ELIZA
KIKI LEADS ME into the kitchen. I am silent. My heart is banging. Her brother, Steadman, who’s my other roommate, stands at the island, hip thrust out, an I Heart Zombies coffee cup in hand. He’s glaring at me.
“Uh, hi?” I say uncertainly. “What’s going on?”
Steadman snorts, the very action making his blond, feathery bangs lift from his forehead. His eyes are dark-rimmed, as if he has applied eyeliner. He’s pear-shaped, with a big ass, a lot to grab on to. Today he’s got on a gray sweatshirt that’s too tight as well as fitted black jeans and shiny high-top leather sneakers. By the smell of it, there’s bone broth in that mug—I have some in the house, as it’s supposed to annihilate all bad cells in the body, and though I can’t take the flavor, he finds it delicious.
Kiki stands at the island with a meek look on her face. The only similarity between her and Steadman are their striking, ice-blue eyes. I met Kiki at the writing group I joined earlier this year. I’d been working on The Dots, and I needed someone to read a draft, but I didn’t want that someone to be anyone I knew—I couldn’t imagine letting my mother look at it, and all of my college friends were majoring in business or some sort of useless science-like mumbo-jumbo having to do with quarks; I doubted they’d be useful in offering critique. When I saw the poster for a writers’ group advertised on a bulletin board at Trader Joe’s, I’d thought, Why not?
The woman who started the group, Sasha, held the meeting in her apartment, which overlooked the very Trader Joe’s parking lot where I found the ad. The apartment was filled with a lot of Native American décor—masks, beaded things, feathers, a wooden canoe mounted on the wall—and smelled like tobacco. Low, atonal, rhythmic chants played over the stereo. There was a bowl filled with small, smooth stones on her coffee table; I worried them between my fingers, terrified to pull the six sets of eight stapled pages I had made for the group out of my bag. It was the first two chapters of The Dots. I was terrified for anyone to read it. Then it would be real.
Kiki sat next to me that first day. She had threads of gray through her hair and carried herself with the air of a much older, wiser woman, so I was surprised to find out later she is only twenty-seven. She wore a flowing skirt sewn together with rainbow-colored quilted strips, and she smelled like Strawberry Shortcake’s little plastic head. When she noticed me, I must have been putting off a serious fear vibe, because she gave me a comforting pat on the hand.
The others in the group sat on the wicker chairs and beanbags Sasha had piled together in the room. Sasha cleared her throat and looked at me. “Eliza? Ready to pass around?”
My fingers crimped around my pages. I wasn’t sure I could let go of them. They were so unvarnished and inadequate. All at once I desperately had to pee. That always happened when I got nervous.
“How about I go?” Kiki piped up. “I have some new poems.”
Sasha looked at her evenly. Someone near the door groaned.
Kiki passed out her poems. Pages riffled. The room went silent. As I read, I began to relax. Her poems were about astrology and vaginas. They were written in iambic pentameter and couplets. She’d rhymed uterus and Oedipus.
The critique began. As everyone tactfully pulled Kiki’s pieces apart, she sat quietly on the couch, her posture perfect, her expression serene and pensive. By the end of the session, I finally felt ready to show my work, but Sasha deemed that the group was over for the night. Everyone stood to leave. Kiki turned to me and smiled. “Well. I think I need a drink after that.”
I went with her out of guilt—I’d sent her lousy writing to slaughter in place of mine. But Kiki didn’t see it that way. “I appreciate everyone’s feedback, but I’m submitting those pieces to Poetry just as they are,” she announced, smoking a joint as she walked.
At the bar, Kiki Germ-X’d the tabletop while we waited for the bartender to get the drinks. “Bar counters are worse than public bathrooms,” she said in that same placid tone that never seemed to leave her voice. She told a long, convoluted story about various relationships and breakups with seamy-sounding men at least thirty years her senior. Her parents had owned a dandelion farm when she was young, and they made special tea that hippies bought through mail order. But now the dandelion industry has dried up, and they live in a subdivision near Pasadena, where Kiki lived as well. At one point, Kiki sipped her vodka, made a face, and plucked an extra lime out of the cubby behind the bar that contained maraschino cherries, olives, and cut-up fruit. I liked how she looked right at the bartender when she did it, daring him to say something to her about presumptuousness and personal hygiene.
