Little Black Lies

by Sandra Block

  “I’m sorry,” I call out. “I’m sorry.”

  “Zoe,” Sam’s voice says, as if coming from a speaker in the laundry room. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  My birth mother’s face melts away, forming yet another face. It is familiar, a sardonic grin.

  “No, I’m your mother, Dr. Goldman.” It is Sofia Vallano, handing me a card, which I take. A stiff black-and-white card, with my bloody thumbprints on the edges. It is the knight and the horse. The Death card. “This one’s for you,” she says with her Mona Lisa smile.

  And I hear the word hickory, but I can’t stop screaming.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mike lifts his coffee cup to his lips and leans back in the blue velour chair, crossing his long legs. He’s wearing dark jeans and a gray sweater. Date clothes. I barely recognize him out of his scrubs. “So you’re actually doing hypnosis?” he asks.

  “Yup,” I answer but don’t offer any more.

  “That’s all—‘Yup’? Come on,” he says. “You’ve got to tell me more than that.”

  I peer down at my coffee, the foamy candy-cane design disintegrating and turning fuzzy. Scotty tells me Eddie is working on a dreidel next. “You want the long version or the abbreviated version?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I’ve always gone for the CliffsNotes.”

  So I tell him the basics, including yesterday’s nightmare-​esque hypnosis session. His eyes widen as the story goes on, with the “This girl has a lot of baggage” look, which is why I try to avoid offering backstory on any date for as long as possible. But somehow today, sitting here with Mike, I just don’t care.

  “I know a little bit about my biological mother, but not much,” I say. “My dad, I guess, was not in the picture.”

  “Sounds like my dad,” Mike says.

  “Oh, really?” I ask, leaping at the opening. It strikes me right then that I am quite sick of ruminating on myself.

  “They divorced when I was young,” he says. “He moved out to California, so we got visits, maybe every year…then every other year…then every five years…then birthday cards when he remembered. You know, the usual ‘Dad sucks’ divorce story.”

  I nod, though I don’t actually know this story very well. So we all have our baggage. Mine is just more convoluted.

  “He’s got a new family now anyway, new and improved. Young wife, young kids. We get Christmas cards.”

  “Lucky you,” I say.

  Mike laughs, a deep, strong laugh. “Lucky us is right.” He clinks his bright-white coffee cup back in the saucer. Eddie is mopping up a spill next to him, the water beading on the dark wood.

  Outside the window, Main Street is glowing red, green, and white. Lit-up candy canes, stars, and Christmas tree decorations line the street, casting soft shadows on the snowbanks. Sure, I’m Jewish, but I get it. I’d do the same thing if I made up 77 percent of the country: line the streets with menorahs, dreidels, and gelt all in blue and gold and pipe corny Chanukah songs in every storefront. “It’s a holly jolly Chanukah, and in case you didn’t hear…”

  “Does it ever strike you,” Mike says, “that you could be taking the wrong approach to this whole thing?”

  “To what whole thing, my mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, swallowing a bite of chocolate-chip muffin.

  “Hypnosis for instance. Maybe it’s all total bullshit.”

  I peel my heavy wool sweater off over my T-shirt, draping it over my chair. “The thought had occurred to me,” I admit.

  Mike taps his fingers on the table. Long fingers, like a basketball player. Jean Luc had long hands, too, veiny hands. I used to trace his veins right up to the crease in his elbow when I was learning to draw blood from patients. I told him he would make an excellent platelet donor. He told me that was quite a compliment.

  “If I wanted to find out about my mother, for instance, I’d do some research,” Mike says.

  “Research. Like what?”

  “I don’t know. On the Internet. Hire a private eye, maybe, like they do on TV.”

  He’s right of course, but then again, I’m not an idiot. I’ve done some research. I Googled her as soon as I was old enough to know what Google was. But she died before the Internet was truly alive and kicking. All I have is what my parents gave me: a copy of a newspaper article about the fire, her obituary, my birth certificate, and the dog-eared photo of us both. I’ve analyzed these images and words so often that they feel like memories. I do have some picture in my mind of who my mother was, riddled with holes maybe, but a picture.

