Little Black Lies

by Sandra Block

  “We’re talking about releasing you, you know,” I say, to test whether she does know this.

  Her shoulders tense, then release. She clears her throat but does not look up. “I heard,” she says. But I can tell she is lying. A piece of black hair escapes into her eyes, and she pushes it back behind her ear. “And who makes that decision?”

  “We all do. Dr. Grant has the final say, of course, but it’s a team approach.”

  “Of course,” she answers, not hiding her smirk.

  I tap my foot on a loose tile. “Sofia, do you know why I’m asking you about the release?”

  “No,” she says, the glossy magazine page catching the sun’s glare as she flips it.

  “Do you want to know?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she says. “Enlighten me.”

  Wow, “enlighten.” Big word. Did you learn that in college? Oh no, I’m sorry, I guess not, that’s right: You were confined to a mental hospital. But of course I say none of this. Adderall forces all my best zingers to stay in my mouth. “I won’t know if you’re ready for discharge until we can talk about the reason you’re here.”

  She keeps flipping pages and licks her lips, which look chapped. “Guess I’ll be here for a while then.”

  I shrug but don’t stoop to answer. Grabbing her chart, I stand up to leave, wondering at her purposelessly self-destructive attitude: I won’t talk to you, even if it means I’m stuck here forever. “I’ll be in tomorrow, Sofia.”

  “Okay, Zoe,” she says.

  “That’s Dr. Goldman, actually,” I say, feeling for the first time like Dr. Goldman. As I leave the room, my phone sings out: Dum-dum-dum-dah. Jean Luc. My heart does a polka. If I were Pavlov’s dog, I would salivate.

  What is a kumquat? The text reads.

  Fruit. Look it up. I type.

  U r calling me a fruit?

  U call me cabbage.

  :) Je t’aime.

  Je t’aime, I answer and get ready to see my next patient, who I hope to hell doesn’t have a toothbrush.

  Chapter Five

  Warm blood on my hands, my nightgown damp with sweat, buzzing in my ears. All day long, jagged pieces of the nightmare creep into my thoughts.

  “I’ll try anything,” I say.

  Sam folds his hands together. “Unfortunately, as you may know, there isn’t much research on treating nightmares.”

  “Yes, I know.” I tap my heel against the scratchy blue carpet. “What about dream rehearsal? You mentioned that before.”

  He nods. “That is probably where I’d start.”

  “Okay, let’s do it then.” Patience has never been my strong suit. I had the nightmare again last night. So it wasn’t a one-off. They could be back for good. And I want this fixed, now.

  Sam leans back and uncrosses his legs, his corduroys whisking together. He is wearing brown again, blending into the room as usual. Even his glasses (readers—he only wears them sometimes) are tortoiseshell. I’m surprised they don’t have little anchors on them.

  “We have to start by delving into the dream. I need you to tell me every detail, from the very beginning,” he says.

  I take a deep breath. My nightmare, not my favorite topic of conversation. “Okay. Well, it always starts with my hands.”

  “All right.”

  “They’re bleeding. Like I told you, from something that fell off the house, but I don’t remember that part.”

  “Okay. What happens next?”

  “It’s me as a little girl, and I’m confused. Or maybe it’s me as an adult being confused, I’m not sure.”

  Sam squints his eyes. “I don’t think I’m following you.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure I follow myself.”

  He puts down his yellow pad. “So you’re a little girl in the dream.”

  “Yes, and I’m hiding, but I don’t know who I’m hiding from. I don’t even know where I am. But what I’m saying is, I think the little girl knows; I just don’t remember.”

  “Okay, I see now.” Sam pauses, staring at the wall. “Is it possible you were confused, maybe a little oxygen-deprived, when you were hiding from the fire?”

  I feel myself smiling. This is what I love about therapy, both giving and getting these moments of insight. “Yes.” I never considered the possibility of oxygen deprivation before. Of course I was confused. The thought is exhilarating.

