I read a lot about girls without fathers: girls whose fathers left before they’d been born, girls whose beloved fathers had died when they were young, girls whose fathers turned out to have a secret family on the other side of the country. In all the books and essays and articles I read, I couldn’t find anything written about girls like me.
Girls whose fathers tried to leave, and failed.
My father stayed alive, he went to therapy, he (mostly) took his meds. But the house stayed heavy.
For a long time, I blamed my mother.
In the beginning, I asked: Why can’t you make him better,
find him better doctors,
adjust his meds,
make him happy?
She sent him to new therapists and new psychiatrists. Sometimes he got better, for a little while. Sometimes he got worse.
Eventually, I stopped asking her to find him new therapists or better medication.
Instead: Why don’t you leave him?
Then: Don’t you love me enough to leave him?
Finally: I’m not going to end up like him.
And I didn’t.
My heart is pounding when I ring the doorbell to the Harts’ sprawling ranch house. I’m going to give this woman a piece of my mind. She’s going to admit what she did. She’s going to tell everyone.
She has to.
When she answers the door, she looks different than the last time I saw her. Instead of a black suit, she’s wearing a cream-colored blouse with ill-fitting wrinkled tan slacks. Her hair isn’t pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, but falling across her face in blond waves. It’s not nearly as long as Eliza’s was, and maybe a shade darker, but you can still tell that Eliza got her hair from her mother. There are dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot, as though she’s been crying. She’s holding a tissue tightly in her left hand.
“Ellie Sokoloff.” She even sounds different. Her voice sounds thinner, as though the woman speaking isn’t a person at all but a balloon that’s slowly deflating. She doesn’t even look surprised to see me. Maybe mourners have been showing up for days to pay their respects. Or maybe she’s just too tired to muster something as frivolous as surprise.
I spent the drive to Menlo Park silently rehearsing what I’m going to say to Mrs. Hart:
I know about Eliza.
I know what you did to her.
You have to come clean.
You have to tell the truth.
This is all your fault.
But now that I’m standing in front of her, I feel tongue-tied. “Mrs. Hart,” I begin slowly.
“Who’s that?” Mrs. Hart cuts in, putting her hand up over her eyes like a visor. She nods at Sam, still sitting in the driver’s seat of his car in the driveway.
“That’s my roommate, Sam.”
“Why don’t you both come in?” She waves Sam out of his car and gestures for us to come inside. This is nothing like I expected: no angry confrontation, no tearful confession, no doors slamming in my face. I take a deep breath and step across the threshold.
I don’t think the living room has been cleaned since the funeral. Plastic plates litter the coffee table, the couch cushions are crushed and out of place, the light carpet is dotted with footprints, and there are stray napkins wadded up on the end tables. It looks like Eliza’s mother told the caterers to pack up their stuff and leave, sent her housekeeper away, and closed the doors.
Now she drops onto a chair as though she weighs a thousand pounds and the effort of being on her feet has exhausted her. Sam and I sit on the couch across from her. Her eyes are closed. She looks smaller than she did before. Her clothes look too big, like maybe she hasn’t eaten in days.
“I should offer you something to drink.” She opens her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“No, we’re sorry,” Sam responds before I can. “It was rude of us to just knock on your door out of the blue like this.”
She doesn’t answer, just fixes her gaze on me. Her eyes are exactly the same color as Eliza’s. The dark purple circles beneath them bring out the blue.
I know about Eliza. I know about Eliza. I know about Eliza.
She fiddles with her necklace. A tiny cross on a gold chain. “What brings you here, dear?”
I flinch when she calls me dear. It’s hard to hate someone who calls you dear.
“I wanted to ask you about Eliza,” I say finally. My mouth feels sticky. I swallow. “Do you think she might have been … I mean, Mack told us she was—I mean …” I swallow and gaze at the ceiling. “I remembered something that happened in your husband’s study when I was in first grade.”
Mrs. Hart doesn’t ask what I remembered. In fact, she shudders like she knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“I’m sorry to bring it up,” I stutter. I don’t look at Sam. I know the expression on his face will tell me to be quiet, just let this poor woman grieve. “I just—well, I know Eliza struggled with depression like her father did.”
“Not exactly like her father,” Mrs. Hart corrects. “My husband is bipolar. Eliza was diagnosed as a unipolar depressive when she was fourteen.”
I’m taken aback by how easily she offers up this information after she went to such lengths to conceal it while Eliza was alive. I’ve never heard of unipolar depression. I consider the word: If bipolar means two opposite moods—the lows of depressions and the highs of mania—then unipolar must mean that you get trapped in just one of the moods. Depression, obviously.
“Well,” I continue tentatively, “I was thinking that if she’d just gotten some help—”
Mrs. Hart opens her mouth like she’s going to laugh, but no sound comes out. “I used to think the same thing.”
The question slips out of my mouth quickly, like the words are slippery: “But then why didn’t you let her get the help she needed?”
“Dear, I begged that girl to get help. I sent her to therapists, but she refused to talk to them. Made appointments with psychiatrists who prescribed her medicine she refused to take. For a few months there, I actually crushed up her medication and tried to feed it to her in ice cream like she was a naughty puppy.”
