Today's Reading
I have tried to consult my notes whenever I can, in the hope that what follows here is as accurate an account of these unusual events as is possible. I shall refer to this patient as Jane O. in these pages, in order to protect her privacy, but her full name does appear in my notes.
When I think of Jane as she seemed on that first day, an odd image comes to me: a pine tree growing alone on a great, wide plain.
As I would later tell the detective, I didn't think I would see Jane O. again.
CHAPTER TWO
Three days later, I got a call from the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist. A woman had been brought to the hospital by ambulance after a maintenance worker found her early that morning— unconscious on a field in Prospect Park.
The woman had no wallet with her, and no identification. No keys. No phone.
Upon waking, the patient could not recall how she had come to be in the park, or, initially, where she lived. She was severely dehydrated, but she was otherwise uninjured.
By the time she arrived at the emergency room, her confusion had begun to clear. Her name, she said, was Jane.
And— to my great surprise— she gave my name, Dr. Henry Byrd, as her doctor.
Photographs taken on that day, after she was found in the park, as part of the hospital's initial examination, show a woman with sunburned cheeks and chapped lips and with tiny bits of leaves clinging to the curls of her hair. But most striking— to me, at least— is the expression on her face: a look of being caught off guard.
When I first saw those pictures, months later, it was hard to reconcile the woman in the photographs with the woman I had by then come to know. In my presence, Jane always radiated a sense of neatness and control, an obsession, almost, with exactitude. I guess I should not have been surprised that I could not detect her usual precision in those hospital pictures— and yet, even now, that is my feeling: surprise.
By the time I arrived at the hospital that first morning, Jane had pulled her hair back and washed her face. She was quiet in a green hospital gown. A paper cup of orange juice was resting between her hands. The only obvious evidence of where she had spent the previous night was the dark dirt beneath her fingernails.
"I'm so sorry to bother you," she said when she saw me. Her face looked grim with worry.
"Don't be," I said. "This is what I do."
But the situation was actually somewhat unusual for me and was made possible only by the babysitter who sometimes watches my daughter on Saturday afternoons. I wanted to reassure Jane, though. I wanted to put her at ease, and to make her feel that this visit involved no inconvenience to me at all. This kind of deception is not uncommon in the practice of psychiatry, as in life.
Jane didn't mention our earlier brief appointment, but the memory of it— and her abrupt departure— hung in the air between us.
Although she had now regained her lucidity, she still could not explain how she had come to be lying facedown in the park that morning.
"The last thing I remember," she said, "is filling my teakettle with water."
This was her habit, she said, to make a cup of tea right after dropping her infant son at his daycare, which was four blocks from her apartment.
But that was Friday morning. Now it was Saturday afternoon.
Jane could not account for the roughly twenty-five hours that had passed between the moment she finished filling the teakettle and the one when she was discovered in the park.
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