ELIZA
MY CHEEK HITS the leather seat of Bill’s car. My wet hair snakes around me, soaking my neck; droplets plop onto my palm. Bill, wet too, tries to put the seat belt around my waist, but it’s awkward with the way I’m lying, so he gives up and leaves me unbuckled. I shut my eyes, awash in misery. I don’t want to be breathing. I don’t want to be alive. I wish Bill would have left me in that pool.
Sometime later, I see a slice of blue sky out the window, half of a tree. I hear Bill speaking to someone on the phone, but I can’t tell what he’s saying. I must doze off again, because the next thing I know I am slumped over in a wheelchair, and Bill is speaking to a triage nurse: “Do you think she’s suicidal?” And then, Bill: “Yes. She jumped into a pool, and she can’t swim.” “Let’s get her back there, get her checked out.” A hand on my arm. “Honey?” Hot breath, the smell of latex gloves. Hair tickles my earlobe. I try to look toward the sound of the voice, but my eyes won’t cooperate.
“She’s not moving,” comes the woman’s voice.
I am lifted under my arms and hefted onto a mattress; I roll to my side and curl in a ball. Around me: Beeps. Dings. Footsteps. Sighs.
“Hello?” I call, much later, raising my head. It is dark, and I am alone. I am seven years old again. I am wearing a charm bracelet of skeletons. I’ve just knocked over a plate full of chicken and carrots. I’m seeing double of everything. “Is anyone here?”
“I’m here.” A squeak of the chair. My gaze focuses, and it’s my mother standing above me. A blanket is pressed over my body. Her touch is warm on my forehead.
“Where am I?” I ask, my mouth cottony and my words slow. “Is my tumor back?”
She breathes out a small puff of air. “Oh, Eliza. It hasn’t been back for years.”
• • •
In some ways, The Oaks Wellness Center is worse than I imagined. The rooms are too cold and there are too few blankets—maybe the staff thinks the patients are going to knot them together and climb out the window, I’m not sure. For the first week, when I lie on my bed, curled up and feral, resistant to talk or medication or sleep or food, not a single staff member is nurturing.
“Up, you have to shower,” the nurses say gruffly. Or: “On the toilet, now. There you go.” Or: “If you don’t eat something, honey, we’re going to have to give you a feeding tube. Your choice.”
I try to argue with them that I just want to die, but apparently dying isn’t an option here. They have rough hands and slam the doors and speak loudly when I want quiet, and on day eight, when I start making tiny requests—for a drink, for a walk down the hall, to talk to someone—they sometimes forget what I’ve asked for. Desperate for water, I try my door to find it locked. I spend hours shut in my room, rocking on my coccyx bone, until finally a nurse sweeps in and rolls her eyes. “Get up.”
Or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, because when the fog starts to clear, the staff members are all quite pleasant.
The third week in, I start to mingle with other patients. If I want to be out and about, there is no way to avoid them: we eat meals together, watch TV together, and I’m even forced to go with some of them to Group. Some of them descend on me, leechlike, chattering about their stories, who they are, what landed them here. It surprises me how many people talk unapologetically. Peter says almost proudly that this is his third visit to the Oaks. Angela shows me self-inflicted burns up and down her arms. A girl younger than me whose name I can’t remember boasts that during her last breakdown, she smeared herself in shit. On the other hand, some of the patients seem completely normal, just sort of worn-out: like Jim and Pablo, who play chess in the corner. Like Felicity, who wears the silk bathrobe—she’d be so pretty with makeup on, and she’s always talking about her kids. Like Caroline, who knits and smiles at everyone and says that in a previous life she was really talented at baking cakes.
In some ways, though, the Oaks exceeds my expectations. I have my own room with no roommates—a terror at first, when I needed distraction from my screaming mind, but now it’s an incredible gift to escape from the others. There are a lot of channels on television and decent books on the shelves in the common rooms. The staff lets you spend a lot of time outside, tilting your head into the dry desert sun, thinking about nothing.
My therapist is a thickly muscled, goateed, African American man named Albert. He looks like he could asphyxiate anyone who came close by just sitting on their chest, which I appreciate. I need a big, strong man around me. I still can’t get Aunt Eleanor’s cackle next to me on that barstool—or that flash of her face in that mirror on Dr. Roxanne—out of my mind.
