But then I remembered.
That wasn’t me.
jessie
Before I can tear my eyes from Mom’s face on the newspaper’s obituaries page, from my own circled name, the man has slipped from the garden and disappeared from sight. I attempt to run after him, barreling through the rows of hawthorn trees as quickly as my legs can carry me. But still, when I come rushing out onto Michigan Avenue, chest heaving, breathing hard, he’s gone. The sidewalk is inundated with people, with kids, a middle school field trip to the Art Institute, and they’re all lined up in two parallel rows before the museum’s concrete steps. Clogging the sidewalk. I push past bubbly preteens who are incognizant of my desperation, who don’t care. By the time I reach the other side, there’s no sign of the man anywhere. The man with the sad eyes and the untied shoe.
I stare up and down the street, completely aghast. A muscle in my eyelid twitches, a spasm. Something involuntary, something I can’t make go away though I try. It’s extremely annoying. The street is a wide six-lane divided street jam-packed with people and cars, a median strip in the center that’s plugged with flowers and trees, making it even harder to see the other side. But still I walk, searching the streets for the man.
I hurry down Michigan with a heavy, desperate tread. The wind is a wall by now, and I lean into it to walk. It’s exhausting. All the while, my eyelid twitches. I turn left at Randolph, a temporary reprieve from the militant headwind, which now comes at me from the side so that I slope laterally, a perfect seventy-five-degree angle. At Clark, I turn right, not quite knowing where I’m going, but trying desperately to find the man. I climb northward, gazing into storefronts to see if he’s there. I stare down alleyways, out of breath by the time I come to a six-story building on Superior Street, one that’s flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows and looks oddly familiar to me.
I spin in a circle, taking it in, the doorman in uniform, the sign outside that reads Spacious, Open-plan Lofts for Sale. Inquire Inside.I know where I am. I’ve been here before.
Just like that, I’m standing at Liam’s front door.
I didn’t know I was coming here. I didn’t come here on purpose. But here I am, and now that I’m here, I make an attempt to scoot past the doorman and into the building. Because maybe Liam can help me think this through. The little girl in the car accident, the man in the garden. He’ll make me see that there’s nothing sordid going on. That it’s only a coincidence.
The doorman stands on the curb, hailing a cab for a resident. “Can I help you, miss?” he asks, catching sight of me out of the corner of his eye, as he steers the resident into the back seat of the cab and closes the door for her.
He steps closer to me. “I’m here to see Liam,” I say.
His smile is mocking. Wary. “Liam who?” he asks, playing dumb, and I freeze, realizing only then that I don’t have a last name. That to me he’s just Liam. That until yesterday he wasn’t even that, because before yesterday he didn’t have a name. He was only the guy from the hospital, the one with the blue eyes.
But I also realize that the doorman knows fully well what Liam’s last name is. He isn’t curious. He’s testing me, checking to see how well I know Liam before he lets me in.
“I don’t know his last name,” I admit, feeling uncomfortable as my feet shift in place. At first he’s hesitant, not sure he wants to phone Liam or not. For all he knows, I’m someone Liam is avoiding, someone he doesn’t want to see. And that’s his job, to keep unwanted visitors at bay, unwanted visitors like me.
He sizes me up and down. He asks twice what my name is. Both times I say Jessie, though for the first time I start to doubt that it is. I feel disheveled, disoriented, and though I have no idea what I look like, I can see it in the doorman’s eyes. It’s not good. I run my hands through my hair; I rub at my twitching eyes.
“Is Liam expecting you?” he asks, and I’m not quick enough on my feet to lie. I tell him no.
“Can you call him for me, please?” I plead, the desperation in my voice palpable to both him and me.
The doorman reluctantly phones Liam for me, but Liam doesn’t answer his call. “He’s not home,” he tells me, setting the phone down. I feel the skeptic in me start to take hold. He’s lying. He didn’t call him. He only pretended he did, but he didn’t. I think that maybe the number he dialed wasn’t Liam at all, or maybe he didn’t push enough digits for the call to go through. Or he hung up before Liam had a chance to answer.
I’m about to get angry, but then I remember. The funeral. Liam’s brother’s funeral is today. He’s at the funeral. He’s not home.
I excuse myself, walking from the building, feeling muddled. There’s a convenient mart next door to the apartment building. I slip inside and buy a Coke, hoping the caffeine will make me feel less mixed-up. Or, at minimum, curtail the throbbing in my head from the day’s lack of caffeine.
Back outside, I drop down onto the curb to catch my breath. I need to think things through, but my mind can focus on only one thing. What if Jessica Sloane with my social security number did die when she was three? She wasn’t erroneously classified as dead because she was really dead. Then I’ve been living with a mistaken social security number all this time, with a mistaken identity.
Is it possible that the other Jessica Sloane and I have social security numbers so close they’re off by only a single digit, or have two numbers that are interchanged? Maybe she died and someone unwittingly typed my social security number into the death database. The names matched, so they didn’t think twice. An oversight only.
Doubtful.
And then my mind gravitates to the man in the garden. Who is he, and what was he doing there? What does he want with me?
“Jessie?” I hear, and when I look up from the street, I see Liam making his way toward me. All dressed up in a black suit and tie. Looking undeniably sleek but also tired like me.
I rise from the curb and bridge the gap, and, as we close in on one another, his face darkens. “Your shirt,” he says as he points to it, to my shirt, and tells me that I’ve got it on inside out. Which wouldn’t be so obvious were it not for the label sitting smack-dab beneath my chin, a blaring thing. I pluck it from my skin for a better look.
Not only do I have my shirt on inside out, but it’s backward. And now that Liam has pointed it out for me, I feel the high neckline, the cotton taut in places it isn’t meant to be taut. In that moment I have no memory of ever grabbing the shirt from the closet, slipping it from its hanger, of ever putting it on.
It’s a blessing that I’m even dressed.
“Come inside,” he says, his eyes hanging on a little longer than they ordinarily would. “You can fix it there.”
But I say, “No,” shooing him off, feeling suddenly asinine. “It’s just a stupid shirt anyway; it’s not like anyone noticed.” And then I sigh, feeling completely exasperated. Exasperated and exhausted. He hears it in my voice.
