R.I.P. Eliza Hart

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  “I know,” I say softly. Suddenly, I feel like crying. I bite my lip and stare out the window. The breeze blows my hair across my face. “I just don’t want to be a freak anymore.” I can barely make the words fit around the lump in my throat. I’m surprised Sam can hear me.

  “I don’t think you’re a freak.”

  I laugh, but it comes out sounding like a cackle, the same sour sound I heard from Mack and Sam. I think about our classmates in the buses up ahead of us, heading to a funeral like it’s a field trip. “You’re in the minority,” I say finally.

  Sam shrugs. “I’m used to that.” He takes his eyes off the road long enough to turn to me and grin.

  I smile back. The lump in my throat shrinks.

  Food is laid out on tables set up in a row across the dining room. It’s warm in here—there’s a skylight letting the sun in—and the cheese is sweating under plastic wrap. They’re waiting for more mourners to get here before they open the containers, though the housekeeper says we’re welcome to help ourselves if we’d like. We apologized for being early. Sam explained that we must’ve mixed up the time, and she nodded warmly, as if to say no one expects you to remember those details at a time like this.

  I don’t recognize her. Maybe the Harts had a different housekeeper when I knew them. Or maybe she’s just a temp, hired for the day to help out with all these guests. Maybe this woman never even met Eliza.

  I recognize the dining room table, even though it’s been pushed off to the side. I run my hands across the smooth dark wood. This table looks like something that should be in a mansion in England. It feels utterly out of place in this bright, sunny California home.

  “Please excuse me.” The housekeeper gestures to a few blank spots on the table, indicating food that has yet to be prepared. “I’m afraid there’s still so much to do in the kitchen. Will you two be all right by yourselves until the others arrive?” She sounds so kind that I almost feel bad. Because we’d like nothing more than for her to disappear into another room, leaving us free to explore.

  When the housekeeper is out of sight, Sam nods in the direction of the living room. The walls aren’t the same color I remember; they’ve been painted a sort of dusky gray with cream-colored trim. Instead of the terra-cotta tile floors that cover so many California homes, the floors are hardwood, with an enormous antique-looking rug in the center of the room. I don’t remember if this is the same couch, but I do recognize a carved ivory end table.

  “Remember anything?” Sam murmurs.

  “Just the end table.”

  Eliza once left a glass of apple juice on that end table and it left a water ring. Cassie, her babysitter, was worried that we’d get into trouble, but Eliza wasn’t. She just moved a lamp so it covered the ring and told Cassie it was okay. I remember thinking that I’d never be as grown-up as Eliza. Even now, a decade later, I’d still be scared of getting yelled at by my mom if I ruined a piece of furniture. And none of our furniture is as nice as that end table.

  At home—back in Manhattan—our living room walls are littered with family photos. Framed pictures of Wes and of me as a baby, of my mother’s parents, of her grandparents, whom she never met, who never made it out of Poland during the Second World War. The walls in the Hart living room are blank except for one enormous piece of modern art. I wonder how much it’s worth.

  We’re not ostentatious, I remember Eliza saying to me once.

  What’s ostentatious?

  It means we don’t show off.

  I nodded. Our kindergarten teacher said that nobody likes a show-off.

  There are no knickknacks on the surfaces; at home, our end tables are covered in Wes’s basketball trophies. (Mom is too proud of them to let Wes keep them in his own room. She wants them on display for everyone to see.)

  The living room opens up into a more casual room. The den, I guess. Or maybe they called it the family room, I don’t remember. I do remember sitting on the carpeted floor, staring up at the TV screen and watching Disney princess movies. Eliza had every princess movie, even the old ones that my parents thought were too boring. They were never boring (though now I shudder to think of Snow White encased in that glass coffin). Cassie brought us cookies and made us promise not to get crumbs on the carpet. I close my eyes and picture myself eating my cookie holding my paper towel up around my face like a bib, ready to catch any stray crumbs. The cookies were store-bought, but not from a package like the cookies at my house. These cookies had come from a local bakery.