  “So you’re hiding,” he confirms.

  “Yes, and I hear a whirring noise.”

  “What’s that from?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “And actually, it drives me a little crazy. I’m always trying to place that sound, even in the dream.”

  “Okay, so there’s a whirring noise.”

  “And I’m afraid.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And I’ve got my blue teddy bear, Po-Po, who is missing an eye.”

  Sam smiles at the image.

  “And someone’s calling my name, but I’m afraid to come out.”

  “Okay. Do you know who that someone is?”

  “Not really,” I say, but this is only half-true.

  “Go on.”

  “Then the person opens the door.” My heart speeds as I recount this. “And that’s all.”

  Sam nods, digesting this. I catch him glancing at the pewter clock, then down again. “I’m going to give you some homework for next week. I want you to write down the dream, every instant, every little thing you remember. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sometimes just the act of writing down the words diminishes their power over you.”

  “Okay, that makes sense.”

  “Then I want you to extend the dream.”

  “Extend it? What do you mean?”

  “I think part of the problem here is the confusion. The unknown. That may be what’s truly scaring you. The lack of a real ending.”

  “But how do I extend it? I don’t know what happens when the door opens.”

  “Right,” he says, “and I think that’s the crux of the problem.”

  I shift, and the uncomfortable leather couch creaks with me. “So you’re saying give it another ending?”

  Sam sits up in the chair with a smile. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. An ending that you dictate. That you control. An ending that’s not a question mark.”

  “Like?”

  “That’s up to you to decide. What’s a more optimistic, and perhaps realistic, ending to the dream?”

  I pause, thinking. “I don’t know. A fireman coming?”

  “Sounds like a good one.” Sam crosses his legs, the corduroy rubbing again. “You need to bring resolution to the nightmare. I think that could really help.”

  “So how does this work? I just hope the fireman shows up in the dream at the right moment?”

  “Not exactly,” Sam says. “You need to practice it. That’s where the rehearsal part comes in. You run through the dream before you go to bed. Every single moment, especially the end, when the door opens and the fireman enters. You insert your new ending and rehearse that part before you go to sleep.”

  I am picturing a fireman, dressed in bright yellow, bursting through the doorway, ax in hand. Face grubby with soot and sweat, helmet tipping down over his forehead. Saving the day. The thought gladdens me. Much better than the alternative—the unknown, or even worse, the suspected. The idea so terrible that I can’t let it sneak into my brain for a second without falling into a well of self-loathing and guilt. The idea that I do know who was calling me, but I didn’t answer her.

  And maybe, if I had answered her, she would still be alive.

  Chapter Six

  Tell me about my birth mother,” I say.

  We are sitting in her room, Mom in her rocker and me on the corner of the bed, on her crumpled Amish quilt. The ever­green air freshener I bought last week is pumping its heart out to cover the competing smells. We have arranged it so she now has the luxury of a cramped private room, so we don’t have to hear her roommate
rambling on about “Nancy” anymore. Mom looks up from her magazine, which I notice with some distaste is the same magazine Sofia was reading. “What about her?” she asks.

  “Just about her.” I stash my Narcissism book on her nightstand, next to a Gideon Bible. “Beth Winters,” I say, reminding her.

  “Yes, Beth Winters, I know. But why are you so interested in her all of a sudden?”

  Which is a fair question. Probably because I’m dreaming about the fire again. “I don’t know.”

  “Hmph,” she says, glancing back down at the magazine.

  “I have this patient,” I tell her, “who’s a sociopath. She killed her mother when she was, like, fourteen.”

  She looks up abruptly. “That’s terrible,” she says, smoothing the magazine cover with her palm. “We had a few patients like that when I was in social work. So sad, these troubled, troubled kids.” Her eyes take on a faraway glaze. “I remember one case in particular. This young boy who killed his whole…” She shivers. “Never mind. Just sad, so sad.” Then she lets out a chipper, unexpected laugh. “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, but I can still remember those kids.”