A few months later, when my book sold and I collected some cash, I asked Kiki if she wanted to be my roommate. I didn’t enjoy bumping around in the new, free-from-my-parents’ house by myself. I kind of wished I were still in the dorm at UCLA—I liked the idea of having fifty-five sleeping coeds just a knock away. Kiki was happy to leave her parents’ dumpy tract home. Her deal, though, was that if she moved in, her brother, Steadman, who was also living at home, had to come, too.
“Otherwise he’s never going to leave my parents, and they’re so sick of him,” she said. I knew the feeling.
I asked what Steadman did, and Kiki said he managed a curiosities shop in Venice. “Does he need extra employees?” I asked immediately. I’d pulled eighteen-hour days working on my book, but once I’d finished, I needed something else to occupy my time. I was up to taking four baths a day. Many hours passed where all I did was thumb through a big Edward Gorey anthology.
Now, I pad to the fridge, open it, and grab a bottle of water. The shelves are stuffed with Trader Joe’s fare. Steadman’s name is written on the soy milk and individual pots of Greek yogurt. He pens S.R. across the skin of each individual clementine in the bag. This is why I moved my vitamins upstairs. I don’t want to have to put my name on them.
I can feel Kiki and Steadman staring at me.
“So is it true?” Steadman asks.
“What’s that?” I ask after taking a long drink.
“The pool, Eliza!” Kiki holds up her phone. “Did you almost drown?”
I swallow hard. “How do you know that?” Could Desmond have told them on his way out?
“A website in Palm Springs wrote a piece about you. I just read it. I thought it was for your book, but it’s about someone pulling you out of a swimming pool.”
“So it is in the news?”
I snatch the phone from her. Woman Rescued from Near-Drowning reads the headline on the screen. The story posted twenty minutes ago—my Google Alert, which I’d set to ping whenever a mention of me popped up online, must have missed it. The article says a young woman, twenty-three, fell in the pool and that the police were called. They mention my name, but there’s no picture of me. No mention of foul play, either.
I hand it back quickly, feeling queasy. “This doesn’t tell the whole story.”
“Okay, what’s the whole story?”
“What happened in Palm Springs is her business, Kiki,” Steadman interrupts. He looks at me. “But, if you’re going through something, maybe you should talk to us. I mean, I have a business to run. And when you show up on your off days acting erratic, the business loses money.”
I squint. “Huh?”
“What happened on Friday, Eliza. You showed up all . . . I don’t know. Weird.” He wiggles his arms and shoulders, octopus-style, to demonstrate weird.
I squint, trying to remember Friday. As far as I know, I hadn’t left the house. My big excursion to Palm Springs had happened the following day.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
Steadman sips from his mug and swallows noisily. “Herb said you came in all dazed, but when he tried to talk to you, you clammed up and left. You freaked him out, which says a lot, you know?”
“Herb was wrong. That wasn’t me.”
He slaps his arms to his sides. “Eliza, come on. It was you. So what are we dealing with here? Drugs? Alcohol? Do you need to go to rehab?”
“Look, I’m fine. And if I did do that, I’m really sorry,” I try, adding a little laugh. “How about we just forget this?”
Kiki grips a Bakelite napkin ring in the shape of a tarantula. Over Steadman’s head is a squirrel skeleton. The moment Steadman moved in he brought tons of knickknacks from the curiosity shop with him, and though I don’t mind most of it, the raccoon penis he fashioned into the centerpiece of a dream catcher that hangs over the sink doesn’t exactly put me in the mood to do dishes.
“This is all so worrying,” Kiki says quietly. “All your memory lapses, and now the drowning thing . . .”
“I didn’t drown. I’m still here.”
“But you tried to drown,” Kiki points out.
“No I didn’t!” I consider mentioning the murder angle, but this is definitely the wrong audience. “It was an accident.”
Silence. Steadman taps his long nails against the mug. Kiki stares out the window and looks like she wants to cry. I’ve still got “Maneater” in my head. Oh-oh here she comes . . .
“When you say all my memory lapses . . .” I say. “Can you give me another example?”
“Well, there was that time two weeks ago when I saw you at yoga,” Kiki says. “You were leaving, I was coming? I waved, and I swear you saw me. But then I bring it up later and you look through me like I’m nuts.”
