “Where is a home?” She reached for me and her fingertips, rough with the silvery beginnings of blisters, grazed my wrist.

When the ambulance came, paramedics in rubber gloves and gas masks shooed me back inside like I had committed a crime.

The man snapped open his briefcase and passed me a thick stack of papers. He pointed to a paragraph with tiny font, marked by an arrow-shaped sticker. “As you can see here, your primary role in the Hospital is to simply exist, along with daily examinations, to ensure there are no signs of infection.”

“Sounds like the beginning of a horror movie,” I said.

“More horrifying than what you’ve already experienced?” The man took a fountain pen from his briefcase and placed it next to the papers. “I sincerely doubt it.”

How would he know what I had already experienced?

I won’t even pack a suitcase, I decided then. I would go in the clothes I was wearing, my mother’s photo in my pocket. I bent at the waist. My hair fell over my eyes. Blood rushed to my skull. I had my own reasons for wanting out of Somerville.

Here were the facts of my life: I worked as a cashier at a twenty-four-hour Stop & Shop, graveyard shift. My basement apartment had no windows. I slept through the daylight hours and never left for work without drinking at least four ounces of cough syrup. I stole fresh bottles from the Stop & Shop and I knew one day I would get caught and be fired, but did I care? I did not care.

It was at the Stop & Shop that I started with the cough syrup. I got the idea while restocking shelves in Health & Beauty. I tried Creomulsion, Boiron, Mucinex, but cherry-flavored Robitussin, maximum strength, was my favorite.