Little Black Lies

by Sandra Block

  And I just want my mommy.

  “Mommy,” I whisper.

  “You’re pathetic,” Sofia says. “Your mommy isn’t here, remember? I killed her.”

  “But,” I say, trying to focus on her face, “why?”

  She laughs then, almost a cackle, not-nice Sofia. “You really want to know why?”

  I nod, not trusting my voice to speak. I feel my knees trembling, even in my cast.

  Sofia rises off the bed, slow and deliberate, so her face is inches away from me, eyes boring right into mine. “Because,” she says, and I can feel her breath on my face, “I wanted to.”

  The scene tumbles back to the present as her hand reaches out and plunges the nail file in my neck. I cannot turn my head away quickly enough, as if I’m stuck in molasses in a nightmare. Jets of blood shoot out in pulses even as I feel the dull blade ripping my skin. I am clawing at Sofia with one hand, flinging the file out of my neck with the other, thinking in an oddly clinical manner: jugular or carotid? If it’s carotid, I’m already dead. If it’s jugular, I might have a chance.

  I clutch at Sofia, desperately trying to gain a grip on something. I am clawing with all my might, a nose, an eye. I feel blood under my fingers and keep squeezing. I hear yelling. I don’t know if it is Sofia or me. My mind is floating, my arm is going numb, tingly, but I keep squeezing. I cannot let go; I will not let go. There is the patter of feet running into the room, and I see brown, sensible leather shoes bounding toward me. I wonder what kind of shoes those are, then realize the absurdity of the question as possibly my last observation in life, and I feel myself floating.

  I am not floating above my body. I am on a clear, deep, blue lake. Blue water sings around me. Jewel-blue skies high above me. The boat is small with a fresh coat of red paint. “Zoe” is written in black script on the corner. I am rowing, in perfect rhythm, my arm, my oar, the water, the sun, the sky, all one, all together. My brain is quiet, resting, at peace. I can hear my name, far, far in the distance, like an echo over a mountain.

  “Zoe…Zoe…Zoe…”

  But the call turns into a whisper, and then it stops.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I fade in and out.

  I can’t keep my eyes open. Beeping noises. Rough hands searching my arms for veins. Voices, sometimes loud, sometimes hushed, unintelligible. The face of my birth mother hovers over me, face blurred but concerned, her blue-blue eyes. Then I see my mom, BD, her face smiling, her warm hand holding mine, calling my name. I think I am alive, but I am not sure. I fight to keep my eyes open, but I usually lose. I don’t know how long this goes on, could be hours, could be days.

  Then one day, I open my eyes. I recognize the teal-blue tile, the gray walls with black scuff marks from inaccurate bed-drivers, and the thin, navy-blue blanket laying on me. First, I realize I am at the county hospital. Then I realize I am alive. Exhausted, worn down, but alive. My eyes move over to the window, and Scotty is asleep, lying in the chair, his head arched back with his Adam’s apple sticking out.

  “Scotty,” I call out, but my voice is a hoarse whisper. “Scotty,” I try again, and he bounces up from his chair. He runs over to the bed, hair disheveled, eyes bloodshot.

  “You look like crap,” I whisper, expecting a hearty What the fuck, Zoe? in return, but instead he reaches over, clutches my hospital gown, and starts crying. His face is buried in my chest, wetting my shoulder, head shaking. I am patting his head. “I was so afraid,” he says, his breath ragged, sobbing.

  “It’s okay,” I say back, patting his back now, though my arm is tired.

  He cries into my chest for another long ten seconds, then takes a deep breath and gives my shoulder a squeeze, which is a little painful. He stumbles back into his chair, giving his eyes a vigorous rub. They are red and swollen.

  A nurse bustles into the room, heading over to change the IV bag when she looks down. “You’re awake!” she says. “I was wondering when you were going to join us.”

  “Could I have something to drink?” I ask, noticing my throat is bone-dry and sore. “Wait,” I say to the nurse, the thought dawning on me, “was I intubated?”