  I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t. She just stares at the wall. I clear my throat, trying to sound casual. “So it got me thinking about my own mother, how she died. I just want to find out more about her.”

  She nods, putting the magazine on the nightstand with only a hint of a sigh, as if she is sick of telling this story but will do it just one more time because I insist.

  “Beth Winters,” I say again.

  “Yes, that was her name,” she answers.

  “And she was your best friend,” I say, jogging her memory.

  “Beth was my best friend. You know the story, Zoe. She asked me, if anything ever happened to her, would I raise you, and I said yes.” She takes off her reading glasses, cleaning the lenses with her blanket. “Of course, when someone asks you this you never really think about it. You just say yes. No one ever thinks something will actually happen. If you really thought about it, you might say no.”

  “True,” I say, considering this. There is a pause, my mom mindlessly rubbing her glasses. “And then?”

  “And then she died in the fire, not six months after asking me.” She puts her glasses back on, though they are still dirty. Her rocker knocks against the rose-pink wall, smudging it with wood stain. “You know, I didn’t think I would ever have children. We tried so hard, your father and I, for years we tried. Nearly divorced over it.”

  If I were a cartoon, my mouth would be hanging open. She has never told me this about her and Dad before. She fumbles with the pilled lilac blanket on her lap. Then she starts to clean her glasses with the blanket again. I’m not sure if she forgot she just cleaned them or if she noticed they were still dirty. Then she drops them, silver rims glinting in the sunlight. I pick them up and hand them back to her.

  “Then Beth died. And suddenly, I had a baby of my own.” She smiles at me. “A four-year-old baby.”

  I smooth out a wrinkle in the quilt, pulling the plum diamond straight. “But I never understood something. Why didn’t her family just take me in?”

  She squints as if trying to remember the answer. “I think it was written in her will, so no one could contest it.” She throws me a defensive look, as though I might want to contest it.

  “And my biological father?” I ask. “No one knew his whereabouts?”

  She pauses. “Larry something, I think.”

  She had told me before it was a one-night stand. “Did you ever try to find him?”

  “I don’t remember, honey. Maybe. Probably.”

  “What about her parents?”

  “What is this, twenty questions?” she asks with a nervous smile.

  “No, I’m just trying to fill in some things.”

  “Her parents were gone,” she says, then pauses, thinking.

  “You told me they died of cancer when she was young,” I offer.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she says, relieved to get the answer. “Very sad.”

  “No other family?”

  She looks at the ceiling; the rocker thwacks the wall again. “A sister I think. She was into drugs, I want to say.”

  “Heroin, you told me.”

  “That’s it then.”

  I’m not sure why I’m asking her these questions when I’m the one providing all the answers. She lifts her glasses off her face and starts cleaning the lenses again. This time they are definitely clean, though, sparkling even.

  “It was hard. Of course, your father and I were over the moon with you. But on the other hand”—she drops her glasses again, and I pick them up, as if we are in some bad vaudeville routine—“I lost my best friend. We were like sisters.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “But I had you. And six months later, I was pregnant with Scotty. After all that time thinking I couldn’t have kids, I stopped worrying about it, and boom.” She laughs her deep, throaty laugh. “In a weird way, I always felt like that fire was meant to be, as awful as that sounds.”

  I nod, and she reaches over to take my hand. Her nails have been freshly painted, a French manicure. This is one of the many offered activities in the nursing home, and something she never would have bothered with BD. My hands are ruddy and dry, in need of some lotion. We sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes. In her dementia, there are these odd, unexpected rewards, moments we are closer than we ever have been, or ever would have been.

