Mistaken Identity
By Paul Alan Fahey
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Copyright 2013 Paul Alan Fahey
ISBN 9781611529098
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
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Mistaken Identity
By Paul Alan Fahey
Late at night, the wind blows west from the Santa Lucias, shaking windows and rattling doors, then sweeps across the arroyo to the edge of the mesa. Sometimes, the dry, hot air lingers in town, roams Main Street, and sails over the three-story Victorian with the rounded glass turret and white picket fence. Near a moonlit grove, the wind picks up the scent of eucalyptus mixed with pine and pauses by a garden in front of a white stucco house. Inside the cottage, which is the last one on the road leading out of town, a woman stands by a window watching the fog drift over the bluff to the sea.
One hundred eighty miles south, a hospital languishes in the Santa Monica hills, a cement building with an iron gate and a twisting drive. From her bed, a woman with no name stares at her reflection in the window. She is a victim of senseless brutality and has no memory of her life before the assault. The woman listens to the doctors talk about her as if she isn’t there. Without an identity, maybe she isn’t.
* * * *
Diane
Miguel, the evening orderly, arrives with my medication. I take the pills he offers and wash them down with a few sips of juice. My gaze is riveted to the TV, a film from the early 1940s, the mystery Laura.
Later, in a dream, the movie unspools in my mind. It isn’t the film script, but a different version of Laura with my own personal spin and point of view. I become the murder victim. Her name is Diane Redfern. I wake when I hear the doorbell. I turn on the bedside lamp and put on Laura’s robe and slippers. The apartment is dark, but I know the way as I often stay over when Laura’s out of town. Laura, who understands me, who knows the difficulty of making ends meet, especially for a young model new to the business. She offers me the key to her apartment, and I become her friend. Her good friend.
Not thinking to check the peephole, I open the door.
I see a shotgun muzzle, hear a sudden blast.
I reel backward into the darkness, my face no longer recognizable. It is an act of senseless violence and mistaken identity. The killer thought I was Laura.
I open my eyes. Diane Redfern. I repeat the name aloud. I feel empathy for the celluloid Diane who, like me, was left alone to die. I like the name. It’s mine now. I’ll tell Dr. Macias tomorrow. It’ll make her day. Anything’s better than Jane Doe, or ma’am, as they call me around here.
Macias says I’m smart, that I remember dates, places, literature, and art. She knows this from all the tests they’ve given me. “What is this picture? What’s twelve times twelve divided by two? Who was JFK?” I ask her, if I’m smart, why can’t I remember my own name, my past life? She smiles but doesn’t answer. Psychiatrists do that, I’ve learned.
The next morning, I pad in bare feet to the bathroom I share with another patient, Selma. I don’t know Selma’s last name. They don’t allow last names here. I can tell Selma’s recently taken a shower since the glass is misted over. I pick up a damp towel thrown over the tub and run it across the mirror in sections, top to bottom. I’m fifty-ish—so they tell me—with a round face, short-cropped hair, and blue eyes. I turn sideways and notice the beginning of jowls. I move my head up and down, work my jaw, try to make the bags of fat under my neck disappear. Newsflash: They don’t.
Later, near the end of my therapy session, I stop pressuring myself to remember and decide to give Macias what she wants. Poor thing, she’s tried for weeks to restore my memory and failed miserably. I guess I feel sorry for her.
The doctor clasps her hands, drops them in her lap, and leans forward. “You’ve got to do better, Diane.” Macias loves my new name. I thought she would. “Don’t you want to get well?”
“Of course I do.” I hope I sound sincere.
“Then try a little harder. You have to trust me.”
Selma failed the trust test. We were sitting in the solarium one day, having a cup of coffee, and she opened up, told me about her surgery, the double mastectomy, and the middle-aged technician with the stringy blond hair who took her blood. Selma watched the woman pump red fluid from her veins and listened to her go on about the hopelessness of her situation. “They always drop some cells, Selma,” she said, “no matter how small. Microscopic traces that continue to grow. Nothing you can do about it.”
Selma became my friend, and I trusted her until the morning I opened the bathroom door and saw her sitting naked on the john, applying a foamy cream to her sagging breasts, rubbing it over them, unaware of my presence. I think trust doesn’t mean much to me anymore.
So today I give Macias what she wants. I look up at the painting, the one hanging on the wall behind her, the one she said she bought on a trip north to Santa Maria. I study the brown mountains Macias calls the Santa Lucias and the mesa below, something you’d expect to see in New Mexico or Arizona but not in California. I learned all this from Macias, who seems to know everything.
Like the detective in Laura, I dive into the painting and begin my daydream. “I see a windswept plain dotted with oak trees. High, sandy mountains rise above a dry riverbed. An arroyo, I think it’s called.”
“Yes, this is a good start.”
I continue on. “There’s a white stucco house with a red tile roof, kind of Spanish-looking. A woman is working in a garden.” I pause here for effect. “No, she’s not in her garden. She’s inside the small cottage watching me from a window.”
