The Elizas_A Novel

by Sara Shepard

  Dorothy took off her left shoe, rubbed her ankle, then put it on again. “Just know you can’t trust them. Ever.”

  “Can’t we just move to another hospital?”

  “It’s not so easy, honey. Not anymore. They called your mother.”

  “Surely she doesn’t want me in there all alone!”

  Her aunt made a strange coughing sound. “Look, I’m not trying to make her out as the bad guy, but I think she was in on this decision, too.” She set her jaw. “Anyway, I have to go.”

  “What?” Dot sat up straight. “You can’t leave!”

  “I have an appointment.” She stroked Dot’s arm. “I’ll be back, don’t worry. Just be good, okay? As long as you’re good, it will all work out fine.”

  She sauntered out of the room in a heady scent of orange blossoms. Dot couldn’t control her tears; she sobbed uncontrollably for at least ten minutes. She was surprised the crying didn’t propel her into a new seizure. She didn’t know what to make of any of it—had her mother been in on the decision? What if she’d proposed the idea? What if this was some way to get her away from Dorothy? She was jealous, maybe, because clearly Dorothy had taken her place.

  But why did Dorothy leave? Why wasn’t she fighting this? She’d fought so hard for everything else.

  A few minutes later, Nurse Lisa swept in and pulled out Dot’s IV tubes. Then she ordered her out of bed so she could strip her sheets. She dressed Dot in another gown and took her to X-ray and to draw blood.

  “But you already drew blood today,” Dot whined.

  “We just want to make some comparisons,” Lisa said cheerfully.

  Dot had yet another MRI and CAT scan that day, too. And after all that, with no explanation, they wheeled her into the ICU.

  It was deathly quiet in the ward. Dot’s room was tiny and had a strange smell she didn’t recognize. She was old enough to understand that all around her were other children who were very, very sick; probably some of them would die soon. Feeble wails from babies woke her up in the night. Sounds of vomiting. A woman, standing outside her door, crying uncontrollably. What on earth could Dot have done to land her in here? Had she said something disparaging in her sleep? Did the nurses know that she and Dorothy made fun of some of them when it wasn’t their shifts? Maybe the rooms had little microphones hidden in them, like in the movies, and the nurses heard everything. If Dot just apologized, could she go back to the normal ward?

  Or was she really this sick?

  And then, in the morning, she heard Dr. Osuri’s voice: I said you couldn’t be here! What part of that don’t you understand?

  Dot strained to hear whom the doctor was talking to. Had some madman broken into the ICU? She hallucinated axe-wielders, orange storm clouds, pointy-horned ibexes. The drugs she was taking to quell the seizures made her so drowsy, and she dropped back into sleep. Just before she slipped into unconsciousness, she saw her mother standing in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest, a tight, worried look on her face. Dot probably could have struggled to stay awake to say hello to her, but she didn’t want to.

  A few hours later, Dr. Osuri came in to check on her, praising her for having no new seizures in the night.

  “See, I’m better!” Dot crowed. “So get me out of here!”

  Dr. Osuri chuckled. “Soon, I promise.” There was a sad, kind look on his face. Dot was sure this hadn’t been the same doctor who’d been yelling at someone earlier in the day.

  Three days in the ICU, no new seizures. Dot played Solitaire on an iPad; a nurse gave her the wireless password and she watched toy reviews on YouTube. Her mother appeared in the doorway, but every time, Dot pretended to be sleeping. Patients around her moaned. An alarm went off in the middle of the night; nurses and doctors hurried into an adjoining room, and there was a flurry of tense instructions and bleeps of machinery. Dot was astonished to fall asleep amid the cacophony. In the morning, when she woke up, she had no idea if the person who’d had the episode so late at night had lived or died. Her brand-new cell phone, which Dorothy had bought for her but which Dot didn’t quite know how to work yet, received text messages, a very new thing.

  Are you being good? Dorothy had texted her. Dot answered yes. Not talking to anyone? Dot answered no. Good, and don’t think anything, either, she said. Because they can read your thoughts. Who? Dot always asked. Dorothy never answered.

  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. B
ut 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.”