It was probably technically his office or his study, but Eliza called it his room.
We weren’t allowed in there, but she showed it to me once, opening the door slowly like it was a secret passageway.
The third door, the one I thought might be a guest room—that was it. I rest my hand on the doorknob, cool and smooth beneath my skin. I hesitate. Mr. Hart’s room was off-limits.
I open the door. There’s no carpet in here and no area rugs, just the shiny hardwood floor. In the center of the room is an enormous wooden desk, but there’s nothing on top of it, not a paper or file in sight. Not even a desk lamp.
“Elizabeth,” Sam hisses from down the hall. “What are you doing?”
I don’t answer. I’m not sure I can answer. It feels like my limbs have taken on a life of their own, like they’re stepping into the room of their own accord and I don’t have any say over it.
Sam slips inside, shutting the door behind us.
And the water rushes in.
I gasp desperately for breath. Sam puts his hands on my shoulders, trying to lock eyes with me, but I can’t make my gaze be still.
“Shhh,” Sam coos. He’s trying to comfort me, but there’s an edge to his voice.
I’m scaring him. I’m scaring me.
What’s happening? Why is this happening?
I turn my head frantically, taking in every corner of the room. Mr. Hart’s study isn’t small. There are enormous floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the backyard, framed by gauzy lace curtains.
Windows. Air.
I twist myself from Sam’s grasp and head for the windows. I try to wrench one open, but my hands are trembling too hard. Finally, I rest my forehead against the smooth, cool glass.
I try to use my internal voice to self-soothe, try to think, There, there, you’ll be okay, you’re safe. But I can’t hear the sound of my internal voice over my ragged attempts to breathe.
My knees go so weak that I start to slide down the glass. As I fall, my cheek brushes against one of the lace curtains.
They didn’t used to be made of lace.
They used to be heavier, velvety.
I thought they were soft, softer even than the carpet Eliza claimed was made of fur.
I rubbed them against my face.
When? How could I when this room was off-limits?
My uneven breaths fog up the glass.
“Elizabeth?” Sam whispers. He reaches for me, but I smack his hands away.
The memory floods my mind:
It was spring. First grade was almost over, and I’d had dozens of playdates here at Eliza’s house and had yet to win a single game of hide-and-seek. I was determined to find a hiding spot where Eliza wouldn’t find me. Not beneath the dining room table or under Eliza’s sleigh-shaped bed.
I rushed down the hallway, hearing Eliza’s voice counting. Ten, eleven, twelve …
I had to hide before she got to twenty.
I can see my seven-year-old fingers gripping the brass doorknob. Can remember my decade-old logic: She’ll never find me in here.
I shut the door and dove behind the curtains. I barely heard it when Eliza shouted Ready or not, here I come! but I could hear her feet shuffling across the carpet as she walked right past the door without so much as pausing. She must have looked for me in her room first, then her parents’ room. Her footsteps faded as she made her way toward the living room.
I was so pleased with myself. Until I heard the door open.
How did she find me so fast?
I stayed frozen in place, holding my breath so she wouldn’t hear me.
But then it wasn’t Eliza’s bare feet I heard against the wooden floor. These footfalls were heavier. This person was wearing shoes.
I shifted so that I could see out through a gap in the curtains. I swallowed a gasp. It was Eliza’s father.
I was going to be in so much trouble.
But he was the one who wasn’t where he was supposed to be! He should have been at work. My dad never came home before dinnertime.
Except … sometimes Eliza’s dad did. Like that time the year before when he came home and we all painted in Eliza’s playroom.
But that day, he’d been laughing and smiling. Now his mouth was pressed into a straight line.
I decided to stay hidden. He’d leave eventually, and then I’d run into the hallway and tell Eliza that I’d been hiding under her bed the whole time, that she must’ve missed me when she looked under there. I’d even let her win if she insisted that it didn’t count since she’d looked in my hiding place.
I just had to wait until Mr. Hart left the room.