  “I wish I could remember my birth mom,” I say. “But I don’t. Except for the picture.” My mom knows the picture I’m talking about. The only one I have of my “real” mom, a dog-eared photo of a woman with dark hair and brown eyes. Big, lovely, doe eyes with liquid brown eyeliner and permed frizzy black hair, as if she could have been on her way to a seventies disco. She is looking right at the camera in triumph and holding a fuzzy-headed, puffy-eyed baby: me. And on the back of the photo, in faded blue cursive, was my mom’s writing: “Beth and Zoe—5 days old.”

  “She was the real thing, your mom,” she says. Her hands are fidgeting. I hand her back her magazine.

  “By the way,” I ask, “who’s Tanya?”

  The magazine trembles in her hands. “Who?”

  “You called me Tanya when I was leaving last time. I wondered who you were talking about.”

  “I don’t think I know a—”

  A knock on the door interrupts us. “Med time!” the orderly calls out in her bright voice, poking her head in the room. Her name, I remember now, is Cherry. Cheery Cherry, I thought when I heard it, so now I don’t forget it. Though Cherry is not a name you might forget easily anyway. My mom never remembers, but that’s my mom. She throws back her pills, a pro by now, and Cheery Cherry gives her a thumbs-up of approval and pushes off to the next room.

  “So you don’t know who Tanya is then?”

  “No, honey.” She sinks down farther in her rocker, her face tired and drawn. “I’m not so good with names anymore.”

  I pat her arm, standing up from the bed. “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter.” I straighten the magazine, and the spindly plant that is fighting for its life. “I’m going to let you go.”

  She nods. “Good night,” she says, though the sun is out.

  “Good night,” I answer, remembering how the therapist told us to “meet her where she is at.” It took everything in me not to point out the dangling preposition, but then again, that’s why I’m on Adderall.

  Mom’s eyes are closing. Maybe the meds are making her tired. Her Aricept just got increased. I’ll have to remember to ask the neurologist about that when he comes back next week. The neurologist who can’t explain why my mom suddenly needs a walker, and can’t give her a diagnosis.

  “Could be frontotemporal dementia, Lewy Body. Could be Alzheimer’s.” He rubbed his hands together rapidly, as though there were a fire, not making eye contact. His blazer looked as if he’d slept in it. “Problem is, we never really know until autopsy.”<
br />
  Problem is, the diagnosis is not really helpful at that point! I wanted to scream. Just about as helpful as the neurologist coming to check her eye movements, rotate her arms around, and ask her to remember three things (bread, church, twenty dollars, always the same three things that she never remembers), spending a total of five minutes in the room (possibly eight if I happen to be around) before writing a script for another pill that “may or may not help very much,” and then moving on, shall we say, to the next victim.

  “Tits on a bull,” my brother said as the neurologist squirreled out of the room last time. My brother tightened his arms around his chest, fingers splaying his lightning-bolted biceps out of his sky-blue T-shirt. “Tits on a bull.”

  And on this point, I must say, we most definitely agree.

  Chapter Seven

  I can’t believe this,” I say, skimming through Sofia Vallano’s chart to catch up on anything from overnight.

  Jason bites into an apple. “What?”

  “You should not talk with the food in your mouth,” Dr. A scolds him.

  “I really can’t believe this,” I repeat.

  “Again, what?” Jason asks, opening his mouth and sticking his apple-covered tongue out at Dr. A, who shakes his head in disgust. I have been working with these guys so much lately that sometimes I feel as if I have three brothers. A regular dysfunctional family, us.

  “He hasn’t been listening to a word I’ve said,” I answer.

  “I still don’t know what in tarnation you’re on about,” Jason says, in a Southern drawl he just made up.

  Dr. A whips out his notebook. “And what would be a ‘tarnation’?”

  Jason ignores him.

  “I’m talking about my patient Sofia. Remember, the lady killer? Dr. Grant interviewed her yesterday. His note is completely wrong. It sounds like he was talking to a different patient.”

  “Oh, that,” Jason says, bored, turning back to his patient chart and chomping into the apple again. “Grant hasn’t listened to a word I’ve said since July. Don’t feel so special.”