  But Mike has a point. I’ve never gone the next step because I never felt the need to. Or maybe I’ve just been subconsciously half-assed about the whole thing all along. As if all my efforts so far have been a way of being sure I could say I looked for the truth but couldn’t find it. So maybe I’m not as ready to jump into my guilt-ridden nightmare as I profess. “Not a bad idea,” I say.

  We sit, staring at the fire in silence. Coffeehouse silence. With strains of samba and acoustic guitar playing Christmas songs. Next to me, a twentysomething wearing skinny black jeans and black high-tops (which, I am sure, were a downright pleasure in the snow) taps away at his computer, beside a stack of books including How to Write a Best Seller. Absently I trace the scars on my hands. I notice Mike looking, then not looking. So I hold them up, unashamed. “From the fire,” I say.

  “Really?” He grabs them to see, tracing them with his fingers. Like a doctor, not a lover. “How?”

  “A piece of metal, something fell off the house during the fire, I guess.”

  “Hmm,” he says, sitting back again. “They look like defensive wounds.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He throws his hands up in a “stop” pantomime. “Trying to ward something off.”

  “Yeah, falling metal.”

  Eddie wanders up at that moment. “Want any more coffee?” he asks, barely making eye contact with me.

  “Sure, love some. Thanks, Eddie.”

  As he pours, an ohm-sign tattoo peeks out from under his thermal sleeve. Mike signals that he’d like some, too.

  “You’re a regular, huh?” Mike asks as Eddie walks off, straightening up some chairs.

  “Just keeping an eye on my brother,” I say.

  Mike looks up at the register. Scotty is flirting with a couple of girls. One of them is pretending to punch him. “Looks like he doesn’t need any help,” Mike says.

  I sip at my coffee and he at his, the tinny sound of high hats from some inscrutable jazz album floating around us. In companionable silence, otherwise known as not knowing what the hell to say to each other. At work, we have a script. Here we are floundering, or maybe not. Maybe this is normal for a date. My brother would know what to do next, how to relate to someone without continually comparing him to an old flame. He would know how to move things seamlessly to the next level. Like Scotty with his video games, climbing effortlessly to level three, while all my wizards die one after the other.

  A woman flashes by me through the window, running in navy spandex, her breath blowing out in bursts of smoke. I have a crazy urge to leap out the window and become her. Feet pounding the salt-covered asphalt in a comfortable rhythm, breath burning through my lungs. Escape the manufactured merriment and soft brown tones of the Coffee Spot and the floundering date with Mike.

  “I have ADHD,” I announce without any idea where it came from, except possibly my ADHD.

  He looks at me as if I am an alien, then laughs, the same deep, full laugh as before. “I have high blood pressure,” he says, “since we’re sharing.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. They could never figure it out. Since senior year of high school I’ve been on medication. Lisinopril.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, really. Fascinating, huh?” he says. “By the way, is ADHD actually a real thing? I always
thought that was just another name for talking shit.”

  I take an oversized bite into my chocolate-chip muffin, something I must admit that the Coffee Spot executes exceedingly well. “Not exactly,” I answer between chews. “There are lots of psych disorders where you talk shit. That’s not a very discerning symptom.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he concedes. “But it seems like this one is more or less an excuse for talking shit.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say. “I could go through the entire symptom list in the DSM V for ADHD, but I think that little ER brain of yours would get bored.” Mike laughs, and I swirl the coffee around in my cup. “It’s a dopamine thing,” I say. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  There is a shriek of laughter near the cash register, and Scotty has his arm around some large-breasted, big-haired, skinny-hipped woman sounding her mating call. He is immersed in Amusing Story #30-something. He has a catalog of amusing stories, a complex mating-call system of his own. Sometimes I think the whole thing is one unnecessarily elaborate charade. All this talking. If you want to sleep with someone, and you’re just following your evolutionary calling, why chitchat about it? Do I really want to be sitting here having a conversation with Mike, when we could dispatch with the boring parts and go directly to bed?