It was warm behind the thick cloth. I peeked out and watched him remove his jacket and carefully hang it on a hook on the back of the door. He unbuttoned then rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, revealing long white stripes going up and down his wrists. He poured himself a drink from a cart on the other side of the room. The liquid Mr. Hart swirled in his glass was about the same color as apple cider, but I could tell it was the type of thing Eliza would call a grown-up drink. He sat down on the high-backed leather chair behind his desk and opened the top drawer. He pulled out what I thought was an oversize cigarette—a cigar, I realize now—and held it under his nose, taking a deep breath. He put it in his mouth, but he didn’t light it. He set his drink down on the desk and didn’t drink it. Instead, he pressed his hands to the surface of the desk and traced the wood like he was reading Braille.
Then there was a flash of silver as he moved his hands, and suddenly there was red, red, red, everywhere.
Mr. Hart held up his arms and I saw deep, horrible cuts going longways on either side of his arm like the white lines on his wrists had come open.
I didn’t scream. I still thought he would leave soon and I would be able to make it out without giving myself away, without getting in trouble.
Anyway, Mr. Hart looked so calm that it almost didn’t seem like anything was wrong. He was a grown-up. Grown-ups were the people we were supposed to go to when we hurt ourselves.
It didn’t actually look like he was in pain. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He laid his arms, wound side up, on his armrests. He looked completely relaxed, like was falling asleep.
And that looked very, very wrong.
I started to shake.
I wanted out. Out of my hiding place and out of this room as quickly as possible. Blood was dripping from the chair onto the floor; a long, slimy path of it was headed right toward me. The moment it touched the curtains, I knew they were ruined because once, at a classmate’s birthday party, I’d skinned my knee while wearing a party dress and my mom was so upset. Bloodstains, she told me. We’ll have to throw that dress away.
The blood kept coming, soaking into the cream-colored curtains. The red was so close to my light blue sneakers. I shuffled out of the way as best I could, pressing my back flat against the window. I couldn’t take my eyes off the red liquid spreading across the floor.
I didn’t care if I got in trouble. I had to get out.
I tried. I really tried. But somehow I got twisted up in the curtains. The more I struggled, the tighter they became. The curtains had turned into ropes, and I felt like a character from one of the fairy tales I liked so much, the princess who opened the forbidden door and lived to regret it.
I wanted to turn to face the window so that I wouldn’t have to see the blood, but the curtains were so tight that I couldn’t. It was hard to breathe. I stayed still and held my breath. I didn’t want Mr. Hart to hear me. I wasn’t scared that I would get into trouble for being in this room anymore.
I was scared of Mr. Hart.
I was scared he would do to me whatever he’d done to himself.
I don’t know how long I hid there. I couldn’t see anything anymore—somehow the curtains had fallen across my face—but I heard the door open and the scream when someone (the housekeeper? Cassie?—it didn’t sound like Eliza) saw Mr. Hart. Whoever it was must’ve cal
led an ambulance because soon I heard sirens and EMTs rushing into the room. I heard them shouting words like gauze and pressure and groaning as they lifted him off his chair and onto a gurney.
They didn’t see the little girl hiding in the corner.
Eliza found me after he was gone.
“Where’s Cassie?” I asked.
“In the kitchen on the phone with my mom.” Eliza’s mom didn’t have a job like mine did, but she always had errands or meetings or volunteer groups. “I told her we were in my room.”
It took Eliza a long time to unwrap the curtains. They were twisted and knotted between my arms and legs, pinning me against the window. My legs had fallen asleep from being wrapped so tightly, and I fell onto the floor, onto Mr. Hart’s blood. Some of it got on my face. I could taste it.
“Don’t!” Eliza warned when I started to gag.
It felt like I was choking, but I managed to swallow. I imagined the throw-up going backward down my throat and spreading through my body, soaking my insides.