  “You sure were,” she answers. “A drink I have to ask the doctor about. But these should do for now.” She empties some ice chips into a Styrofoam cup. I scoop the icy pebbles up with my fingers, letting them melt on my tongue. I have seen ice chips adorning patients’ bed stands for years. They become part of the furniture. But I have never actually tasted them. And let me tell you, they are delicious.

  Scotty procures me another cup, and I keep chomping until my tongue is numb. He lumbers down in the chair next to me, yawning and crossing his long legs. He looks dog tired. “Do you mind if I put the TV on?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say, yawning. He clicks through channels, each one thrumming a different ad, until he settles on—big surprise—hockey.

  “I think I might rest a little more,” I say, apologizing as if I have a guest over but can’t quite stay awake. The odd thought shoots in my head that maybe someone drugged the ice chips.

  “Go ahead,” he says, patting my leg, his ring knocking against the cast.

  “Hey,” I call out before I can forget, “how is Sofia?”

  * * *

  The answers dribble in over the next two days, as I rejoin the land of the living.

  Sofia severed my jugular, not my carotid, and Dr. A came to my rescue. He told the nurse he felt guilty when he heard I was still dealing with Sofia so he stopped back on the floor to see if he could help. Security was called when Dr. A heard screaming in the room: Sofia, it turns out, from me clawing her face off. Dr. A knelt down to find me pale and dying on the teal-blue tile and, in an instant, whipped out some prolene and a hemostat and stitched me right up on the hospital floor. It shames me to think that if the roles were reversed, I would have been ill equipped to save the day. I might have inquired, “So how do you feel about dying at the hands of your murderous sister? Should we try to reach some closure on this?” while leaning out of the way to avoid the spurting blood. But Dr. A is not afraid of blood, and of course he had his surgical bag on him “in case it ever comes in overhanded.”

  I am ready to leave the hospital already and have been telling anyone who comes near me about this desire, but my body is not quite on board with the plan. I walked three feet in physical therapy yesterday, and my good leg felt like jelly, with bones aching that I can’t even name.

  “Who are these from?” I gesture to the huge yellow-and-red bouquet on the side table. The sweet floral smell mixes with the stale smell of my hospital sheets.

  “I don’t know,” Scotty says, flipping through a Macworld magazine.

  I tear open the envelope with my finger, pulling out the little square card with boxy blue writing.

  There are better ways to avoid me.

  Mike

  I laugh, which makes my chest ache.

  “Oh, Jean Luc sent some, too.” Scotty glances around. “They’re here somewhere.”

  My heart does not cha-cha, fox-trot, or engage in any other dance. “You called him?”

  “Yeah. We weren’t sure at first, you know.” He smooths out a page, then takes a picture of the ad with his phone camera. Because God forbid he write the information down manually.

  I scratch at the tape on my hand, the IV tugging at my skin. “Does Mom know?”

  Scotty looks up from his magazine. “I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to say anything until I knew…either way,” he says awkwardly.

  “Yeah, I probably would have done the same.”

  There is a loud knock on the door and a burly man comes in, wearing a tie and jacket. His belly hangs over his belt as if he is pregnant, the buttons stretching over his “baby” and threatening to pop. “Zoe,” he says, shaking my hand. His hand is huge, like a bear paw.

  “Hi,” I say, wondering if I am supposed to know him.

  “Hey,” says Scotty, who obviously does.

  “Do you remember me?”
he asks me.

  “I’m sorry, no…”

  “Detective Adams,” he says. His voice is low and gravelly, but friendly. “Don’t worry about it—you’ve been pretty out of it.”

  “I met you?”

  “Said a couple of slurred words, more like,” he says.

  I attempt to sit up in the bed, which is a mistake. Pain shoots through the incision in my neck. The detective winces. “Quite a gash you got there,” he says. And he’s right, I saw myself in the bathroom mirror. The light was forgiving, but even so, I look like Frankenstein. Now the victim will have no problem describing me to the criminal sketch artist after I rob the liquor store. She was tall, over six feet, nondescript features, but a very large, nasty scar on her neck. “I have a couple of questions for you,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” I say. “But can you tell me something?”