I try to laugh. “I remember that—or, I remember you telling me you’d seen me at yoga. But I wasn’t there. I haven’t been to your studio in months.” I tried to like yoga, I really did, but I kept laughing through the instructor’s chants. I kept rolling my eyes at the Sanskrit names for the poses.
“But I saw you,” Kiki asserts. “You looked right at me!”
My gaze shifts down. Could I have been there? Why don’t I remember? “I think you were confused,” I insist.
The siblings exchange another look. Steadman starts to pace. “It’s other things, too. Not keeping up with the household responsibilities when you say you’re going to. Not cleaning like the schedule dictates.”
I blink hard. “Wait, that thing was real?”
Steadman put up a chore schedule on a white marker board in the mudroom. I’d actually made fun of it to Kiki. Maybe even in front of Steadman.
“Plus you sometimes eat our food, and you use the toilet paper you didn’t buy, and you never paid cable last month, and we basically had to go without cable until the two of us coughed up some funds,” Steadman adds. “And you said you were going to get cable. You said you called the cable company.”
“It’s my house!” I exclaim. “If I don’t want to have cable, then we’re not going to have cable.”
But as soon as I see the rage in his expression, I realize my mistake. If Steadman leaves, Kiki might, too.
I mumble a halfhearted apology and head out the door. I don’t slam it—that might qualify as erratic, unstable behavior, the kind of behavior defined by people who drink too much and don’t own up to skipping yoga and who throw themselves into swimming pools. I walk the whole way to the edge of the property line before I turn around and give the house the finger. Chore charts? Cable? Really?
It’s mild outside, and the sun has sunk below the trees. I start to walk, hoping movement will settle me down. Halfway to Riverside Drive, I hear footsteps and turn around. It’s Kiki. She’s barefoot, and her eyes are red, and her golden hair is flying behind her like the tail of a kite.
“Eliza,” she calls.
I consider running, but she’d catch me by the end of the block. So I stop. My arms hang heavily at my sides.
“I’m sorry.” She’s breathing hard. “I didn’t know my brother was going to say all those things.”
“You could have stood up for me.”
Kiki twists her mouth. “I know. But Steadman, he . . . well, whatever.” She smiles sheepishly. “And it’s kind of true, honey. Lately you’ve seemed barely aware of your life.” She puts her hand on my arm. “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to talk about?”
I stare down at Kiki’s pale, freckled hand. She’s got a thick plastic ring with a plastic roach trapped inside of it. She got it at Steadman’s shop, but she doesn’t work there. Part-time, she plays an Elsa from Frozen for birthday parties, company meetings, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and for hungover fraternity brothers. It’s weird who requests an Elsa. You never know. Anyway, she wears the ring while princessing it up, the bug spun toward her palm. She says it gives her power.
Everything I need to tell weighs on me with the dull, pressing force of a dentist’s X-ray bib. Not just the drowning, not just the person Desmond saw running away, but everything else, too. I never told Kiki about the suicide attempts. I never told her about my tumor. I don’t want her looking at me differently, and I know she would. I don’t want her pitying me, though it seems like she is anyway.
Maybe, though, it would be okay to have a friend to worry with. It’s one thing for my family not to believe me about jumping into the pool; it’s another for Kiki to say, unprompted, that I’m having memory problems. What if I am still sick? What if the tumor has come back? Some people are good at crossword puzzles or jujitsu. Maybe I’m good at making tumors nestle inside my skull.
Only, what about that person running away? What is that, then?
I can’t tell Kiki. Just uttering those words, just giving my condition shape and air, means that this sudden and sharply defined worry might be the truth.
“I’m fine,” I say quietly. “I’m just . . . tired. Freaked out about the book, maybe. Afraid people aren’t going to like it.”
“Of course,” Kiki says. “It’s got to be a lot of pressure. But you should be happy about it, Eliza. You’re getting published in what, a month? It’s going to be amazing.” She slaps the sides of her thighs. “Want to get dinner somewhere? I’m up for anything.”
There’s a lump in my throat. “I just want to take a walk by myself.”
“Of course, of course.” She pulls me in one more time for a hug. She smells like weed, and her weight against mine makes my throat-lump six sizes bigger. “Get some Baked Alaska at Bob’s Big Boy,” she murmurs in my ear. “And a big glass of milk.”
