stolen moments ...Part 2 of 2

We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.
― Criss Jami

a girl who claims to be from the 1940's awaits me in the hospital psych ward while I try to celebrate an anniversary dinner with my wife. It's unsettling to say the least.

Ironically, my dinner reservation is in the same Restaurant & Bar where Amber insisted she's employed--but way back in 1945. It's crazy and unlikely--but I can't shake the fact that her story seems so damn credible because I can't detect any pathology in her at all.

Usually, I avoid discussing patients with Tara, especially over an anniversary dinner, but the surroundings inspire me to share Amber’s story.

Tara is fascinated. “Surely, the details would be easy enough to check—what about missing persons reports? Maybe the poor girl’s an amnesiac.”

I sip from my glass of Yellow Tail. “I was thinking the same thing. It should be a relatively straightforward matter of finding out who she is—but treating her is going to be the tricky part.”

Just as we we're preparing to leave the restaurant, my cell goes off. The hospital needs me.

I drop Tara off at home, promising to get back as soon as I can, and head for the Mental Health Facility. When I arrive at the ward, there's pandemonium. Karen Olmstead, the head nurse, is having a meltdown of her own.

It seems Karen did a bed check just before going off duty. Usually, she’d do a count first, and then check off each name on her list just to be sure.

Her initial head count came out to twenty-nine—one patient short. She did the more detailed checklist and discovered Amber Taylor was missing.

Security was alerted and the closed circuit video cameras checked—they indicated Amber did not exit the facility. A thorough search of every closet, bathroom and storeroom was conducted, but to no avail. The girl seemed to have vanished into thin air.

“Do you have cameras in the patients’ rooms?” I ask.

Karen is indignant. “Oh no, Doctor Wallace—the privacy act won’t allow that—all the cameras are in the common areas and the doors are electronic and require pass cards.”

“I still want to see all the video footage,” I insist.

I sit down with Mike Edwards, the head of our security and we scan through the video recordings—they're time and date stamped and show absolutely nothing.

I get an idea. I walk out into the common area and check for camera angles and blind spots. There are a few dead zones located in corners or windowless areas—but there's no way that Amber could escape that way, unless she blasted her way out.

I'm baffled. I examine the window in her room, but it only opens a crack—hardly wide enough to get a hand through. I stand in the doorway and scan the room—nothing. I turn around and scan the common area outside and look up and see the camera. Then it hits me.

I rerun the video playback. On the video, Amber's door is slightly ajar. I ask Mike if he can enhance the image and zoom in. He does it, and we run the tape in slow motion.

We can make out the dim outline of Amber’s sleeping torso, her back toward the door. At precisely, eleven fifteen, her sleeping form seems to fade into nothingness—her disappearance unmistakably captured on camera.

I have no explanation for what happened to Amber Taylor. We found her picture in The Tide, the 1945 edition of the South Coast High School Yearbook. There could be no doubt—it was her all right—younger, but same smile, same innocent look.

The police located a cousin living in Pennsylvania that reported Amber died of cancer in 2009. Those were the bare facts of the case.

Today, I’m sitting in my office looking at a file and a police admit report on a woman who died in 2009, but was admitted to our facility in 2017, suffering from bipolar disorder. I also have my own personal handwritten notes.

It’s absolutely impossible for Amber Taylor to have been a patient in this facility. She was dead. Then, I smile to myself—I'm forgetting my own observation—even reasonableness in a psych ward becomes transmuted into something else.

There is no reasonable explanation for the case of Amber Taylor—but then, there are no rules when it comes to exploring the psyche and one patient is totally unlike another.

© 2017, John J Geddes. All rights reserved.

Photo: https://goo.gl/images/6yNjEe