“I have?” She looks up, genuinely asking, and then her finger runs along her throat, where she has allowed me to reapply the bandage. “I guess I have.”
Mental pictures in strobe-light flash: Two girls, crazy with fear. Tan sandals slipping on leaves. Heavy footsteps crashing through the woods behind them. Nico, facedown, blood flooding from her neck. I blink, clear my throat. Talk very, very slowly. “Your mind is processing trauma. It’s hard. The thing is, though, we’re in a tough spot, so to speak, just in terms of time.”
She nods some more, her small head nervously bobbling up and down, her hands twitching in her lap. “Actually,” she says softly. “Can I—you said, about time …” She peeks up at me, and then down. “How much longer?”
“Oh,” I say. “Sure.” She doesn’t know how long she was unconscious. She doesn’t know. “It’s Monday morning, October 1,” I tell her. “There are two more days.”
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She licks her dry lips nervously, pushes one stray lock of black hair behind one small ear, a simple gesture redolent of who she is, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, a kid who got lost in something terrible and strange.
“So I’m really …” I smile one more time, try to make the smile look human. “I’m really wanting to figure out what happened.”
“But I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember. It’s all like this—I don’t know.” Glances up at me, scared, touches the thick gauze on her neck. “It’s all black.”
“Not everything, though, right?”
She shakes her head, barely, a tiny motion.
“Not your whole life?”
“No,” she manages, glancing up. “Not my whole life.”
“Okay, then. So we’ll start with what you do remember, okay?”
“Okay,” she whispers.
It’s not okay. It’s really not. What I want to do and what I would do if it would work is lift her and shake her by the feet until the facts come flying out like coins from her pockets. But this is how the process works. It works slowly. It’s impossible to tell at this point what portion of her not remembering stems from literal amnesia, what portion from the atavistic fear of reliving whatever horrors she has encountered. The necessary tactic in either case is bound to be patience, small steady movement through the fog, toward the truth. You build trust: Here are the things we both know. Here are the things we are going to talk about. You coach. You coax. It can be hours. Days.
I slip through the bars onto her side of the room and place my coffee cup carefully on the floor and take a knee like I’m going to propose.
“You had this bracelet in your pocket, with the charms,” I say. “The lilies. So that’s why we called you Lily.” She lifts it hesitantly from my hand and then presses it in her palm, folds her fingers around it tightly.
“My parents gave it to me.”
“A-ha.”
“When I was little.”
“Gotcha. Nice. But, so—what is your name?”
She says something, in the back of her throat, too soft for me to hear.
“I’m sorry?”
“Tapestry.”
“Tapestry?”
She nods. Sniffs a little, wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. I feel a dim glow of knowledge in the darkness between us, the first teardrop bulb glowing on in a string of Christmas lights.
“And is Tapestry a nickname?” I say. “A code name?”
“Yeah.” She looks up and gives a watery smile. “Both, sort of. We all have them.”
“A-ha.”
They all have them. Tapestry. Tick. Astronaut. Does Jordan have one of these nickname/code names, I wonder? Does Abigail? Tapestry’s black eye, I notice, is at the bare beginnings of the healing process, fading from dark purple to a soft bruised pink. She is—what? Nineteen? Twenty maybe. She’s like a hummingbird, this girl. She sort of reminds me of a hummingbird.
“Did Astronaut assign you the code names? Astronaut is—”
The end of the question is “the leader, right?” but before I can get there she inhales sharply and her eyelids drop shut like window blinds.
“Whoa,” I say, standing up. I take a half step forward. “Hello?”
She sits in her silence. I can see, or imagine that I can see, her eyes moving behind the lids, like dancers behind a curtain. Slow, Detective, slower. Build trust. Have a conversation. This is all covered extensively in the literature. In the FBI’s standard witness-engagement guidelines; in Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation. I can picture the books on the shelf in my house, the neat line of their spines. My house, in Concord, that burned down. Suddenly, from down the hall, there is a determined thirty-second burst of jackhammering, ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk, ka-da-thunk, followed by a loud backfire, and then Cortez’s exasperated hollering. “Oh, fucker! Fuck me sideways! Fuck!” and the girl looks up, surprised, and bursts out laughing, and I grab the moment, giggle also, lean in, shake my head with amusement.