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.
“Jessie,” he says, his voice far more resolute this time. “Come inside. Keep me company.”
We step inside the building and wait for the elevator to come. “Did you sleep last night?” he asks. I don’t say yes or no, but my silence gives it away. In my head, I tally the days up. I lose track at number four and have to start again, counting on my fingers this time, reaching seven.
It’s been seven days since I’ve slept.
“I looked it up,” Liam tells me as the elevator comes for us. Though it doesn’t align with the lobby floor—a fact that I realize all too late—and so I trip on the way in, stumbling over that one-inch rise. Liam latches on to my arm, steadying me. He doesn’t let go. Not until I draw my arm away, stepping closer to the wall so that I can use it for leverage if need be.
“Looked what up?” I ask as the elevator sweeps us up to the sixth floor. I feel suddenly rocky on my feet. Nauseous.
“The longest a person has ever gone without sleep,” Liam says.
He tells me how people die from lack of sleep. About lab rats who died from lack of sleep. “How long?” I ask.
“Eleven days,” he says. “Eleven, Jessie,” he repeats to drive the point home, I think. “You need to sleep.”
“I will,” I say, but chances are good that I won’t.
I ask how the funeral went because I don’t want to talk about my lack of sleep or the fact that in four more days I’m liable to die because of it. The funeral, he says, went as well as to be expected for a funeral. His shoulders shrug and his expression is flat. He doesn’t say more.
The elevator arrives at the sixth floor. He leads us to his apartment, walking a half step ahead of me. At the door, I stop a few feet back, waiting as he opens it. Inside, the space is big and roomy with ceilings that are extraordinarily high, track lighting, exposed brick. Sunlight pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. “You coming?” he asks.
I walk past him and into the apartment as behind me he closes the door.
He offers me something to drink. I say no because I have my Coke, which I uncap and take a swig of. But as I raise the bottle up to my lips, there’s that tremor to my hand again, the one I can’t make stop.
Liam tugs the tie from his neck and slips the suit jacket off. Throws it over the arm of a chair. Unbuttons his shirt. Rolls the cuffs of it to his elbows. Finds himself a water in the refrigerator and sinks into a low-slung chair. He never asks what I’m doing here.
I give the article to Liam, my hand still shaking as I do. I sit on a chair opposite him. I don’t bother fixing my shirt.
“What’s this?” he asks, but it’s one of those questions that isn’t really a question because already he’s reading the story of Jessica Sloane, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver at the age of three. When he comes to the end of it he tells me what I already know. He says that this is strange.
I assert, “I mean, it’s just a coincidence, right? A mistake?”
His face is impassive. He doesn’t say an emphatic yes as I’d hoped he would; he doesn’t put my mind at ease. This time, there are too many holes that don’t line up.
“I don’t know,” he admits, saying, “It’s just that it’s strange, Jessie. I mean, yesterday it was a coincidence. Yesterday it was a mistake. Yesterday someone screwed up. But now it’s like it isn’t so much an accident as it is someone intentionally trying to keep you off the radar. You have no birth certificate, you can’t find your social security card and the social security number you think is yours matches up with that of a dead girl. One who might just have the same name as you.”
The expression on his face says it all. Something sordid is going on here. Something bad.
“It’s just hard to believe that she’s not you,” he says while motioning to the photograph in the article, but when I look at the child’s face, I see nothing but a stranger looking back at me. I’ve never seen this girl before.
“But it’s not me,” I argue, voice trembling. “She doesn’t look a thing like me. Look at the shape of her eyes, her nose. It’s all different,” I allege, rising to my feet. “It’s all wrong.”
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, his voice gentle. “That’s not what I meant, Jessie. I just mean,” he says. “I just mean that I think it’s possible there’s something going on here, some sort of identity theft.”
“What do you mean, identity theft?” I ask, except I know what he means. What he’s suggesting is not that my identity has been stolen, but that I’ve stolen the identity of someone else—unpremeditated on my part, but still identity theft.
“Jessie,” he starts, but I shake my head and he stops.
At first there’s nothing but silence. I drop back down into my chair. I think it through. “You think my mother changed my name, gave me a phony identity and passed me off as a dead girl?” I ask, the words themselves unthinkable. Not something that could possibly be real. For a second I feel like I might vomit. The Coke gathers in my stomach, burning the lining of it. There’s hardly any food inside me, which, when coupled with everything else, doesn’t sit well. The pain starts somewhere around my navel and creeps up my chest. An agonizing lump that plunks itself behind the breastbone.