  When I open my eyes, Sam is looking at me expectantly. I shake my head. Cookies aren’t the kind of memories we’re looking for.

  We walk past a wall of sliding doors that lead out to the backyard. The deck where Eliza would drive her oh-so-cool electric car.

  We turn into a long hallway.

  “Bedrooms,” I whisper, surprised by how certain I am. I remember Eliza’s parents’ room is at the end of the hall, behind double doors. But there are three doors between here and there: Eliza’s room, a hall closet, and a third door that I don’t remember. A guest room, maybe.

  We head toward the first door. That’s Eliza’s room. Or it was, the last time I was here. For the second time today, I feel like I am stalking her, just like she said. Who else but a stalker would sneak into her room the day of her funeral?

  “Sam,” I whisper. “Is this—are we doing the right thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It seems so … disrespectful. Going into her room like this. Without her permission.”

  Sam’s face softens. “I know,” he agrees, hesitating. “It’s your call.”

  Finally, I turn the knob and open the door. I can tell Sam is holding his breath as we cross the threshold. He thinks my memories will come flooding back the instant we step inside.

  It’s more of a trickle than a flood. I remember Eliza’s full-size sleigh bed, the wood as shiny and polished as it was when we were little. I remember the creamy wallpaper with subtle pink splashes that look sort of like abstract flower petals, and the thick champagne-colored carpet that was so soft Eliza once told me it was made of rabbit fur. For one whole day, I believed her.

  But I don’t think any of these memories explain why she was afraid of me.

  “Still nothing?” Sam can’t hide the disappointment in his voice.

  I shake my head. “Nothing important.”

  I rub my hands up and down my bare arms. “Do you think Eliza’s parents have come in here since she died?”

  “I don’t know. The police have probably been in here at least, right?”

  I nod, imagining Detective Roberts in his tweed jacket, combing through the room in search of some insight into Eliza’s life, some clue into her death.

  I open the door to Eliza’s bathroom. (En suite, of course.) The floor is covered in tiny white tiles, and her sink is the old-fashioned kind that doesn’t have a cabinet beneath it. Luckily there’s a window facing the front yard, so I don’t have to hesitate before stepping inside. There’s a shiny glass medicine cabinet, and I bite my lip when I open it, not sure what I think I’m going to find. I try to think of something scandalous that might be hiding in there: Midol? Birth control pills?

  But the medicine cabinet is empty. I mean, empty. There’s not so much as a bottle of Advil. Was Eliza so perfect that she didn’t even get headaches? Or maybe her parents already cleaned it out.

  I go back into her room and open one of her drawers. It’s full of clothes. Maybe her parents will wait months before they get rid of her clothes, her books, her belongings. Maybe next year they’ll turn this into a guest room or a gym or a luxurious walk-in closet. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before these four walls aren’t Eliza’s Room anymore.

  Someday it will become just a room.

  I step back into the center of the room and look around like a tourist taking in the streets of Manhattan.

  “There aren’t any pictures.” It’s even more bare than the living room.

  “What
do you mean?” Sam asks.

  “No pictures of her with Arden and Erin or with the swim team. No posters of her favorite bands or school banners or—or anything.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to mess up the wallpaper.”

  I shrug. Maybe she didn’t care enough about her friends to display photos of them. After all, she kept secrets from them, right? They didn’t know about the trees, didn’t know about Mack.

  Didn’t know the truth about me.

  “Maybe …” I head for a closed door on the other side of her bed. Her closet. I remember it was a walk-in closet and not very practical for hide-and-seek because it was so big that even if I tried to hide behind her clothes she could see me.

  There’s a small round window at the end of the closet up by the ceiling, kind of like a porthole. Not much, but it’s enough that maybe I can step inside without having an attack. If I leave the door open. And Sam comes with me.