I shake my head. “But Mack said—” I cut myself off before I can finish the thought.
Eliza must have lied to Mack, too.
Finally, I say, “I don’t understand. If you were willing to get her the help she needed, then why did she—” I can’t bring myself to finish the sentence, but it doesn’t matter. The words I don’t say seem to hang in the air between us.
Why did she kill herself?
Mrs. Hart shakes her head, tears hovering in the corners of her eyes, making them even bluer. “Eliza didn’t want help. She took her illness as proof of her worthlessness instead of the thing that tricked her into feeling worthless.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mrs. Hart smiles faintly. “Did you know my husband still prefers to say that the scars on his wrists are from the time he broke a scotch glass?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “It took me years to realize that it wasn’t me he was lying to. He was lying to himself.” She shakes her head. “Eliza learned from him. As though shame could be genetic.”
Eliza was the one who worried about saving face, not her mother.
“But Mr. Hart got help,” I say finally. “He takes medication.”
Mrs. Hart doesn’t ask how I know this. “Sometimes,” she says sadly. She blinks, and a few of her tears overflow. She doesn’t wipe them away. “And not always as instructed by his doctors. Eliza saw that her father didn’t exactly get better as the years went by—he had good periods and bad periods. He didn’t always take his meds when and how he should, and they had side effects—weight gain, weight loss. Sleepiness, sleeplessness. He took medication for the medication.” She almost laughs.
“I had no idea.”
“Most people don’t. Most people see commercials for the latest antidepressant and assume that the only people struggling with mood disorders a
re the ones who haven’t taken a magic pill yet.”
“You make it sound like Eliza was right. Like she never had a chance.”
Mrs. Hart shakes her head. “No. Treatment can work wonders. But it has to be administered properly. By the time I understood how sick my husband was, he’d wreaked havoc on his body. He’d spent years mixing medications, taking them improperly, self-medicating with alcohol, skipping therapy—you name it. Sometimes I thought even his doctors gave up on him. How can I blame Eliza for losing hope?” She sighs. “I should have taken her from this house years ago. I should have protected her from all that hopelessness.”
“But then …” I stop myself. I’ve already asked so many personal questions.
But Mrs. Hart finishes for me. “Why didn’t I leave?” I nod. “I thought it would be worse. I was scared that he might do more damage without us here.” She takes a deep breath. “And … I suppose I thought I could save them both.
“I tried to stop her from going back to Ventana Ranch in January,” Mrs. Hart adds suddenly, urgently, like she needs us to know this. “We argued all through the holidays. She promised that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. Insisted she would be sadder if I kept her out of school. That it would be worse if everyone there knew about her. I said we’d come up with a cover story, but she said it was no use, they’d find out, and everything she’d worked so hard for would be ruined.”
Mrs. Hart shakes her head. “I gave in. I never could say no to her, whether it was a new dress or a new car.” She swallows. Over the years, there must have been so many toys, so many clothes, so many gifts she gave her daughter, wondering which would be the one that finally made her little girl happy.
“I told myself as long as she’s under eighteen, I can intervene if I need to.” Mrs. Hart’s voice is hoarse, as though she can’t quite believe that intervention isn’t an option anymore. I read once that denial is the first stage of grief, but I don’t think I ever really understood what that meant before. It’s not that Mrs. Hart doesn’t know Eliza’s dead—of course she knows it, the detritus from the funeral reception are right in front of her—but she doesn’t quite believe it.
“I could have forced her into a treatment center. I should have forced her. Now she’ll always suffer.”
“Her suffering is over now,” I suggest softly. It’s the kind of thing people say. It’s the kind of thing we want to believe. But then I remember what Sam told me: He didn’t want his mother to die, even if that meant prolonging her suffering. I wince, not sure whether I’ve said the right thing.
Mrs. Hart shakes her head. “No. She died without hope. She’ll never live long enough to have the chance to feel better.” Her voice gets quieter and thinner with each syllable. I have to lean forward to hear her.
“Maybe it was an accident,” I say, my voice still quiet. “That’s what the police think. You told Mack—”
Mrs. Hart flinches at the sound of Mack’s name, though she doesn’t ask how I know about him. “I think I was wrong about him,” she says.
I stiffen. Wrong to tell the police to let him go?
She says, “I thought he was dangerous for my daughter, that their relationship was too intense. But maybe intense was what she needed.” She stares at the wall behind me before refocusing her gaze on my face. “I told the police that I believed it was an accident. That she’d never been suicidal before. They believed me. They didn’t even pull her medical records. Or perhaps my brother-in-law pulled some strings to keep them from digging too deep.” Mrs. Hart sits up straight, smoothing her shirt over her torso. “But I know the truth.”
“What’s the truth?” My question comes out as a whisper.
Mrs. Hart’s voice sounds even smaller. “They found her wearing my dress. It was her favorite when she was little. Even after it went out of style, she never let me throw it away.”
“I remember that dress,” I say softly. “You wore it the first day of kindergarten.”