Albert is slowly unwinding my memories, explaining that I distanced myself from them as a form of self-protection—and because I was manipulated to forget. He shows me a picture of the man who tried to literally excise Eliza from my existence, and it’s Herman Lavinsky, flasher guy from the café with Posey. The Freak Show who wrote the pamphlet-book at my parents’ house. What the pamphlet didn’t mention was that aside from being a faith healer or some shit like that, Herman is also a neuroscientist, and he developed a few experimental psychopharmaceuticals he was trying out on people. He and his team of people hypnotized me—count backward from ten—put me into an MRI machine, asked me to spew forth my memories of killing Aunt Eleanor, and then carefully targeted this chemical he developed to turn off the memory gene. And then, poof! Memories gone.
I would have been better off with a trephine.
Of course, those weren’t the only things Herman tried. Along with whatever chemical he stabbed into my brain, he also used antiquated drugs like ether on me, and some weird Native American herbs. My central nervous system was put on ice. I had electrodes stuck to my head. Not that I remember this—Albert just reads it back from various papers and articles written about his process. Herman spent hours in my room every day—a room that wasn’t in UCLA at all but in a hospital all the way in the Mojave, where I guess they allowed him to do this nonsense, unexamined—cataloging all of my memories with Aunt Eleanor in them and rewriting them, one by one, so that Eleanor was no longer there. In the case of me having a brain tumor as a child, apparently that was too tainted with Eleanor to salvage, so it was wiped away completely. Why would someone want to remember a childhood brain tumor, anyway?
The problem, of course, is that my memories were too strong for Herman’s method, and they were screaming to get out—hence The Dots, and hence various pieces clawing through at importune moments, though I’d tricked myself into thinking I’d had the brain tumor I thought was present last year but that had only existed when I was a little girl. Albert hasn’t yet read my book, so I have to try and explain my story to him all by myself. Much of it is still foggy to me; I can’t figure out where Dot ends and I begin. Part of me still denies any of it happened to me. Another part thinks some of it happened, but in a very different way.
“Really, your family shouldn’t have tried to hypnotize your memories out of you,” Albert says. “It doesn’t exactly work that way. It’s much better to work through your memories. Try and make sense of them. Try to see their significance, and try to decide what you believe. This business of erasing them? Well, it leads to a lot of messiness later on.”
Messy as in losing one’s mind on Dr. Roxanne. But I don’t comment—I don’t want any insight on that, either.
So we work through my memories, all shitty seven zillion of them, reversing Herman’s freakish effects. And I see Aunt Eleanor, brighter and stronger, with every moment that comes back. Love of my life, Aunt Eleanor. Lovely little addiction I clung to again and again. I know I should be furious at her, and I definitely am. But on some early mornings, I have dreams of our old conversations, the back-and-forth banter from when I was a child—her telling stories, me telling a joke, her telling me I was the smartest girl alive. She hugs me and says, “All of it, darling, is a lie. I love you, I love you, I love you.”
But I always wake up, and I always tell Albert about it, and he always tells me that I did feel love for her, and that’s okay, and maybe I always will, but I also have to recognize that she is the bad person, and it was all her fault, not mine.
“You were talking about Eleanor when I found you in the bar,” Gabby says on a day when she and Leonidas visit. Well, when I finally let them visit. “God, you were so freaked out. She just left, you said. Jesus, Gabby, she’s still alive, how is that possible? I was heartbroken. You were supposed to forget her, but it was like you remembered everything, and it was killing you. So I had to stop you. I had to try to . . . set you right, I guess. I said you couldn’t talk about her anymore. And you said, but I have talked about her. She’s in my book. It’s why I made Mom and Dad get your book. I was in a panic.”
“And then what? After you found me in the bar at the Tranquility?”
“You got up and just ran out of there. I didn’t know where you were going. You stopped at the pool, but you were still raving, and it seemed like you . . . saw someone. You were so scared. You said Eleanor wasn’t going to stop until you made it right. You said this was why you’d come to the Tranquility—something had led you here. It was so you could remember, and so she could find you. You remembered everything in that instant. It was like everything we worked so hard to suppress broke through.”
“Though I guess I forgot it all when I woke up the next day,” I grumbled. “I bet that made you happy, huh?”
“Oh, Eliza,” Gabby says, lowering her eyes.
But I feel so bitter, tricked, betrayed, duped, obfuscated. Complex lies upon lies have been spun, all by people I’m supposed to love. I’m not sure if I can ever really trust them again.