  The rods and shelves are stuffed with clothes. There’s a big unopened box in the center of the closet. I see it was shipped from Ventana Ranch—someone must have packed up the belongings from her dorm room. I wonder if Erin or Arden kept an item or two for themselves before everything was sent away. A favorite sweater or T-shirt, something to remember their best friend by.

  I point to a rod filled with dresses. “I used to hide there,” I say. “Behind her clothes. But we were so little then that her clothes weren’t long enough to cover me up.” I get on my hands and knees. The closet is covered with the same champagne carpet. I breathe in: It smells the same, like cedar and lavender. Suddenly, I’m a first grader again, and listening for Eliza to call out, Ready or not, here I come! I used to press myself flat against this wall. I push aside the dresses.

  “What the hell?” Sam says.

  The wall where I used to hide isn’t blank. It isn’t even covered in wallpaper. It’s covered in pictures. Some look like printed photos that Eliza took herself and some look like they’ve been ripped from magazine and newspaper articles. There are even a few drawings in there, sketches that maybe Eliza did herself.

  There must be a hundred pictures here, layered on top of one another like a collage. Page after page, image after image of the woods around our campus.

  Some of the pictures show tall trees, healthy, strong, and untouched. But others are pictures of butchered trees—the trees Eliza helped Riley and Mack gain access to. There are old-fashioned Big Sur postcards and one black-and-white picture of a tree with a tunnel carved into the bottom big enough for a car to drive through. There are pine needles and pinecones taped to the wall so the collage is three-dimensional.

  “Wow,” I breathe. “It must’ve taken her months to collect all this.”

  “Why do you think she did it?”

  “No clue.” In the center of the college is a row of photographs. An enormous tree, healthy and strong. The same tree with a burl gouged out of the center of its trunk, I guess after Riley and Mack did their dirty work. Another photo: The same tree’s pine needles are turning brown, and the wound at its center is dark with sap. Another: The tree’s branches are dipping downward, collapsing under their own weight, the weight they’d held up for decades before. Another: The wound is dry now, the wood so pale it looks almost like bone. The branches that dipped down are completely bare, unable to sustain even the life of a pine needle.

  And a final photo, a selfie of Eliza with the tree behind her. She looks different. I mean, she’s still beautiful blond Eliza, but she’s not smiling. She isn’t looking at the camera, but looking past it. Her eyes are completely blank, like she was trying to make her face look like the tree behind her.

  Before I can stop myself, I reach out and pull that photo from the wall.

  “What are you doing?” Sam asks.

  I don’t know. It’s not like this is a particularly good picture of her. It’s nothing like the pictures people pasted to their Rest in Peace, Eliza Hart posters back at school, nothing like the pictures people have been posting to social media since she was found: Eliza in between Erin and Arden with her arms overhead after a swim meet or grinning in the sunshine at the beach.

  I slip the photo into my bag. I feel like I’m supposed to have it.

  It’s still cold but not as bad.

  The air feels soft, like it’s made of silk.

  The pain isn’t as sharp. It’s dull, like I’m covered in bruises and someone or something is pressing against them.

  And I’m tired. Not actually sleepy, but not so very wide-awake, either. Not quite so wired. More like a normal person feels around 3:00 p.m., when they need a hit of caffeine or a snack to make it through the afternoon.

  My dad was on the Stanford swim team. I can’t imagine him caring about something consistently enough to work as hard as he’d have had to work to make it on to the team, but I know it’s true. I’ve seen pictures of him at meets and came across a box of medals in the closet in his office.

  I started swimming because I thought it would make him happy, back when I still believed that anything I did made a difference. I was good, so good we thought maybe I could swim for Stanford one day, too.

  Dad used to come to my meets. He didn’t stand up and cheer. He never argued with the coaches about how they were teaching us or complained that we’d been cheated when we lost. He just sat in the bleachers quietly. I’m not sure he even watched me swim. But he was always there. That was the most he could muster.