  “I’ll try,” he says, which is different from yes.

  “How is Sofia doing?”

  He nods. “She’s okay,” he says but doesn’t go any further. “Can you tell me what happened, from the beginning?” He grabs a spare chair next to Scotty and pulls it up beside my bed. He barely fits in it.

  I tell him everything I remember, including the story of that night when I was four, and Sofia telling me she was my sister. Scotty’s eyes are glued on me throughout the story. He has heard bits and pieces from me so far. The detective is scribbling in a notebook, the way they do on TV. I am surprised they don’t have iPads by now.

  He smooths his tie, a cheap maroon number. “How do you think she found you?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea.” I shift my casted leg, which is prickly and falling asleep. Every time I move, the bed tries to move with me with a mechanical moan. It is maddening, keeping me up all night. I will never forget to write sleepers for my patients ever again. “Do you know anything about how she found me?” I ask.

  Detective Adams doesn’t answer right away. “We have looked into it.”

  “And?”

  “And it seems she has been following you for many years, since she was in the previous institution in Syracuse. She apparently had access to a library computer in the hospital, from someone in security.”

  Yeah, I’m sure Sofia was quite popular with the folks in security. “So she found out I was a doctor?”

  “Actually, she’s been following you for quite some time. We found Web-site hits all the way through college and medical school.”

  I shiver, as if someone walked on my grave. “And it’s just a coincidence that she got transferred from Syracuse?” Of all the gin joints.

  “Sort of,” Detective Adams answers. “It wasn’t a secret they were thinking of shutting down the hospital. It was all over the news in Syracuse for some time. They tried to save it, but when push came to shove, it was a for-profit hospital, and it wasn’t making enough money. So they closed it.”

  “So you’re saying she had time to plan.”

  “In a manner, yes. Sofia knew from a nurse she befriended that only the most stable patients were going to be transferred to Buffalo. The rest were going to Albany. So she had to shift gears and be on her very best behavior. She wasn’t always such an angel. But she managed to convince everyone she had changed. She saw her golden opportunity, and she took it.”

  I am suddenly exhausted. My head is pounding along with the stitches on my neck. The metal clock above the whiteboard reads three o’clock. A quick calculation tells me it’s about time to score another pain pill. “So can you tell me where Sofia is?”

  “She’s here, on another floor in the hospital.”

  “What?” I say, sitting up again, my bed moaning.

  “Don’t worry. There are two policemen with her. She’s handcuffed to the bed. And no more nail files. That’s a security breach that, believe me,” he says, “will never happen again.” He shakes his head and mutters, “Giving a psych patient a nail file…”

  * * *

  The room is blazing.

  My body grows warm against the dryer, the whirring sound vibrating through me. My fingers smooth the hem of my favorite powder-blue, frilly nightgown.

  The room is dark but lit up by the moonlight, spattered in checkers on the floor. I touch the cold tile to feel the moonlight, but it slips away under my hand. The sweet smell of cedar fills the air.

  Jack is asleep, but I don’t want to wake him up. Mommy said to run, hide. What if Sofia finds him, too? Punches him with her knife? I huddle by the warm dryer, squeezing my eyes closed. Maybe, if I can’t see them, they can’t see me.

  Footsteps thud by me. “Tanya? Where are you?”

  I curl into a ball. Don’t answer her. Mommy said to hide.

  “I won’t hurt you. Come out, Tanya. We can play makeup.”

  Makeup is my very favorite game, where Sofia puts lipstick on me, blush and eye shadow. Her hands touching my face, smoothing the soft brush across my eyelids with a wonderful tickle. Sofia smiling at me with her pretty teeth. “You look like a princess!”

