The Elizas_A Novel

by Sara Shepard

  And yet.

  “I have such a blurry memory of that night,” I answer. “I mean, I have what I wrote, and I think that’s the truth, but why didn’t I hear Eleanor fall onto the highway? And when I look back on that memory, Eleanor’s face is a caricature—there’s something so odd about her.”

  Albert cuts me off. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, really. It’s just like she transformed into a demon in those last moments. Into someone I didn’t know at all.”

  Albert spins in his chair. “Maybe you don’t want to recognize her in your memories. Maybe if you can shape-shift her into something else, you’ll feel less guilty.”

  I stare at my lap. “You’re probably right.”

  “The mind is very mysterious.”

  I pull a pillow close to my chest. It’s embroidered with a large question mark; Albert told me a patient cross-stitched it for him. The mind is mysterious, and don’t I know it. There are some days when I wake up and have this overwhelming feeling that none of this happened to me. The memories that have come back are simply the ones in the book replacing dull, drab scenes of me stuck in a hospital somewhere, perhaps. I mean, hell, for all I know, I could have been sick for years, right? In a hospital with brain issues for years, and only recently let out, and to supplant years of monotony, I made up this fantastical story.

  It’s possible, isn’t it?

  But mostly, I choose to buy into the memories, though sometimes I think my interpretation of them is incorrect. There are times when I wonder if Eleanor was the victim. I’ve read my book again; I see how Dot desperately wants to think her mother’s the one in control. What if that is the truth? Could my mother have fabricated Eleanor’s Munchausen-by-Proxy behavior? Could she have fed the nurses lies to get Eleanor evicted? It wasn’t as if there was documented proof that Eleanor had, beyond a doubt, been in possession of strychnine and figured out a way to get it into my body, causing the seizures—the police would have only started an investigation when the claim was filed, and by then, Eleanor had taken off. Yes, there were my seizures, and my blood tests were positive for strychnine poisoning. I don’t want to presume my mother was in charge of fabricating the tests, too—or, more horrifyingly, giving me the strychnine herself—but I’ll never really know. What if she did it for my own good? But would she go to such great lengths?

  This still doesn’t explain Eleanor’s return, either, or my strange wake-ups at her suite, and the powder she’d put in my drink the last night I ever saw her. But some days, those scenes feel embellished, too. Had there even been a drink switch? Maybe I just invented that scenario after the fact to justify what I’d done next. She was going to poison me, so I killed her.

  Maybe I am a terrible, terrible person.

  “So why did that bartender say another Eliza had been sitting next to me at the bar?” I ask Albert, once I gather my thoughts. “Who was he talking about?”

  “That I don’t know. And maybe you’ll never know, either.”

  “But I want to know. Clearly the bartender saw someone. What if she is still alive?”

  He clicks his pen on and off. “I think it’s highly unlikely. There was a report about her death.”

  The report was given to me a few days into the hospital stay, when I still refused to believe anything I didn’t remember was real. Eleanor Reitman, it read, aged 52, dies from tragic fall in Alhambra. There wasn’t much more to it than that. A lot of the story was about how traffic was tied up for a good portion of the night. The writer touched very briefly on the fact that Aunt Eleanor was a resident of the Magnolia Hotel and that the staff adored her, and that her memorial wishes state that a remembrance ceremony would be held at M&F Chop House. There was no talk of foul play. There was no talk of the legacy she left. No family was mentioned. It wasn’t a police report, either. There was no talk of a body being found. For all I know, my parents fed the writer every detail. And they could have said anything.

  “But say you really did see her at the bar,” Albert goes on, “and say you’ve seen her lurking around, as you’ve said. What do you think she wants after all this time?”

  I can’t believe Albert would ask such a silly question. “I guess to kill me.”

  He stares into the middle distance. “Are you sure?”

  I run my tongue over my teeth. I felt so sure of this at the hotel, during Dr. Roxanne. And I’m pretty sure I felt certain at the Tranquility when I saw her. But now that I have the whole story, it feels jumbled. “In my book, she said that if she was going down, I was going, too.”