“Did I?”
I nod. Mrs. Hart shrugs like she can’t understand what was so memorable about it. “It was just a plain little day dress. Entirely out of fashion nowadays. But Eliza always said she was going to wear it herself when she was big enough. You’d have thought it was my wedding dress or something.”
“She could make anything stylish,” I say.
“Yes, she could,” Mrs. Hart agrees. “I gave her the dress when she turned sixteen, but she never wore it. She said she was saving it.” Mrs. Hart pauses, almost choking on her next words. “For a special occasion.” She takes a ragged breath. “It was her way of leaving a note.”
I don’t think I really believed Eliza killed herself until this moment.
Mrs. Hart told Mack, You can’t prove anything.
Mack couldn’t. But she could.
I lace my fingers through Sam’s and squeeze.
“Why didn’t you tell Mack the truth?” I manage to ask finally. “He thinks you didn’t let her get help.”
“My daughter had her reasons for telling Mack what she did.”
“And you’re not going to tell the police what really happened?”
“No.”
“Why not?” I’m not asking for myself, not anymore. I’m asking for Eliza now.
Mrs. Hart closes her eyes again. “Because I think that’s what Eliza would have wanted me to do. And because keeping her secrets is the last thing I can do for my daughter.” She opens her eyes and looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, but it feels like she’s asking a question:
Will you keep her secrets, too?
“What are you going to do?” Sam asks as he merges onto Highway 1. The Pacific Ocean stretches out to our right, sparkling in the fading sunlight and unimaginably big.
“I don’t know.”
Mrs. Hart offered us tea again, and again we said no. We apologized for disturbing her and excused ourselves. For a split second, I wanted to invite her to come with us. It seemed almost cruel to leave her in that house. The air inside was thick with grief. But then, I guess Mrs. Hart will take her grief with her wherever she goes from now on.
I can’t believe I ever thought she might turn Eliza’s room into a gym or a closet. For Mrs. Hart, no matter if they clean out the drawers or get rid of the clothes, the first room off the long hallway in her house will probably never be anything but Eliza’s room.
She will always be Eliza’s mother.
She will never stop missing her daughter.
She will always wonder if there was something she could have done differently, something that would’ve kept Eliza alive.
With each turn of the wheels, we’re getting closer to Ventana Ranch. Closer to the students who hate me.
“I would back you up if you wanted to tell,” Sam says. “They might believe it coming from the both of us.”
“Do you think I should tell?”
Sam doesn’t answer.
I say, “It might help people to know that even someone like Eliza Hart had issues. I mean, if Eliza hadn’t been so determined to keep her problems secret, she might have gone to treatment instead of coming back to school in January.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe someone else has secret problems, and maybe if they knew about Eliza, they wouldn’t be so ashamed.”
“Someone like you?” Sam’s voice is gentle.
“I’ve gotten plenty of help. Eight therapists, remember?”
“You kept your phobia secret from everyone at Ventana Ranch.”
“Not from you.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Why does it have to count?”
It’s dusk as we round a cliff in Monterey. The ocean is getting dark. Soon, the water will look black instead of blue.
“Ellie,” Sam says softly, and I know he wants to talk about the fight we had earlier. “I don’t think you’re a freak. I never thought that.”
He continues, “And I didn’t mean you were obsessed with her in a bad way. I just meant—you seemed to care an
awful lot about a girl you barely knew.”
It never felt like I barely knew her. Not while she was still alive, anyway. It was only after she died that I realized how little I—how little any of us—really knew about her.
“I couldn’t help it,” I answer finally. “On some level, it still felt like she was my best friend, you know?” I never stopped picturing her the way she was at age seven, the only best friend I’d ever had.
Sam nods. “My mom’s been gone for years, and I still think of her as my best friend.”
“That’s different.”
“Not completely.”
We drive in silence for a few miles. “So you think I should tell?” I ask finally. “Because mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of?”
“Yes.” Sam nods. “But I don’t think you should tell about Eliza.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s her secret, and maybe it never should have been a secret, but she wanted it to be.”
I nod.
“But,” Sam adds, “I do think you should tell about you.”
We drive in silence until Sam pulls into the student parking lot an hour later. “You know, I could teach you to drive,” he offers. “That way, next time you want to confront a grieving mother about her daughter’s suicide, you won’t need me to play chauffeur.”
I groan. “That’s a terrible joke.”
“I know.” Sam grins. “But one of us had to say something.” He opens his door and gets out of the car, so I do the same. I close the door behind me and lean against the Camry.
“Let me ask you something,” I begin. Sam walks around to my side of the car and stands in front of me, less than an arm’s length away. “If you don’t think I should tell the truth about Eliza, why did you offer to back me up if I did?”
Sam steps toward me. The sun has set completely now. It’s cold but my roommate’s breath is warm against my face when he speaks. “Because I want to help you.”
“But they’d hate you, too. You wouldn’t be able to go back to normal—back to hanging out with Cooper and …” I bite my lip, swallowing the rest of my sentence: back to hooking up with other girls.
R.I.P. Eliza Hart Page 21