  For him, it was a lot. He knew I was doing it for him, and showing up was as close as he could come to saying thank you.

  But I’d failed. My swimming didn’t make him happy.

  When he was sick, nothing did.

  Unless he was the other kind of sick. The kind that made him care so much it was scary. The doctors prescribed pills called mood stabilizers—I always thought that sounded more like some groovy recreational drug left over from the 1970s than a medically prescribed pill packed with chemicals—but he didn’t like to take them.

  I wonder what would’ve happened to me if I took the pills that were supposed to keep a patient calm. Can you care less than not at all?

  I don’t know if it was a trick of genetics or the result of growing up the way I did or some pernicious combination of the two, but I only ended up having half of what was wrong with him. I never had the caring-too-much problem.

  Lucky me.

  Not that I blamed him. I always believed it was my mother’s fault.

  She married him.

  She had a child with him.

  She stayed with him.

  She kept his secrets.

  And I did, too.

  If I felt things, I think I’d feel sorry for what I did to Ellie Sokoloff at Ventana Ranch, making everyone hate her. It wasn’t her fault she was at the house that day.

  If Ellie Sokoloff hadn’t been at the house that day, maybe she and I would have stayed friends.

  We might have hatched a plan to keep her parents together and her family living in Menlo Park, just like kids in the movies.

  Ellie and I could have made our way through elementary school hand in hand.

  In middle school, she would’ve stood up and cheered at my swim meets.

  She might have sat next to my dad and pointed out my lane in the water.

  Maybe everything would have turned out differently if Ellie and I stayed friends. The butterfly effect and all that.

  Maybe not.

  I said I didn’t plan this, and I wasn’t lying.

  I wasn’t one of those angsty teenagers who sat around plotting and planning her death.

  I didn’t have a fascination with razor blades and I didn’t dream of drowning—I didn’t sleep enough to dream.

  I didn’t romanticize jumping off a bridge or driving my car into a tree.

  But I did spend a lot of time thinking about sleep. I used to tiptoe into my roommates’ bedroom in the middle of the night and watch them, their eyes blinking to show that they were in REM sleep and their chests rising and fal
ling at a steady pace.

  Sometimes I even made a small sound,

  opened the window,

  turned on the light,

  just to see if they would wake up. But they went on sleeping and dreaming through the night, eight hours and more.

  I don’t know why I watched them.

  Maybe I thought my brain could learn something,

  or perhaps I was just jealous,

  or I suppose I was just holding out hope that my poor brain would get some rest though osmosis.

  It took me years to understand why Dad avoided half his meds. For a long time, I thought he was just careless. I didn’t realize he was doing it on purpose.

  He was willing to crash if it meant he got to fly first.

  He loved the mania more than he loved me,

  more than he loved my mother,

  more than he loved anything at all.

  He took up all the space in the house, breathed all the air. We watched him, waiting to see what was coming next: up or down or some tightrope walk in between.

  I didn’t want to be like him.

  At first, I told my mother she was just being paranoid.

  Just because I’m his daughter doesn’t mean I’m like him.

  But I was lying. I knew what it was. I just didn’t want to admit it.

  Mom got me pills. Sometimes I took them, but they never helped. She said I didn’t give them a chance; they needed time to kick in. I said she’d never given me a chance.

  Or maybe I just never had a chance.

  We close Eliza’s door behind us. “Where to next?” Sam whispers.

  “Maybe we should head back to the living room before the housekeeper catches us.”

  “You’re giving up?”

  “No, it’s just … if Eliza’s room didn’t jar my memory, what will?” This is starting to feel hopeless.

  “Mack said it had to do with her father, right?” Sam asks, and I nod. “Maybe we should head to his room. His and Mrs. Hart’s, I mean.”

  Sam heads toward the double doors at the end of the hall, but I don’t follow. His room. His room.