  “Right. So okay, she could be after you. But maybe there’s another emotion at play here. Maybe you keep seeing her because you secretly miss her.”

  I stare at him.

  “Come on. You admit that you still love her. And face it: for a long time, you didn’t know she was hurting you. You loved your time together. You modeled yourself after her. And then, suddenly, this whole alternative truth about her, this hideous truth, is revealed to you, unequivocally. And then she’s gone. Shortly after she left, it’s erased from your memory, so you don’t even have time to properly grieve and work through your feelings. There’s just this . . . hole inside of you. You never got to say goodbye. You barely got to voice your fury. You never got to hear her side of things, not really.” He sniffs. “I mean, come on. You want to, don’t you? Even if it’s manipulative bullshit. Even if it’s the craziest thing you’ve ever heard. There’s no shame in wanting to know her thoughts. And there’s no shame in missing her, either.”

  I get a pang. It’s true. I do miss her. “But isn’t that a self-destructive feeling? If she did poison me, I should hate her. Not miss her. Not love her.” I take a breath. “And why did she poison me? How could she have done such a thing?”

  “Control. She worried about you leaving her. It was a way of getting attention. And a way of keeping you close.”

  “But I would have remained close to her. She was my favorite person in the world.”

  Albert reaches for his teacup again. “Well, she was sick. I can’t explain Munchausen by Proxy. I don’t know what drives people to do it. What drives child molesters? What drives people who abuse their spouses? It’s a terrible thing. But you have to accept that that’s who she was, too.”

  “I’m not sure I can accept that,” I say quietly.

  “Well, then you’ve got to let her go.”

  My heart squeezes tightly. Letting go doesn’t mean loving or hating, it means feeling nothing. How could I possibly get there? And more than that: there is a film reel inside me still running, unfinished. I could be fooling myself, but I can still sense Eleanor’s pulse. I can still hear her thrumming energy if I put my ear to the ground.

  “She’s still out there,” I repeat to him. “She’s still looking for me. She still wants to settle the score. I can feel it.”

  “Eliza, she’s not. It’s a symptom of your ripped-out memories. It’s your mind playing tricks on you. You’re seeing a ghost you’ve created. If you want to be a functional person in the world again, if you want to go on with your life and be happy, then you need to try and exorcise her. Exorcise this feeling that she’s after you because you’ve done something so terribly wrong.”

  “So how do I do that?”

  He taps his chin. “Maybe you should do what Dot does in the book.”

  Albert eyes the copy on his shelf. It is definitely new as of today; I would have noticed it before. Several copies of The Dots have been circulating around the hospital; I’ve caught nurses, administrators, doctors, and patients reading it. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised Albert has a copy, but it’s still discomfiting to imagine him reading it.

  I consider what he said. The ending of The Dots is the only thing that hadn’t happened to me. “I’m not doing that.”

  “But maybe you want to. Maybe it’s why you wrote it. It might give you closure. You’d be free. Just like Dot is. You could admit what Eleanor did to you and why you had to take action.”
Here he pauses, and I realize for sure, just like I realized with Desmond, that he understands my book is an autobiography. “You could let someone decide your punishment.”

  “. . . And go to jail. I can’t take that chance.”

  The chair creaks as he sits back. “And yet you let Dot take that chance.”

  “She’s a fictional character.”

  “She is?”

  I let out a snort, stand, and start toward the door. Albert glances at the clock—we have ten minutes left, but he doesn’t move to reel me back in when I walk out. “I understand your reaction, Eliza,” he calls out. “But maybe, with reflection, you’ll see I’m not so crazy for suggesting it.”

  “I’m sick of reflection,” I grumble over my shoulder. “All I’ve done is reflect.” I bump into the coffee table in the waiting room and knock off a stack of Yoga Journals.