  But that is nice Sofia. And this is the other one, the witch who comes out and tries to trick me sometimes. Told me it was apple juice and gave me a bitter, blue, scratchy drink and closed her bedroom door and laughed when I threw up and Mommy had to help me. Not-nice Sofia, who stuck her leg out and tripped Jack. Pretended to soothe him and even touched the blood as it beaded up in needlepoints on his knee, but then I saw her dip her blood-smeared finger in her mouth when she thought no one was looking.

  “Come on, Tanya. Hide-and-seek is over. Time to come out. We can play tea party.”

  Then the door flies open, light filling the room, blinding me. A huge figure towers over me, like a monster. Sofia, her blue eyes blazing. I cower in a ball, warm wet seeping into my undies and my powder-blue nightgown.

  Then her face looms up in front of me.

  “Someday,” she says, with her Mona Lisa smile. “Someday I’ll get you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  This is all we got,” the woman says, handing me a dark-green file folder. She is an overweight woman with big, gold hoop earrings and a shirt revealing impressive cleavage that’s hard not to stare at, even as a heterosexual female. It makes me think back to a Get Your First Job seminar at college, where the PowerPoint bullet point admonished us to “play up your attributes!” Though it is doubtful this is what they had in mind.

  “Thank you,” I say, signing a form and leaving her a credit card and driver’s license for the privilege of taking the folder to a cubby five feet away. But I have waited over an hour in this overheated room that smells of new carpet, discussing my admittedly complex situation with the above-mentioned amply cleavaged woman, along with a manager and supervisor, before establishing that I should be allowed access to the folder. The clerk and manager were still refusing with polite bureaucratic rudeness when the supervisor actually remembered the case, got a human look in her eye, and made the decision to let me see it. At that point, I would have given my firstborn to have a glance at that thing.

  I scoot out a gray plastic chair under the gray Formica table. Along with the gray walls and the new gray carpet, it seems the interior designer of the Syracuse City Court had hopes this room would just disappear. I take a deep breath and open the file.

  A picture of my mom jumps out on the top of the pile, from the crime scene. She is a beautiful woman, more beautiful than I would have remembered, wearing a light pink dress with a mauve orchid design, now stained mostly red with blood. There is a lot of blood on the robin’s-egg-blue wall, seeped into the oriental carpet. Her eyes are Sofia Vallano–blue and clouded over.

  Underneath is a picture of Sofia, from the crime scene as well. Age fourteen, looking both scared and matricidal, pale, skinny, her hair dyed black, and black nail polish dotting her fingers. And then there is a picture of Jack, impossibly young, with his sandy red hair, freckles on his face dark as dirt, his eye already swollen shut. There is even a photo taken of me, little Tanya, my face red fr
om crying. I could be straight out of central casting for Little Orphan Annie with my pudgy, freckled, round face and smeared cheeks.

  Also included in the file is my real original birth certificate (not the reissue that I have from my parents after the name change), a picture of my mother, alive, from her passport photo. She wears a mysterious smile that reminds me of Sofia.

  There are just those few items from the night of the murder. The supervisor explained that most of the information and evidence surrounding the crime is in a separate unit in Albany. So it will be a separate trip and a separate fight, a separate gray room with a separate gatekeeper, to get a glimpse of that file.

  Most of the papers in the forest-green folder start with my post-Tanya life. I piece together the story from the faded copies.

  My adoptive mother was a social worker at New Horizons, an agency that worked with Sofia Vallano on her drug addiction and truancy issues, though my mom was not the direct worker on the case. After the murder, a search for suitable family members to care for Jack and me was carried out, and it was established that my biological father, James Vallano, a homeless alcoholic, was not fit for this role. There were also no available grandparents, as James Vallano’s mother was dead and father in prison and both of Annette Vallano’s parents were deceased. Jack was sent into foster care, and my parents petitioned to be my foster parents. An application was made for formal adoption as soon as legally allowed, followed by a speedy name change. Then we moved to Buffalo, and the trail goes cold.