“Look, I made a promise not to ever mention Eleanor, and I took that promise seriously,” Gabby admits. “Remembering her would be a huge trigger for you. It was why we erased so much of your life that would remind you of her, too. We went through your room and removed all your mementos. And later, we even took down your Facebook page—there were a few spots where you made a reference to the book Eleanor was writing. We didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”
“Hmmph,” I grumble, though at least this explains what cuckoo Eliza Facebook page Kiki was talking about looking at when she first met me.
“And anyway.” She smiles wryly. “Anyway, it’s not like you really saw Eleanor at the bar. It’s impossible.”
I tap my teeth together. Was it? Then I look at Leonidas, who, so far, has stood there numbly, like a post. He’s no longer a stranger, all the feelings I had for him rushing back like a beloved book I’ve just reread, but I’m angry with him, too.
“So why were you involved in keeping all this a secret?” I snap, feeling embarrassed to be talking to him with my stringy hair and unwashed armpits.
He shrugs. “Because I knew everything. You told me you were going to kill her before you did, and then I was the one who rescued you the night it happened.”
“And were you at Palm Springs, too?”
“No. Gabby just called me to talk about it later. She was frantic.”
I stare at the ceiling and let out a breath. “How did you find me that night it all went down, anyway?”
“You were gone when I got to the dorm. So I drove to M&F—I had a horrible feeling. I saw you running into the pizza place, and then you just blurted it all out.”
“And then you yelled at me for not doing what I was told and dumped me at my parents’, is that it?”
Leonidas looks tormented. “I should have stayed by you that day. I worried all through class—I knew you were going to go to dinner with her. But maybe if I’d stayed, you wouldn’t have seen her.”
“Or it might not have mattered. She was out to get me. It would have happened another day. The story would have ended in the same way.” Well, in sort of the same way. Except that maybe I would have heard a thump when Eleanor hit the concrete on the highway. And a horn honk. A crunch and pop as a car hit her.
Instead, I’d heard nothing. The only evidence I had she was gone was the cops showing up at my parents’ later that night, saying they had her body at the morgue.
“And as for breaking up with you.” Leonidas clears his throat. “I was told by the doctors your parents hired that I had to. They said that ties to the past, especially to her”—he makes a face, so I’m assuming he’s talking about Eleanor—“would be detrimental. Your doctor wanted your mom to cut ties with you, even, but she said absolutely not.” He walks to the window. “I hated dropping you like that, though. Not that you care, but I went through a lot of pain. I missed you terribly.”
Someday, perhaps, I will care about Leonidas’s feelings in all this. But now, front and center, is the How Eliza Was Duped show. Everything else is on another network, one I’m not watching.
But then, after they leave, I am given another memory, one that hasn’t come back yet. A few days after the singular evening we went out with Eleanor together, Leonidas and I were on a drive somewhere. I still felt like shit—whatever Eliza gave me created a hangover that went on for days. I waited for Leonidas to tell me I told you that you shouldn’t have drunk—I would have, had the roles been reversed. But instead, he drove silently until we reached Santa Monica. He parked near the amusement park and unlocked the doors.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“We’re having fun,” he answered.
He bought us tickets for the rides, and we went on all of them, which sounds dreadful with a hangover, but somehow, combined with soda fountain Coke and two huge, steaming-hot pretzels, made the headache and nausea evaporate. We held hands on the Ferris wheel, screamed on the roller coaster, threw darts at balloons and won a giant Scooby-Doo. By the end of the day, we were tired, we were laughing, we were talking about normal stuff. It was his way to cover up a night he feared had been laced with duplicity. It was his way of saying, Whatever that shit was, it was adult and weird and I’m not ready for it. I still want to be a kid.
I want to be a kid, too, even now. With my childhood tumor memories returned to me, I feel like I never got to be a kid, not even for a day.
• • •
After Albert and I straighten out reality, we straighten out the truth, especially the unraveling of what was tumorous inside of me and what was brought on by Eleanor’s wild, sick head. I’d had a tumor, yes, when I was young, but it had been benign. My mother was busy with work, even more stressed now because there were hospital bills to pay. Eleanor volunteered to hang out with me while I recovered, and my mother begrudgingly said yes—she didn’t have money for a nanny, and Eleanor seemed okay. Well, sort of okay. “I mean, yes, she’d had a son who killed himself, and she’d had mental issues years ago, but she seemed recovered,” my mother admits one day, when she and I are in a joint session with Albert. “And she was always lying to you about who she was when she was young, but I didn’t see it as dangerous, really. Just sort of . . . childish.”