  Mike is looking at me with a grin, as if he is reading every thought in my head.

  A phone text chirps, and I look down at my phone. Visit mother: 2 p.m.

  I am forever leaving myself reminders, another “compensation measure” for my ADHD. Though, as Scotty once helpfully pointed out, “Not every idiotic thing you do is because of your fucking ADHD.”

  “You know,” I say to Mike, “I actually have to get going.”

  “Oh yeah?” He sounds a little disappointed. “Anything exciting?”

  “Extremely. I’m visiting my mom.”

  He stretches his arms out like a cat, yawning. “Want company?”

  I pause, look at him. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got nothing to do. Why not?”

  “Really,” I repeat. “Hanging out with my demented mother sounds like a good time?”

  “Hey,” he says, “it’s a date. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “All right. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into,” I say, giving him one last out.

  “I’m ready,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The nursing home lobby looks as if Father Christmas vomited all over the Victorian tearoom. Wreaths are haphazardly hung up, tinsel hangs in every corner, and ten different artificial Christmas trees are decorated with ornaments and fake presents underneath (fake presents, with their beat-up corners and brazen promises of nothing always depressed me somehow). There are elves planted all around, wearing garlands of red, green, and silver beads, as if it’s Mardi Gras for little people.

  “Wow,” says Mike.

  “‘Wow’ is right.”

  We make our way to Mom’s room, where I notice a large construction paper sign reading “Celebrates Hanukah” in blue Magic Marker taped to the door. Subtle. I wonder if they will put blood on the door during Passover so no one will snatch her firstborn. When we peek in, my mom is staring out the window at an uncharacteristically sunny day. Dust particles dance in the stream of light, making the room appear a bit less depressing.

  “Hello,” I call, and she turns and gives me her ear-to-ear smile.

  “Hello there, daughter,” she says. I am hoping she actually knows my name. “And who’s your friend?” She gestures to Mike.

  “This is Mike,” I say as he enters the room.

  “Is this the Frenchman?” she asks, a mischievous glint in her eye.

  I want to hide under her bed. “No, this is Mike,” I repeat.

  “Not the Frenchman?”

  “Not the Frenchman.”

  Mike looks amused. “Mike,” he says, shaking her hand. “Not French.”

  “Jewish?” she asks, ever hopeful.

  “Sadly,” he says, “not that either.”

  She shrugs dramatically, a “What’s a mother to do?” shrug. “Oh well, that’s okay,” she says, sunny again. “Any friend of my daughter’s…you know what they say.” She has forgotten what they say. At this point, I truly wish I were under the bed. Bringing Mike here was beyond a bad idea, despite his claim that this is a perfectly legitimate way to spend his Saturday afternoon off. After that awkward introduction, we all sit in the room staring at one another.

  “So, Mike,” my mother says, her manners coming back to her, “what do you do?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  She nods enthusiastically. “What a coincidence! My daughter’s a doctor.”

  “I know,” he says with a smile, ready to please.

  “She’s a plastic surgeon,” she says.

  “Psychiatrist,” I correct.

  “Same difference,” she says, waving me off in dismissal.

  “Not at all, actually,” I chime in, but she is focused on Mike. Whether she is flirting with him or making a good impression on my behalf, I am not sure. Mike is sitting back in the pale-pink love seat, comfortable as a clam.

  “Hey, I think the Sabres are playing at three,” he says, looking up at her clock.

  “Oh, I love the Sabres!” my mom exclaims, which is a complete lie. She struggles with the remote. My mother, never a TV watcher, has hardly ever turned on the set, a good-sized flat screen Scotty and I bought her out of guilt and in an effort to kill some of the bored silence during visits. Last time it took us thirty minutes to find the remote, which she had hidden in the bathroom because, she said, people were spying on her with it. That was one of her more paranoid demented moments. Mike stands up and leans over her to help with the remote, gets it to the right channel, then settles back in the love seat. The Sabres skate on amid strobe lights, pomp and circumstance, and an overdone national anthem from a local singer.