I start walking.
It is after five, and Burbank is dead. The roads are wide and empty, perfect for drag races. A girl wipes off the tables of the greasy Mexican joint, and tinkling mariachi music escapes out of speakers. A high-end Mercedes slips silently out of the gates of Warner at the end of the road, then makes a slithery turn onto Olive, escaping for the highway. Its stealthy, amphibious motion triggers memory upon memory of all the weird, unexplainable things I’d recently done.
Like jumping the fence of a chain hotel and plunging into the first body of water I could find—which happened to be a large, outdoor hot tub. I forced my face into the hot water. Only when I couldn’t breathe did I feel relief. It’s going to end. I’ll be free.
Or the memory of riding a bike down the path that cuts through Santa Monica and Venice beaches and suddenly, arrestingly, having a palpable fear that someone was chasing me. I turned around, and I did see someone. Maybe lots of someones, all with angry, vengeful eyes. The only way I could fathom getting away was plunging into the Pacific, so I’d made a madcap run across the sand. A wave had taken me down immediately. A father and son dragged me out after the breath had left my body. Why is she coughing? the little boy kept asking. Is she going to be okay?
And the memory of two nights ago, when I’d crashed into the pool at the Tranquility. The cold water had been so shocking, but once again, I’d felt safe. I flailed onto my back and, for a moment, opened my eyes.
I stop short just before the curb cut. There was someone on the pool deck, just like Desmond said. The glare from a spotlight blotted out any discernible features, but whoever it was stood above me, chest puffed triumphantly, as I sank.
I grab my phone and dial the police station again. The same receptionist picks up, and I can’t remember Lance’s last name again, and I can’t bear to go through the spiel of the message one more time. I hang up and demand my phone’s automated assistant give me the number to the Tranquility. “Can I be connected to the Shipstead bar?” I ask after the front desk answers.
There’s a pause, and then someone else picks up. “Shipstead.” It’s a man with an Australian accent—Sheepstid.
“G’day,” I say. Whenever I hear an accent I have the urge to speak with one, too. “Uh, I’m a private detective, and I’m checking in on my client’s wife. She says she was at your bar a few nights back, and I want to see if she was there the whole time or if she left and went somewhere else.”
“Okaay.” He sounds circumspect. “Which day was this?” I tell him. “I wasn’t here Saturday. That was Richie.”
“Is he working today?”
“Nope.”
“When will he next be in?”
“Uh . . . tomorrow, I think. Or the next day.”
“I might be dead by then!” My accent is gone. “Can you give me his cell number?”
The bartender bursts out laughing. “Uh, no.”
And then he hangs up.
There’s a blare of a horn, and I jump. I’ve wandered into the crosswalk. I scamper to the curb, my heart in my throat. The image I’ve just seen of someone standing above me as I sink into the pool in Palm Springs skulks around me like a sullen cat. There had definitely been a shadow standing motionless over me, making sure I was floundering to the bottom.
On my phone, I Google Tranquility resort pool accident. The article Kiki showed me is the only one listed. There were no reported accidents at the resort’s pool besides mine.
Then I Google Palm Springs stalkers. A twenty-four-year-old girl was stalked by an ex-boyfriend. A forty-five-year-old nurse posted sexy pictures of herself in Palm Springs on Facebook and some crackpot stalked her to the Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway. Neither situation has much in common with what happened to me.
I Google Los Angeles stalkers, but that brings up too many hits to wade through. Next I search Can the police lie to you. And Police cover-ups. And finally, How to get a memory back from your brain. This leads me to an article about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which tells me something I already know: memories, especially powerful and emotional ones, are stored in the amygdala, where my tumor resided. These same memories are fragile and easily destroyed when they aren’t given time and space to form—there’s a whole biochemical and electrical process that fixes a memory in place. Also, just because you think you remember something happening doesn’t mean it actually occurred the way you remember it. Brains have a tendency to rewrite memories based on what you’d like to remember, or what someone has told you to remember. Or your mind might conflate two memories into one, the synapses in the brains getting tangled and confused.
Is that it? Am I confusing the pool incident with an earlier plunge? I want to think so . . . but no. That face standing over me is so crisp in my mind. I have to believe in it. Once I start doubting myself, the memory will slip away forever.