  I walk down the cold hall with the ugly lighting, past Jim and Pablo playing chess again. Maybe they’re more fucked-up than I think—they’re at that chessboard day and night, starting a new game the moment they’ve finished the first. I never see them in Group or at meals. What a stroke of fate that they’d found each other here. Maybe it’s not like that for them, and there’s probably no romance to their kinship, but it’s comforting to think so. And suddenly, I feel a longing for Eleanor again. Kinship is what I thought I’d had with her. Understanding. Connection. Could I get that with someone else? Desmond, maybe? Or was what she and I had unique? Or was it all bullshit, because it had been built on lies?

  Desmond knows no lies, though. But maybe that isn’t such a good thing, either. He might love me unconditionally, but I’ll always be this person to him—not the girl in the facility, after a time, but the girl who got away with something. How will that affect our relationship going forward? Every time he holds back, every time he steps away from me as though flinching, every time I think he’s walking on eggshells, I’ll be afraid that he’s seeing the murderer in me. What if he resents me for walking free? What if he thinks I should pay for what I did? Because I did do it. Whether Eleanor died, whether she’s still out there, I’m almost positive I used my hands to push.

  And then it hits me. It’s not just Desmond who knows that I did it. It’s everyone. Yes, wink wink, the novel is fiction. But I’ve peeked at some of the reviews. People are pointing at the factual similarities between Dot and myself and Dorothy and Aunt Eleanor. They are taking pictures of the M&F Chop House and posting them on Amazon as an additional picture for the book. Bernie, the waiter, has been interviewed, saying that yes, there’s a back entrance to the restaurant for high-profile clients, and he remembers Eleanor and me there, though he had absolutely no idea she was in trouble with the law. That Los Angeles cover has been dug up and posted. If the meat of the book is the truth, why then would the ending be a lie? I’d made Dorothy die exactly the same way. I didn’t change a fucking thing—because I hadn’t realized, at the time, that it had happened. Had I known, I would have altered some details. I would have had her fall into a canyon, or into an alligator’s mouth at the zoo.

  Had I known, I wouldn’t have written the book at all.

  The police haven’t come storming the hospital, an investigation hasn’t been started, no one has come out and said what I’ve done, but they’ve got to be thinking it. It’s only natural. So can I go on living my life after committing such a crime? Dorothy did, after harming Dot. Eleanor did, after harming me. But I don’t want to be like either of them. On the other hand, can I bite the bullet and come clean? What was the right thing to do?

  I open the door to my little room and let myself in. Books are piled on my nightstand. I’ve ripped off the blinds, so light streams onto the floor. The staff finally let me have more blankets, and my mother brought an afghan from home. I pick it up and press it to my nose, smelling bergamot oranges. A pang so overwhelming rises in me, and I think of Eleanor yet again. I think of her splashing perfume on her pulse points. I think of her spritzing an atomizer toward me and saying, “Now, walk into the spray. There you go. Now you’ll smell delicious.”

  Sighing, I reach toward the books on the nightstand and pull mine from the bottom of the stack. The binding cracks as I open it for the first time. I flip all the way to the last chapter, and I read.

  Afterward, I sit very still until the light from the window wanes and turns gray. I ignore the knocks on my door for dinner, I ignore the soft footsteps that pass down the hall. I ignore the lights flicking off, another nurse popping in with a plastic cup of meds. She knows I’ll take them, so she leaves it on the bedside table without a word. I sit still until the room is filled with inky blackness. I turn the words I’d written over and over in my head. I am giving myself a great power, choosing to heed my author self’s instructions or take another path. Whichever I choose, it is all my decision, though. I’m the one in control now. I’m the one forging the path that will become the truth.

  From The Dots

  Two weeks after her aunt passed away, Dot went to the airport and did that thing she assumed people only did in movies: picked an international flight off the Departures board, slapped down her Amex at the ticket counter, and got a seat. She wasn’t sure why she chose Dublin except for the fact that people spoke English there and she had no Irish ancestors. She didn’t want to go to a place where anyone looked like her.