  Mike is telling her the positive and negative attributes of each player as he skates onto the ice, and I stand up and start tidying. There’s not much to tidy, mind you, but I am not a hockey fan, and Mike and my mom seem to have become bosom buddies. I stack the magazines on the tiny laminate nightstand, straighten the pictures on the windowsill, then wipe some dust off the binders of her books with my pointer finger, when I spy one of her high school yearbooks. Sophomore year. I pull it out and sit back down on the quilt.

  The inside covers are filled with scribbles. “Never forget hot dog and ‘root beer’ night at Stacy G’s!!!” Which is something she probably forgot two weeks later. Lots of smiley faces, hearts. A few pages in is a picture of two smiling girls with short hair on one side, permy hair on the other, which, heinous as it seems, must have been the style back then. My mom and a friend. The two are leaning toward each other, arm in arm, wearing togas. They have the relaxed posture of sisters, kids without any idea that life becomes harder, not easier. The blood-brother posture of best friends. And I know this, because I have never had one. I have had friends, but a best friend, never. I used to wonder how that would feel, to love someone so freely, so easily, like they were your own self. Someone you could tell secrets to on a sleepover, the hushed, safe whispers lulling you to sleep.

  I recognize my mom in the picture, though not the friend. The picture is encircled by a heart in faded pink highlighter. “Never forget I love ya, babe. You will always be my best friend, Beth.”

  I trace my hand over the glossy smooth page, yellowing now with time, and wonder about this Beth. She bears no resemblance to the picture of my birth mother. This Beth is blond and blue-eyed, fresh as a daisy, with none of the dark-eyed mystery of my mother’s face. And as far as my mom had always told me, she had met Beth at her job, a fellow social worker and dear friend. So obviously this must be a different one. There is, after all, more than one Beth on this planet.

  “Oh!” Mike yells as the Sabres’ puck hits the crossbar with a clang. My mom is staring at Mike in awe. She tosses her hair in a way th
at could be construed as coquettish. On the next shot the Sabres score, and a flash of white-T-shirted fans jump up in the stands. The sirens blare again, and the scoring player goes down on one knee and fist-pumps while the goalie hangs his head. My mother and Mike are high-fiving.

  “This is a fun game, Zoe!”

  “Yup,” I answer, putting the yearbook back in the yawning space in the shelf.

  “And I like your fella,” my mom says, winking broadly at me. “But I still don’t see why you call him ‘the Frenchman.’”

  “Yeah,” Mike says, grinning at me. “She just insists on calling me that.”

  And they continue cheering, like peas in a pod.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Next week it’s another Saturday, another day on Sam’s stiff, brown couch. The pewter clock ticks through the silence of the afternoon.

  “So,” I say, after a moment.

  Sam smiles at me encouragingly.

  “I had a question about the hypnosis.” The wind rattles against the windowpane. A tree stands out in the field, bone-white branches stuttering against the wind. “Why was my patient in the hypnosis last time?”

  “You mean Sofia?”

  “Yes.”

  Sam puts his elbows on his desk. The soft leather elbow patches squeak against the glossy surface. “That’s the thing with hypnosis. It’s what I warned you about. Sometimes the process doesn’t uncover true memories. It’s not uncommon to see people with a strong emotional link, or sometimes not even so strong, just part of your everyday life, pop up in these situations.”

  “Like day residue?”

  “Yes,” he says enthusiastically. “Exactly. What Freud calls ‘day residue.’ Just as you dream about the random things that happen during the day, even things with limited symbolic meaning, this may go on in hypnosis, too. So you may dream about studying for a board exam or playing a football game, just because it’s what you’re actually doing all day. And in this case, that is likely what happened in your hypnosis. You see this patient with a lot of emotional resonance for you, and she shows up in your hypnosis.”