I need to lie down somewhere. I gaze at the sidewalk, considering it—this street is clean enough to eat off. Then I spot an even more tempting option: a corner bar across from Warner’s that used to be a whorehouse. There’s a winking floozy painted onto the window, a neon wine bottle above the bar. I wonder if a certain someone is inside. My mouth starts to water. My body actually lunges toward the place like a plant leaning toward a ray of light.
I push through the door and am greeted by twilit gloom. It’s a bar with multiple personalities: the jukebox, bad lighting, and bathroom of questionable cleanliness suggest dive, but then there’s this whole wine cellar corner thing going on, the menu features beef cheeks, and there’s a PBS news broadcast on TV.
I settle into a stool and gaze down the sparse line of patrons. Most of them, like everyone hanging out in Burbank at this time of day, are either studio people who don’t want to be bothered or screenplay hopefuls who are hoping to rub elbows with someone who will listen to their pitch. The bartender, Brian, tosses a coaster my way with a grumble. He’s always muttering to some guy about what cunts women are, how they’re liars, how they make no sense, how they’re whorish and opportunistic and way more superficial than men. I also can’t stand his hipster beard.
“Gin and tonic,” I shout to him. He begrudgingly makes it, silently plops it in front of me, and sticks the paper bill in an empty glass.
Then I feel a sort of magnetic pull, and I know the person I’ve come for is here before I actually see him. There he is: denim jacket, stubble, floppy hair, square jaw. He’s sitting at the other end of the bar, reading a magazine. As if suddenly aware of my presence, he looks up and stares at me, too. His lips twitch. He stands and walks over with a bearlike lope. I stretch off the stool and roll on the insteps of my feet, heart pounding, seething at the sight of him, but also relaxing, knowing exactly how this will play out.
“Liza,” he says, when he’s close. “Long time no see.”
I don’t know if he gets my name wrong on purpose or if he really doesn’t know it. It’s also possible I’ve given him this name instead of my real one.
“I’ve been busy,” I answer.
He takes a long sip of his drink—it’s something brownish with clinking ice cubes—and passes it to me. He knows I’m not picky. He knows I’ll drink it, which I do. It’s whiskey, the cheap kind. My throat feels gouged.
He looks me up and down, his eyes twinkling. “You busy now?”
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Not really.”
There may be a little more talk than this, maybe even a gin and tonic or two, probably more glares from Brian. But what matters is that after not very much time, Andrew grabs my hand with urgency, and there we are in that horrid bathroom with its crumbling grout and the shit-stained toilet and the foul-smelling urinal cake, my body pressed up against the wall, his fingers rushing to unzip, me feverishly pulling the grungy hospital T-shirt over my head. I shut my eyes and sink into this as best I can. There is acid in my throat. I may vomit soon. But for a few seconds, I can forget everything about who I am and be some girl I don’t know, some waste, a putrid, repulsive Liza a man wants to ravage. That’s all I am worth, deep down. I don’t know why this sort of depravity feels necessary, but it does. Maybe it’s another trick of my amygdala.
It’s over fast. Andrew hands me a cigarette; he’s always got a pack. He smokes one, too. We blow the smoke out the bathroom window into the alleyway. A limp hank of hair falls across Andrew’s forehead.
I tap his arm. “Is that a studio pass around your neck?”
He flicks the ashes from his cigarette into the toilet; the water fizzles. “Maybe.”
“You working on a writing team?”
“Maybe.”
When we first met, he admitted that he hoped to work on a TV drama, maybe a police procedural. This was when we’d had a normal, flirty bar conversation, before he understood I was easy and desperate and didn’t need verbal foreplay to strip naked. But I didn’t play the game entirely—I told him nothing about myself. But now, I kind of want to tell him something. I just don’t know what.
I think of it as he’s zipping up. “I was almost killed two nights ago.”
He looks at me, really looks at me, and raises an eyebrow. Then he snorts and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“It’s true!” An additional thought appears in my mind with astonishing force. And I could kill you, too. I almost gasp out loud, shocked my mind coughed that up.
He licks his finger and uses it to stub out the cigarette. It makes a dangerous sizzle, and he drops it in the toilet. Another sideways glance, and then he finally buttons his pants. “We’ve all got our stories, Liza. We’ve all got our stories.”