Eliza helped me up. We crept down the hall to her room, where Cassie thought we’d been all along. Eliza walked on her tiptoes, so I did, too. There were long black streaks on the hall carpet from the wheels of the gurney. I kept my eyes focused on the lines like they were arrows telling me which way to go.
“Elizabeth?” Sam’s whispering, but it sounds like a shout.
I turn around to answer my roommate. But apparently, I’ve gone too long without taking a real breath.
Because the next thing I know, the world goes black.
I wake up with Sam’s face hovering over mine. For a second I think he’s going to kiss me, but then I realize he’s checking to see if I’m breathing normally.
“I’m okay,” I say softly, and Sam sits up, pulling me up along with him.
“You hit your head pretty good when you fell.”
I put my hand to my head. A bump is already blossoming. “I’m fine.”
Sam pulls me up to stand. “Maybe you should splash some cold water on your face.” He leads me toward the bathroom off the study and turns on the water, closing the door behind us. I lean over the sink and duck my head beneath the faucet and drink from the faucet like it’s a water fountain, suddenly parched. The end of my ponytail falls into the water, but I don’t bother holding my hair back.
Eliza made me take off my shoes to walk from her father’s study to her room so that I wouldn’t track blood on the carpet. When we got to her room, she took off my shirt and my pants and put me in her bathtub just like my mom did every night at home. She ran the water hot and held a spray nozzle over my face until I thought I would drown. She didn’t speak, but the rust-colored water in the tub and my ruined clothes on the bathroom floor explained what she was doing. I was covered in blood and she was washing it off.
She held the water over my face and I couldn’t speak.
Now I start to cough, sputtering, gasping for breath. Sam turns off the water.
“Elizabeth.” His voice is stern, somber, lingering over each syllable. “Tell me what’s happening.”
I close my eyes and more memories come:
Eliza toweled me dry and gave me some of her own clothes to wear: leggings and a T-shirt with a rainbow on it.
“What about my clothes?” I asked.
“I can throw them away.”
I shook my head. “My mom will be mad.”
Eliza shrugged. The wallpaper in her bedroom had long since been replaced after our painting party with her dad months earlier. There were no traces of the horse I’d drawn, of the flowers Eliza had painted.
I reached for my sneakers. You could barely see that they used to be blue. I loved those sneakers.
“Maybe if I tell her—”
Bright with tears, Eliza’s gray eyes looked particularly blue, changing color the way I’d always been so jealous of. “You can’t tell!” she shouted, kicking my shoes out of my reach. “You can’t ever tell.”
“Why not?”
Eliza didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Maybe it was a bad dream.” She sounded almost hopeful. She didn’t look at me when she spoke. It was like she wasn’t really talking to me. “You napped in your hiding place and had a bad dream.”
I shook my head. If it was a dream, then how did my clothes get ruined?
“I won’t tell,” I promised.
“You’ll be in trouble if you do.” Eliza sounded like a teacher, not a seven-year-old girl.
“I won’t,” I repeated.
“Good.”
“What was your dad doing?”
“He does that sometimes,” Eliza said, like that answered the question.
“Why?”
“He just does, okay?” Eliza was really shouting now. “And if you don’t shut up about it I won’t let you come over ever again.”
I bit my lip. At that moment, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to come over to Eliza’s house again.
“I’ll let you drive the car,” Eliza offered, her face softening. “Just please don’t talk about it anymore.”
Sam pulls me up so that I’m facing the mirror above the sink. He presses a towel against my face, wiping off all the makeup I’d put on so carefully this morning, pulls my hair out of the ponytail I’d methodically brushed it into. My face is blotchy, and my eyes are bloodshot. The neckline of my black dress is soaking wet. I pull at the hem. I feel sick, like I have the flu and a fever and food poisoning all at once.
My hands are still shaking. I place them on either side of the sink, trying to steady myself.
“I remembered something,” I explain finally.
Somehow, I know it’s a memory. Just like I remember having Cheerios for breakfast this morning or that I slept in my favorite flannel pj’s last night.