  Rain pissed on the plane’s windows when they landed. A stewardess came through one last time practically giving away duty-free cigarettes and booze. Dot contemplated a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, but didn’t buy it. The idea of alcohol sickened her now. She hadn’t had a drop since her aunt’s funeral.

  Off the plane, the airport was small, humble: an airport that might be seen in a fairy tale or a children’s book. Its shops sold questionable sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and the smallest bottles of Coke Dot had ever seen. She waited for a bus that was an hour and a half late. When it finally came, Dot and the other tourists—Italians, some Scandinavian varietals, a plump couple from Texas—lumbered aboard. The radio loudly played a pop song she’d never heard of. The rain dripped steadily, and though she was safely inside a vehicle, she still felt damp.

  At the hotel, the concierge slipped her a list of things to do and tour, but Dot didn’t feel like actually seeing the city—she just wanted to be away and alone. She lay in bed and watched TV, much of it American reality shows and Australian soaps. On CNN, there was a report of another school shooting. Out the window: buses, more rain, men with identical pasty, doughy faces quickly hurrying down the sidewalks. In the afternoon, after a snooze, she took a walk around Temple Bar. She stamped through puddles on Grafton Street and listened to a busker playing Beatles songs on a piccolo. Then, in a used bookstore window, she saw a copy of The Bell Jar. It had the same cover as the book Dorothy had given her the day she died.

  Well, it seemed Dot couldn’t get away from Dorothy, after all.

  She sank down onto a bench, the water on the seat soaking through her jeans. What had happened blazed inside her, and her perspective on the crime flip-flopped a few times a minute. Had it been an accident, or had she meant to do it? Was she a liar, or was she a fool? Was her aunt poisoning her, or had it been a colossal mistake? Were her boyfriend and mother demonizing an outlier because they felt threatened and jealous by her, or did they have true cause for concern? Was Dot going to heaven for what she’d done, or was she going to hell? On second thought, Dot didn’t believe in heaven. Hell, though, was another story. Hell wasn’t a myth. Hell was inevitable.

  Was Dorothy in hell now? Dot had to think she was.

  Two days later, she took a flight to London and stayed at a hotel in Pimlico. But in a newsstand: an article about Dorothy’s death (Troubled Recluse Dead on Highway). The Los Angeles cover was unearthed. A woman next to Dot at the newsstand was reading the same article, and Dot, afraid of being spotted, pulled her hood over her head and darted away.

  Another picture of Dorothy at a rest stop in Brussels. A news spot on televisi
on in Amsterdam. Dot made a bunker for herself in a hash bar, eating spiked brownies and smoking spliffs until she couldn’t stand. The door swept open, and a black-haired figure stepped in: Dorothy? A short woman with protruding teeth took a seat at a high stool and perused the menu. Dot’s eyes dropped closed. Wherever she went, there was Dorothy.

  Staggering home that night, she noticed an Amsterdam police officer on horseback giving her a strange look. She shot up straight, suddenly sober. Could he know? Was she an international criminal? He gave her a nod, asked her something in Dutch. Dot shook her head and moved on, but once she got back to her room, she curled into a ball and felt her heartbeat thudding against her knees. The police had never asked her questions about Dorothy’s death, but maybe they should. Maybe her family protecting her wasn’t fair. Maybe her promise to her mother to keep quiet wasn’t right. A life had still been taken, after all, and Dot had important information to put the pieces together. Even if she had done it in self-defense, Dorothy’s death wasn’t a suicide. But it wasn’t as if turning herself in would preserve her aunt’s reputation. Turning herself in would destroy it. All those people who were pitying Dorothy now for falling into traffic would understand what a monster she was.

  The spooky gleam from the red lights in the prostitute’s windows across the street continued to burn. The women behind the glass pivoted and posed all night, it seemed, disappearing only to take a client. Dot rolled over on the stiff mattress. Maybe the world needed to know what a monster Dorothy was.