ELIZA
THE DRIVE HOME is a repeat of my flight from the Palm Springs hospital except I’m in better clothes and in my messy Toyota Rav4 instead of Bill’s Porsche. I can still smell Desmond’s body spray on me as though we’ve rolled together wildly, our skin touching in all kinds of places. I peel off one of his long, silky black hairs from my pants and whip it out the open window.
After a while, the scenery along I-10 becomes familiar. To avoid post-work traffic, I get off the freeway and turn onto a busy thoroughfare in Alhambra, passing by derelict strip malls and little shacks that sell porn on VHS. After a while, the neighborhood improves, and a hospital looms ahead. I see a familiar sight and lose my breath. Stunned, I cut across four lanes of traffic into a driveway. A neon sign looms above me.
M&F Chop House.
I park in a space, suddenly shaking. The steak house rises above me, brick and stucco and concrete and real. My vision starts to swirl. When I turn clockwise, there’s St. Mother Maria’s Hospital across the street. I must have seen this out the window or in an ad and used it for the book. It looks just as I described it in The Dots.
I push the door open and look around cautiously, as if I’m expecting sirens to go off at my presence. A chunky man with red blotches on his cheeks smiles at me vacantly, then ushers me through the dining room. “This table all right?” he asks. It’s in the middle of the space. A menu sits jauntily next to an unlit candle and a small potted succulent.
I nod and collapse into the chair. It seems like a normal steak house: wood-paneled bar, framed photographs of old newspaper articles, brass plaques bearing regulars’ names on the walls. The only problem is that I know every inch of the room astonishingly well. The place even smells like how I imagined it in The Dots: meaty, saucy, like red wine and money and sex. Perhaps because all steak houses are alike?
Sizzling plates swirl by. A baseball player cracks a hit on television, and the yuppie twenty-something bankers with their whiskeys cheer. I wrack my memory: perhaps I was here with Leonidas? Perhaps with Bill and my mother? And I must have driven out this way while researching the book. How else would I know there was a hospital named St. Mother Maria’s across the street? How would I know how many floors it had, or that there was a big parking structure right next to it that was taller than the hospital itself? This isn’t a neighborhood one takes pictures of or sees on the news. This isn’t a neighborhood featured in movies, iconic and quintessential. It’s a nothing sort of neighborhood, and yet I seem to know it by heart.
My phone buzzes, and I look down. It’s Desmond. I’m so sorry. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.
And then another text: I would never, ever harm you. Please understand that. You are the light of my LIFE.
And then another: If you don’t want me to contact you again, just say the word. But I shall mourn you until the end of my days.
Get over yourself, I finally respond. Then I turn my phone off. It’s probably cruel, and maybe I should forgive him, but it’s just too comforting to convert my shame into punishing wrath.
As I look around more, I’m surprised to see an unoccupied booth way in the back almost hidden from view. Something about it seems untended, maybe even condemned. I crane my neck. Could there be a secret door back there, too? I feel so loopy. How is it that this place is so vivid? How do I know all its nooks and crannies? Maybe I’m a better writer than I think. If my mother came in here, if she saw how well I’d captured this, maybe then she’d be impressed. Instead of saying, This is what you wrote? Instead of saying, Other people read it? Instead of saying, Do something, Bill.
Instead of saying, Get up. Please.
The last thought knocks over a set of dominoes. A latch gives way, opening a door. Get up. Get up. It’s a pealing bell in my brain. Concentric rings rippling in a pond. A voice telling me to count backward from ten. Maybe it’s the overwhelming smell of bloody meat, maybe it’s my aching, throbbing head, maybe it’s the eerie, dizzy awareness of fiction clashing with reality, but all at once I am standing on the pavement outside Leonidas’s father’s doctor’s office again, and I am smiling about Desmond, and then I am on the pavement, and for a split second before I fainted I looked up and saw what I needed to see. The image has only slid into place now. Get up. Please.
A face stands over me. The eyes are wide with confusion. The mouth is twitchy and concerned. A hand leans down to check my pulse, and then there’s a sigh of relief. The face moves away, and two hands rifle for my phone, and then tap the screen. A backing away, and then the person runs off, legs moving awkwardly. It’s the run of a non-athlete. The run of a middle-aged woman.
My mother.