Macias gives me a smile of beautiful white-capped teeth, then a nod of approval. “Go on.”
“I think it could be my mother or maybe a sister.” I take a deep breath and smile triumphantly. Macias might remember the painting when she goes over her notes, but for now I’m safe from the endless questions.
“Wonderful! I think we’ve had a breakthrough.” Macias looks at her watch. “Same time tomorrow?”
At least one of us is happy.
On my last day at the hospital, I stroll to the solarium. On the road below, a bus rounds a bend, and people with maps and cameras angle for the best photos. I think only in Southern California could a mental hospital or a cemetery be a tourist attraction. Not much difference between the two that I can see. I pour myself a cup of coffee from an urn set out for visitors. I check my mood, a little exercise Macias has taught me, and decide I feel like someone who’s just seen the Prize Patrol stop at her driveway, note the address, and accelerate on down the street.
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I sit in my usual spot, a comfortable, rattan chair opposite a flowery painting. A few ferns and a creeping Charlie dangle from pots on either side of a large bay window. A neglected palm dies quietly in a corner. I walk over to the tree, run my fingers over a brown-edged frond, and snap it off, then drop it into a pink plastic wastebasket. It’s the dead weight that kills you. It has to go.
Macias is late this morning, and I wonder what’s keeping her? Would she miss me if I split?
* * * *
Dr. Macias’ Log
I was surprised the patient—current name Diane—left without seeing me, without being formally discharged. I’d been detained on the ward, but this often happened and she knew to wait. It wasn’t like I’d forgotten her. It’s upsetting because we’ve invested so much staff time and hospital resources in her care over the past weeks.
I really thought we were making progress. I asked Nurse Wiggins, and she said she’d looked in on Diane earlier this morning and heard her showering through the closed bathroom door. Wiggins reported her clothes were neatly laid out on the bed, things she planned on wearing when she was released this morning to the group home in town. Something must have happened. I wouldn’t have predicted she’d walk out before our last therapy session.
We had a breakthrough the other day. The patient initially resisted my efforts, but I think lately she was trying harder, beginning to remember. I can only hope she’ll return.
* * * *
Diane
I find myself outside, carrying a white plastic bag and walking a crowded street without any idea how I got here. I stop, look inside the bag, and find most of my clothes. Blouses, skirts, two cotton dresses, a sweater, some socks, and underwear, all donations from a local benevolent society. I fish out my purse, then flip through the wallet. The hospital social worker gave me some cash, money they set aside for hardship cases like mine. Not much, just under two hundred bucks.
A dry wind warms my face and I visualize the painting in Macias’ office. I focus my thoughts and energy on a cloudless sky, the bluish-black outline of the Santa Lucias, a mesa dotted with pine and eucalyptus. For some odd reason, they trusted me to get to the group home on my own. “Just a few blocks,” Macias said. “It isn’t far.”
Forget it. I know where I’m headed.
A long train ride and several hours later, I’m walking past an orchard with rows of orange and lemon trees. I hear traffic sounds in the distance. On my left, a collapsing barn squats in a parched field. A windblown cypress leans toward a tired oak. A few cattle graze by a wire fence while the mountains tower above me.
I’ve already seen what passes for a town center: a barbershop with a hitching post and a faded striped pole, a hay and feed, a liquor store, an automotive repair shop, and a small white church across from a Victorian with a bed and breakfast sign out front.
I cup a hand over my eyes and follow the pot-holed road as it winds through a grove of eucalyptus, travels up a hill, then disappears. The only sign of life is a woman working in the garden of a white stucco house with a red tile roof.
I walk up to the gate and peer through the iron latticework. I study the woman inside, who wears jeans and a plaid shirt. She looks familiar. The blond hair, parted in the middle and pulled back in a bun, accentuates an oval face. I remember I’ve seen someone like her. Macias called it art therapy. “Look through this book,” she said. “Maybe it will jog your memory,” and so I flipped though the pages until I came upon a sour-faced woman standing by a man. He was holding a pitchfork.
The woman in the garden glances up at me, and I see she’s nothing like the spinster daughter in the painting. She has creamy skin with no lines or wrinkles, and she’s smiling. She appears younger than me, in her thirties or early forties, but I can’t be sure. Along with my memory, I’ve lost the ability to judge age.
* * * *
Hope
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude,” the woman says, then she turns away from my gate.
“Come back here a minute! Please.”
“It’s just your garden,” she says.
“What about it?”
“It’s lovely. Prettiest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”
I get up and brush some dirt from my jeans. “You gotta be kidding, honey. It’s nothing but an overgrown jungle.”
I hear the grandfather clock in the hall strike the hour, and Grover begins his routine, the barking and running, the sound of his toenails scratching the hardwood floor. “He’s disabled,” I tell her. “Noise sensitive.”
