The Woman in the Hospital Photo Was Me · Mira Lang

Chapter 1: Page One Fourteen

The folder came in on a Monday morning in a green Trapper Keeper with a rubber band around it, and I want to say up front that I opened it because opening things is my job.

I'm the office manager at Renfro & Ivers on Culvert Street, which sounds like more than it is. There are two attorneys. There's me. There's Yoli, who does the books on Tuesdays and Thursdays and brings her own creamer because she doesn't trust ours. My job is the phones, the calendar, the trust account, the coffee, and the scanning, and the scanning is most of it. Everything that comes through that door gets scanned, stamped, numbered, and put in the file, and I have done it for eight years on a Fujitsu that eats page three of everything no matter what I do to it.

Lorna Dolan came in at ten past nine and sat in the chair by the fern with the folder on her knees like it was a casserole she was afraid to set down.

She's fifty-one. She works the counter at the laundromat out on 41, the one with the change machine that gives you two dollars in quarters and then thinks about it. Her daughter Shay is twenty-seven and has been gone since Tuesday the twelfth, and Lorna had already been to the police three times, and the third time a detective told her they were doing everything they could, which is a sentence that means the opposite of itself.

She had five hundred dollars in an envelope. I know because I counted it into the receipt book, and I counted it twice, which is a thing I do.

Hollis came out and sat with her for forty minutes with the door open. Hollis Renfro is sixty-one and wears bolo ties without irony and takes clients other people have already sent away, and he did not once tell her he could find her daughter. He said he could make phone calls that get returned. He said the county has to write things down when a lawyer asks, and that writing things down is the whole game.

Then he brought me the Trapper Keeper and said, "Scan it. All of it. Don't sort it."

"How many pages?"

"However many there are," he said. "It's not our file, Margo. We're just holding it."

* * *

Here is what a mother's folder looks like when her daughter is missing.

There were flyers, forty of them, with a photo of Shay at somebody's wedding, cropped so you can see half of another person's shoulder. There were printouts of text messages, photographed off a phone screen at an angle, with Lorna's thumb in the corner of nine of them. There was a list, in block capitals, of everybody who had ever dated Shay, with phone numbers, and a note next to one that said WORKS NIGHTS AT THE CASE FARM. There were pay stubs from Rivertown Home Care. There was a receipt from a gas station in Ferris, circled twice, though I couldn't tell you what she thought it proved.

And there were photocopies of things Lorna should not have had, which she got the way mothers get things, by sitting in a lobby until somebody handed her something to make her go home.

I scanned all of it. Feed the tray, watch for the jam, hit rescan on page three. I stamped as I went. It's a numbering system, Bates numbers, which is just a counter that puts a little tag in the corner of every page so that later, when everybody is arguing, you can say page one fourteen and mean the same page.

I got to page one fourteen at eleven twenty in the morning with a cold coffee at my elbow.

It was a photocopy of a photocopy. Grainy the way a fax is grainy. Across the top somebody had written, in a hand that wasn't Lorna's, MCG EAST ENT — 09/12 — 2135-2150, and along the bottom edge the camera's own strip: 09-12 21:41:07.

Merrick County General. The east entrance, under the canopy, where the doors are and where you can smoke twenty feet out if you don't mind the ashtray that never gets emptied. I know that entrance. Everybody in this town knows that entrance. Owen has a service contract on the old wing.

The frame was shot from up and to the left, so you get the top of a person's head and their shoulders and the ground, which is the angle every camera in America is set at. There were three people in it. A man in scrubs walking out with his phone up. A woman at the far right, mostly gone out of frame, pushing an empty wheelchair.

And a woman standing just inside the doorway, half turned, one hand on the strap of a bag.

She was wearing a gray wool coat with a notched collar and a belt she hadn't tied, so the belt hung down on both sides. Her hair was to the jaw, blunt, the kind of cut you get when you tell them just take it off. She was standing the way I stand, which is with my weight on my right leg and my left knee soft, because I tore the meniscus falling on a wet ramp in 2012 and my body has organized itself around it ever since without asking me.

I looked at that page for a long time. I want to describe it accurately, because I have gone over it a lot since, and I'd like to be able to say I gasped or dropped something. I didn't. What happened was that my ears got hot, and I looked at the picture, and I thought: huh, that's me.

Not as a discovery. As a caption. The way you'd think it flipping through somebody's phone.

Underneath the frame, in Lorna Dolan's block capitals, somebody had copied out a line from a visitor log:

2139 — DYER, MARGARET A — NO PT ASSOC

Which is my name. Margaret Ann Dyer. The A is for Ann, after my grandmother, who hated it.

No pt assoc means no patient association. It means somebody signed in to visit and there was nobody to visit.

* * *

The scanner finished the sheet and pulled the next one and I let it.

I did not stand up. I want to be honest about the next part, because I have replayed it and I don't come out of it well. My first thought was not what is this. My first thought was nobody can see my screen from the hallway, and I checked, and they can't, because I set the desk up that way in 2019 so people at the counter can't read our clients' business.

My second thought was about the coat.

I bought that coat at Kohl's in November of 2023 for sixty-one dollars with a forty percent off card that Yoli gave me because she gets them in the mail and never uses them. It is not a rare coat. There are ten thousand of that coat in Indiana. That's what I told myself, and it was true, and it is still true.

My third thought was that Tuesday the twelfth was six days ago and I know exactly where I was, because I am thirty-six years old and I have a life the size of a shoebox.

Tuesday I got home at five twenty. I put the chicken in at six. Owen was on a call in Attica until nine-something because a church's rooftop unit died and churches never die on weekdays. I ate at the counter. I did two loads and the dryer wouldn't start, and our dryer doesn't start on the first push, you have to hit it, wait, hit it again, and I hit it and waited and hit it. I watched two episodes of a show about people buying houses in Portugal. I went to bed at ten and read four pages.

I did not leave my house on Tuesday. That is not a memory I have to reach for. That's a Tuesday.

So the picture was of somebody else, and the name in the log was a coincidence, or a mistake, or a person with my name, and there are probably nine Margaret Dyers in this state.

I said all that to myself in about eleven seconds, in a chair with one wheel that catches.

And then I picked up my phone and took a picture of the screen.

I knew while I was doing it that I shouldn't. It's a client's folder. It's not our file. I have signed a confidentiality acknowledgment that is in a binder eleven feet from where I sat, and I could recite most of it. I did it anyway, and I put my phone face down in my drawer, and I went and made a new pot of coffee, and when Hollis came out at noon and said, "How far'd you get," I said, "One sixty. There's a lot of duplicates."

"There always is," he said. "Bless her."

* * *

I got home at five thirty. Owen's van was in the driveway with the back doors open and he was pulling a coil of line set out of the rack, and he said the thing he says, which is "Hey, you," without looking up, and I said "Hey," and went in through the side.

Our house is a story and a half on Delph. When you come in the side door you are in a little hallway with a bench and four hooks, and on the four hooks there is Owen's Carhartt, and a hoodie that belongs to nobody, and a tote bag, and my coat.

Gray wool. Notched collar. Belt hanging down on both sides, because I never tie it, because who ties them.

I stood in the hallway with my keys in my hand and I counted the hooks, which is a thing I do, one two three four, and then I did the thing I do after that, which is tell myself I'm being ridiculous, and I took my phone out of my bag and opened the photo and made it bigger with two fingers.

The woman in the doorway was wearing my coat.

Not a coat like it. I know that's the same sentence. But I put the phone up next to the hook and I looked, and the belt on hers hung down the same way, uneven, the left one lower, because the left loop on mine tore out the first winter and the belt slides.