Identity (Eyes Wide Open)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 Ted Dekker
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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MY HEART sounds like a monster with clobber feet, running straight toward me. It’s pitch dark. I’m lying on my back, soaked with sweat from the hair on my head to the soles of my feet. I’m lying perfectly still, but my hands and knees won’t stop shaking.
I’m in my grave, and I know I’m going to die here.
It’s only about eighteen inches high, and my forehead is bruised from hitting it more than once. I can feel both sides with my hands if I reach out. Just longer than me, maybe by a foot. I’m claustrophobic. Very claustrophobic.
I saw the coffins. I saw them, and now I’m in one, buried under tons of concrete. It’s all I can think, over and over, and I can’t stop thinking it.
Breathe. Just Breathe, Christy. Close your eyes and breathe
.
It’s not like this. It can’t be like this. It’s all a mistake. I have to calm down or I’m going to have a heart attack. It’s all a mistake. They’ll find me. This is Boston, not Africa. People in Boston don’t die like this. People don’t die like this
anywhere
in America. It’s all a mistake.
This
isn’t
my grave.
I close my eyes and try to slow my breathing. Try to think different thoughts—not the old ones that keep shoving me under tons of smothering earth. Good thoughts, like the fact that I’m still alive. Like the fact that my imagination has always been my biggest enemy.
Like the fact that it’s all a mistake.
But that’s not true, is it? My whole
life
is a mistake—one tragic error after another, and this one’s going to be my last.
I’m in a grave, and I’m going to die.
My heart sounds like a monster with clobber feet, running straight toward me. It’s pitch dark. I’m lying on my back, soaked with sweat from the hair on my head to the soles of my feet. I’m lying perfectly still with my eyes closed, trying to think new thoughts, but my hands and knees won’t stop shaking.
How did this happen to me?
—
IT ALL began with a little heart-shaped silver locket, the kind that typically holds a small picture of a smiling boyfriend or a perfectly framed family at their best, frozen in time on photo-reactive paper to be forever cherished.
Christy Snow’s locket held no such image because she had neither a boyfriend nor a perfect family. No family at all, in fact. No mother, no father of her knowing. She was an orphan, age seventeen, disturbingly in the dark about her entire existence prior to age thirteen, when she entered the orphanage.
The picture in her locket was the same black-and-white placeholder that had come with the necklace when she bought it for $19.99 at the Target on Steel Street two years earlier—a constant reminder worn near her heart, a promise that she would one day at least know who her real mother and father were. Maybe even recover her childhood. How could she love herself if she didn’t even know who she was?
It wouldn’t be beyond a psychiatrist to suggest that the silver piece had become her identity. As such, she was lost in the deeply held fear that she didn’t belong. Not to a family, not to a man, not to a friend, not even to herself.
Christy, like the image in her locket, was only a shadow, living as a fraud. Although she did her best to pretend that she was happy with her life, she secretly hated herself for being forgotten by family, by anyone who might have said she belonged or had value.
She took the necklace off only when she went to bed because she tended to toss and turn in fitful nightmares of being thrown away as a child. Twice, she had broken the chain in her sleep. But last night, when she’d reached for the necklace around her neck, it was gone.
A thorough, frantic search of her studio flat had turned up no sign of the locket. She remembered glancing at it before heading out to meet Austin late in the afternoon. The chain must have broken somewhere along the route they’d taken to the old storage room, or in the storage room itself. She would retrace her steps as soon as she woke.
The sun was already well up when Christy woke at nine—no reason to get up any earlier. She’d graduated from high school six months ago and was still trying to figure out what to do with her life. The trust fund had kicked in when she turned seventeen, so getting a job wasn’t critical. Two thousand dollars a month wasn’t exactly pay dirt, but the anonymous account turned over to her by the orphanage she’d entered when she was thirteen was enough to buy her time.
She decided to walk the three miles to the hospital in case she’d lost the locket on the street somewhere. She pulled on a pair of jeans, slipped into a red blouse, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and forgave herself for avoiding any makeup before heading out.
No one to impress; she was searching for her locket, not a man.
Truth be told, she wasn’t interested in men if the ones she’d known were representative of the entire species.
Despite an ugly overcast sky, the day was already uncomfortably hot by the time she reached the south end of Saint Matthew’s Hospital. She wasn’t in the best shape, maybe even fat if ten pounds too much was the rule of men. And it was; so, yes, she was plain fat and she secretly hated every one of those ten pounds. She was sweating now because of them.
But she wasn’t there to be seen by anyone, or to be judged and found lacking. She was there to find her locket.
The south end of the building was called the old hospital. It was made of red brick and adjoined the much larger new construction. One block north, the streets and landscaping looked pristine, but approaching from the west as Christy was, no one would guess they were approaching a hospital.
Quincy Street was home to several shops—everything from antique stores to Bill’s Round Bar at one end. A dirty yellow taxicab rolled past on dirty asphalt, followed by an ambulance. The street was otherwise vacant, except for an old bum slouched on a bench under a picture window just ahead.
Someone had dropped sections of the morning paper along the sidewalk without bothering to use the trash bin on the corner. If her locket had fallen off here, some vagrant had surely found it and taken it to the pawnshop for a few dollars.
The world was ill, she thought. Building a hospital in the middle of that sickness didn’t change all the suffering. If anything, the building was only a sad reminder of the fate that awaited every last soul helplessly born into such a cruel world.
A wave of emptiness washed through her chest as she passed the man on the bench. He wasn’t dead yet, but he’d given up on life, and isn’t that what inevitably awaited everyone?
She wasn’t any different from him, not really.
Christy turned into the alleyway that ran between the old hospital and the shops. No sign of her locket. She kept her eyes down, searching for any flash of silver on the ground around the base of the four large green dumpsters that hugged the wall to her right.
Nothing.
The door to the hospital’s storage room was made of metal, covered by mottled gray paint, dented in several places as if someone had taken a bat or hammer to it.
Two years earlier, during a discussion with a doctor about how medical equipment had advanced so rapidly, Austin had learned about the old artifacts all but forgotten in the storage room. Curious, he’d broken in and found a haunting space that became a bit of an obsession for a few months. Its secrets still drew him from time to time.
Christy angled for the door. Austin had gone to the trouble of jimmying the lock so it could be opened with a key of sorts, which he hid in a crack between two bricks.
Picking up a splinter of wood, she pried the ‘key’ out of the crack, then walked up to the door, glancing left and then right to make sure she was alone.
She inserted the thin metal piece into the keyhole and wiggled it until the lock sprang. With one last glance both ways, Christy opened the door, slipped through, and shut herself inside.
She found the switch and flipped it up. The single incandescent bulb strung from the ceiling filled the room with passable light.
For a few moments, Christy stood still, taking in the silence, aware that she’d just broken some law likely punishable by time in a jail cell.
The thought fell away as she scanned the room. Twenty feet wide by ten deep, Austin had said, and he was dead accurate about such things. Two wooden wheelchairs, some rusted IV stands, dirty bottles, and some wheeled trays in the corner to her left. A bookcase filled with old medical books stood along the wall beside them, spines wiped of dust. Austin had scanned most of them. He stuffed his mind with more information than most people could read in five lifetimes.