Just then a blur of brown and white, one ear up, one down, leaps from the porch, and before I can warn the woman, she sticks her hand inside and pets him. I’ll be darned if he doesn’t spread his teeth in a big grin. “Some watchdog, my baby.”
This lady bends down, stares into Grover’s eyes, then tells him the old cliché about barks being worse than bites, and, of course, he’s a goner.
“Speaking of jungles and wild animals,” I say, “meet Grover. He’s pretty harmless, but you’ve guessed that. Wouldn’t know what to do with an intruder if he caught one.” I look down at the white bag she’s dropped at her feet. “Lady, where’d you come from?”
She says she’s from L.A. and looking for a place to stay. I tell her good luck. “Not much in hotels around here. Why not stop a while, have a cup of tea?”
“Yes, I’d like that.” She tells me about a Victorian bed and breakfast she passed up the road, near the church. We don’t have anything as quaint as a B & B and nothing you’d label Victorian, but I let it slide. She must have a good ten years on me, and given the weather, I think maybe she’s had too much sun. I say it’s pretty hot for early spring, and she just stares at me with a kind of bewildered look that makes me a little uncomfortable when my words, “I’m Hope,” just lay in the languid air between us. I open the gate and offer my hand. “Last name’s Diamond. Parents had a sense of humor.”
“Hope Diamond. Sounds like they had high expectations, too.” The woman laughs and shakes my hand. “I’m Diane. Diane Redfern.”
“Red Fern. Now there’s an unusual name. Nice and lush like a rain forest.” I motion for her to sit on the front stoop. “I’ve got a set of perfectly good lawn furniture stored in the garage, but we’ve had some windstorms lately, lots of dust and sand, so I just got tired of wiping everything off and put it all away.”
Diane sits on the porch step and strokes Grover’s fur. He glances up at her lovingly, then lays his head in her lap.
I tell her he’s a good little dog, though the running and barking get to me sometimes.
“But he’s not a threat to intruders,” she says, and I sense I’ve hurt her feelings.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I say what’s on my mind and usually get in trouble. Plenty of it.”
“There’s no place to stay in town,” she says, in a low, whispery kind of voice like she’s talking to herself, thinking out loud.
“No. Nothing for a good ten miles.” I point down the road toward the Bakersfield cutoff. “If I were you, I’d take a bus into Arroyo or Pismo. Lots of motels, some right off the freeway. But it’s too late for today. Last local left around three. I’d drive you, but my car’s in the shop, the one you passed in town.” I study the angle of the sun. “I’d say it’s after four.”
“You can do that?” she asks.
“Do what?”
“Tell time just by looking.”
“Yep. One of my hidden talents.” I pick up the pot, pour some tea, then feel the sides of her cup. “It’s cold. I’ll make some fresh. Stay put, honey. Just relax with your new pal.”
A few minutes later, I return and offer her a steaming cup and a platter of cookies. She inhales two gingersnaps and starts in on an oatmeal. “You must be starved.”
“Guess I am a little.”
“Didn’t you eat today?”
“I had a sandwich on the train from Los Angeles. It was a beautiful ride.??
?
Her growling stomach tells me different.
I can’t resist being a nosy busybody, so I jump right in. “Tell me, and I mean this kindly, what’s a woman your age doing walking around the mesa in the heat of the day?”
“I love it here, don’t you?”
I tell her I was born and raised in this climate and decide she’s a pretty good subject jumper. I try again. “What brings you here?”
“Oh, this and that, I suppose.”
I’m not about to let her off easy. “What this and what that?”
“It’s a long story. I’m making a change in my life. I’ve wanted to do it for some time, and here’s where I wound up.”
“I guess it’s never too late,” I say, and drop the interrogation. It’s none of my business, and she’s a stranger to me. I’m just making conversation, being polite, that’s all. Still, when I turn from her, suddenly distracted by the siren of an emergency vehicle on 101, I have this funny sensation I’ve imagined this woman, conjured her up from my dreams. How many days and nights have I waited for a new friend to come into my life, to walk down this road, and stop at my gate? Too many.
* * * *
Diane
Hope is nice and seems a decent sort, very down to earth. I can tell from the short time I’ve spent with her, but I need to be careful, watch what I say and do. This feeling of people talking behind my back is hard to shake. Someday, I’ll take control of my life like this woman has. I’ll own a home with a red tile roof, tend a garden, and play with a little dog of my own. But for now, I don’t want people to think I’m a loony who’s been locked up.
* * * *
Hope
I tell Diane she can stay the night. “Grover and I have plenty of room, don’t we, honey?” Then the clock strikes, and my little neurotic is off and running in tight circles around our feet, barking like a seal at a clambake.
Diane says she can’t stay. “I’ve just walked into your life. You don’t know me.”
I tell her I know what I know. “We’ve become shut-ins, Grover and me. Look at it this way, you’d be doing us a favor by being our company.” Then she gives me that dazed look again, and I figure this is Diane’s way of saying okay. Who knows? Maybe I’ve made a friend.
* * * *
Diane