I demand to know what she means. Apparently, Eleanor’s fabulous New York youth, how she worked at a circus, how she was a spy in DC—they were just tales. “All her life, your aunt wanted to be fabulous, but she was mostly on the fringes of things,” my mother says. “She might have been acquainted with some interesting characters in New York, for example—our mother certainly was, and Eleanor idolized her. But she was always too needy, too desperate. That was a turnoff to most people. Even I saw it, as a younger sister. She required too much. She needed so much hand-holding and attention. She was never let into the group. Some people rejected her very viciously—it was almost bullying. But she continued to try. She was so desperate to be loved.”
There hadn’t been a Contact Lens Baron or a DC spy. Eleanor had moved to California with us once my mother married my father. She met her husband out there, but he’d been a construction worker, not something more fabulous. Shortly after she had Thomas, her husband died in a freak accident on the job site—an I-beam disengaged from a crane and fell from a great height, crushing him. With the insurance settlement money, Eleanor bought the beautiful house in Hollywood—the house I grew up in, though it had been excised from my mind that the house had once been hers. But of course it had been hers! Who else would have written those crazy death facts on my closet wall?
“She tried to ingratiate herself with the neighbors when she lived there, but it was clear she wasn’t one of them,” my mother continues. “So she sold the place to us for a steal and moved to the suite in the Magnolia because she was sick of feeling like a social pariah. At a hotel, she could pay people to make her feel like the star.”
I’m stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? Why didn’t you correct me when I went on about how great she was?”
“Because you loved her,” my mother answers simply. “And when your child loves something like that, you don’t want to be the one to burst the bubble. I thought you’d blame me. Besides, you two had so much in common. She delighted in you, and you delighted in her. I didn’t want to be the one to end that.”
I feel sad about this new version of Eleanor. The truth doesn’t come as so much of a surprise, but I hate that everything I’d adored about her was fiction. When Eleanor couldn’t impress her peers, she turned to an impressionable child. I suppose I should find it flattering that I was her audience, but I see it all as a big, complicated sleight of hand.
But there was more to this, a complicated question of identity. So much of my personality was based on Eleanor. Playing Funeral in her suite stoked my love of death. Playing Oscar Night in her gowns convinced me that only melodramatic people were interesting. Would I have attempted to write a novel if she hadn’t paved the way first with Riders of Carrowae? It wasn’t that I regretted who I turned into, but I couldn’t help but get trapped in a solipsistic quandary about the way fate slides and shifts. If I’d known the real Eleanor, who would I have developed into as a teenager and adult? A different person? I might have ended up like Gabby, working in an office, grabbing smoothies after work, driving a PT Cruiser. It’s not likely, but maybe. Maybe any of us could be anybody. Maybe it just depends on who we surround ourselves with.
I wonder if Eleanor thought about it this way, too. I might have been a nine-year-old, but I was a nine-year-old she could unquestionably shape. How powerful that must have felt! How deity-like! I saw her as an icon. Which was better than being a mother, because I didn’t notice her flaws. Until it was too late.
Of course, if that’s the way Eleanor saw it—if that’s what she understood she was doing—then why the fuck would she poison me?
“After you recovered, I assumed you knew more than you let on,” my mother says in another session. “I figured you knew that you were poisoned, and you were furious at me for letting Eleanor handle your care for so long. I thought you’d decided that I’d let it happen. Which was untrue, of course, but I didn’t know how to explain to you that I had no idea without getting into what she actually did.”
“Uh, no.” I look at her like she’s crazy. “I had no idea she poisoned me. Do you think I would have seen her when she came back if I knew? Do you think I would have asked you all those questions about where she was if I knew?”
“Yes, I realize that now.” Her mouth puckers. She stares out the window. “I wish I’d made the connection about Thomas. His situation was so different, and he was a strange boy. I wish there was something I could have done to help him. I feel like I let it happen—all of this happen.” She bites down hard on her fist.
“I wish you would have told me the truth about her,” I say quietly, plunged once again into a particular brand of despair I’ve felt so many times since coming to the hospital. Betrayal and anger, sadness and disappointment all rolled into a sour, heavy feeling that stalls the rest of my thoughts. “Everything about her.”
My mother smiled sadly. “You would have never believed me.”
I pause a moment, thinking this over. “I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t have.”