I study my reflection in the mirror: the gray-brown eyes, the messy hair, the sweat on my forehead. The lips that Sam kissed a few nights ago. There are tears running down my cheeks. I brush them aside. I wish I could see through my face and into my brain, figure out where that memory had been hiding all these years.
“Is that why you had an attack?” Sam asks. “Because of what you remembered?”
I tighten my grip on the sink, begging my hands to stop shaking. “I guess so.”
I wish my seven-year-old self were here somehow, that I could give her a hug, explain to her what she saw, tell her everything would be okay.
But of course, everything wasn’t okay. It still isn’t.
I saw a man try to kill himself.
He does that sometimes.
The long white stripes I saw on his wrists were scars. Which means that day in the study wasn’t the first time he cut himself like that. Had Eliza seen it, when it happened before? Maybe that’s how she knew what to do: wash away the blood and then promise never to talk about it.
A promise I took so much to heart that somehow I made my brain forget what it had seen altogether.
“It wasn’t always perfect at Eliza’s house,” I say finally. I reach up and tuck my wet hair behind my ears. I already knew that. That day in Capitola, I remembered hearing her parents fight.
“What are you talking about?” Sam asks. “Is it perfect in anyone’s house?”
Maybe not. But I thought it was perfect here. That’s all my dysfunctional brain allowed me to remember: Eliza’s perfect dollhouse and her perfect toys and her perfect electric car and the perfect cookies that Cassie gave us as an after-school snack.
But now I can recall that Eliza’s father wasn’t always fun. He didn’t always come home and offer to finger-paint with us. Sometimes, he came home and walked right past Eliza’s room without saying hello (something my own father never did). Sometimes, he yelled at Eliza to clean up whatever mess we’d made, and sometimes his wife screamed at him to clean up his own messes while he sat in a chair in the living room like he couldn’t move if he tried.
I keep staring at myself in the mirror. Maybe if I had X-ray vision, I could see why my brain works the way it does.
At once, I’m so sick of looking at my own reflection that I open the medicine cabinet just to have something else to look at.
Sam whistles when he sees what’s inside. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much medication. And my mom had cancer.”
I reach out and grab the nearest bottle. “Risperdal.”
“What’s that for?”
I pull my phone from my pocket and Google the name. “It’s an antipsychotic.”
I reach for another bottle, careful to put the Risperdal back where I found it. “Lithium. I’ve heard of that one. Mood stabilizer.”
Another bottle. “Zoloft.”
“Antidepressant,” Sam supplies.
Another bottle. “Klonopin.”
Sam grabs my phone and looks it up. “That’s for anxiety,” he supplies.
Another bottle. “Diazepam.”
“That’s Valium. Also for anxiety. They gave it to my mom to help her sleep.”
Another bottle. “Lorazepam.”
Sam Googles it. “A sedative.”
All the bottles are labeled with the same name: George Hart.
“What do you take all these medications for?” I ask.
Sam shrugs. “Depression?” he guesses.
“But then why the antipsychotics?”
“Bipolar disorder?” he suggests. “They give you mood stabilizers for that, right?”
I don’t know, but I nod anyway.
“Is depression hereditary?” Sam asks suddenly. “Bipolar disorder?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Either way, living with a sick parent isn’t easy. It can really mess with your head.”
I put the last bottle back and close the cabinet, making sure the latch catches. “Just because her father’s sick doesn’t mean Eliza was. It’s not like inheriting your dad’s eye color or your mom’s hair.” I try to sound certain but the truth is, I don’t know. Maybe it’s like height: you can inherit the genes to be over six feet tall but without proper nutrition, you’ll never get there.
I turn my back on the mirror and the medication hiding behind it. “I mean, no one at school—her friends, even Arden and Erin—ever guessed she was depressed. They’d have told the police by now if they thought there was the slightest chance she could’ve killed herself.”
R.I.P. Eliza Hart Page 17