by Sara Shepard
I nudge Kiki’s side. “You really used to love this as a kid?”
“Oh, it was wonderful. I had my first kiss during a kitten judging.” Kiki gives me a smirk. “I guess you’re too good for me now that you’re going to be on Dr. Roxanne?”
I couldn’t resist telling Kiki about Dr. Roxanne; she watches a lot of daytime TV, so I figured she’d know who Dr. Roxanne was. Sure enough, when I broke the news, she screamed. “That woman is amaze-balls! Your book is going to be everywhere because of her.” She took my hands and jumped up and down. “We should have a party when it airs!”
Still, I dread Roxanne’s questions. I’m positive one of them will have to do with my illness. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want it to define me. I should have never told Posey about it, but I’d felt like I needed to set the record straight. Only, what if she’s already told everyone? What if that’s what the marketing team is concentrating on now?
I don’t want to be known as the phenom who had her skull cracked open by some sort of new brain-surgery technology and then two weeks later starts—and finishes!—a novel. People will see me as a Rain Man. A spooky savant, possibly with robot parts. Sufferers are more than the sum of their suffering, but the rest of the world doesn’t see that. If Dr. Roxanne prods me to talk about my illness, I’ll never know if my audience buys my book because I am the girl who overcame the brain tumor or because my book actually sounds interesting. Maybe I shouldn’t care. Maybe I should just be happy they buy it, period. But I want them to like it. I want them to like me.
Kiki’s eyes are dreamy as she walks toward a crate of Russian Blues. “Are these descendants of Mr. Azure Enchantress?” she asks the owner, a pale, balding man who is most definitely a serial killer. He nods, and Kiki is off and chatting.
I wander away from the booth. The cages to my right and left are exactly the same. Next are booths of cat toys, organic food, feline vitamins. The ribbons and trophies, not yet awarded, are displayed on a table covered with a blue velvet cloth. I’ve been in here for five minutes, and I’ve had enough of cats. I duck into the hallway that leads to the lobby and suck in cool, hypoallergenic air.
The lobby is sparse this time of day. Sounds echo off the high ceiling. I close my eyes, enjoying the public bustle. I like that workers at a hotel have to be friendly and accommodating at all times. Like, if you have a meltdown in the lobby, someone at the front desk will hurry to your side and give you a glass of wine. A little kid plunges her hand into a basket of potpourri at the desk, and no one says anything. A man in a suit, perhaps a manager, notices me and gives me a wink. There’s something about his expression—or maybe being in a hotel, period, with its clean smell and sexy lighting scheme—that gives me a flutter of déjà vu, and then a bolt of terror. I look at this man again, certain he’s someone nefarious. He has already turned away.
Then I hear a voice. It’s golden-toned and snarky as it snakes across the lobby. I turn in the direction of the sound as someone stands. He’s got a shock of red hair, a large head, and a long, skinny body. The voice belongs to a boy-man on his cell phone. His walk is loping and bobbing, like a goose—but it’s a walk I’ve seen before. If my brain could vibrate, it would right now.
I know him. I just don’t know why.
I’m so startled I lurch back, banging hard into a table containing pamphlets for things to do in LA.
“Are you all right?” an older lady in a puffy-paint cat sweatshirt cries behind me.
I give her a distracted smile. My gaze returns to the redhead by the couch. Part of me wants to walk over there so he can see me, but being that I can’t place how I know him, maybe that’s a bad idea. I slink along the wall and settle into a chair that’s significantly closer to him. I tuck my head into my neck like a pigeon and ball up my body so he’ll pay me no mind. My hope is that proximity will spark something in my memory.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he murmurs into the phone. “It’s going to be fine.”
He plops back on the couch and puts his feet up on the coffee table. Rude, I think. I used to know someone who did that: Who? He has a mildewed laundry/male hormone smell billowing around him: unwashed clothes, dorm rooms, sex. My stomach twists.
“I don’t think the cops will ask anything,” he goes on. “I mean, why would they ask you? And you don’t need to bring up Eliza or Palm Springs.”
What?
A cold blast of air from the AC wafts up my shirt, only adding to my chill. The guy stands up again, and I look away, feeling caught, feeling visible. Amazingly, though, he doesn’t seem to see me. “Don’t stress about it, then. Anyway, it might blow over. They haven’t called you yet, right? They might not call.” A long pause. “Well, I can talk you through things to say, things that won’t make them ask more questions.”
Abruptly, he walks away from the couch nook and heads for the revolving doors to the street. I sit up straighter in my chair. Fumble for my phone. Still puzzled as to who he is, I snap a picture of his profile. As I slip it back into my pocket, he’s gone. How has he moved so quickly?
I spring up. The revolving doors are just ahead, but there are a bunch of tourists in front of me, some going in, some going out, and I have to let all of them go first. After a lot of bumbling suitcases and shopping bags and a fold-up stroller that comes unfolded inside the revolving door, after two teenagers chewing sugary-scented gum and a woman who literally stands right in front of me but doesn’t push the door to move, I step outside. The air smells like exhaust and Chanel perfume. The Walk of Fame, visible to my right, is madness: church groups in matching T-shirts, dirty college kids, pretty girls in short skirts and big sunglasses, mothers with babies strapped to their chests. I don’t see a redhead anywhere. I stand on my tiptoes. He can’t have gone far. If I could even see the top of his head, I’d know which direction to go. But it’s like he’s disappeared into a hole in the ground. My ears are still ringing. My body is slick with sweat. What did I just hear? How can I just be standing here, doing nothing?
The revolving door spins again, and three kids scurry out, knocking into me. I wheel back, and my bag upends, spilling onto the ground. “Oh,” their mother says, hurrying behind them as they run toward the street. “God, I’m sorry. They’re animals.”
She crouches to help me to pick up the Kleenex, wallet, and mascara that have tumbled out of the bag. “I’m fine. It’s fine,” I say, and she leaves. A copy of The Dots has fallen out, too; I placed it in my bag before I left today. The book has fallen onto a stack of rental property leaflets, upside down as compared to the rest of the titles. It reminds me of when a tarot card reader lays down a card inverted. I pick it up, wondering if, like a tarot card, the pages inside reflect the opposite message of what I originally wrote. I crack the spine and read a few sentences toward the end. And actually, it does seem to have worked. It’s Dot who’s acting like a monster, Dorothy the martyr. It’s incredible how language can turn in on itself so easily, containing so many different meanings.
“There you are.”
Kiki blusters through the double doors, now clad in a puffy-paint cat sweatshirt, too. She stops when she sees my face, her cheeks going pale. “What’s the matter?”
I look at her blankly, my throat dry. I call up the picture I just took on my phone. It shows the redhead, his chin jutting, his hair in his face, his eyes wide, two dirty skater shoes splayed out pigeon-toed. “Do we know this person?”
Kiki studies the screen, then searches my face. Her throat bobs as she swallows. “Eliza.” She speaks very carefully. “Eliza, that’s Leonidas. I’m pretty sure he used to be your boyfriend.”
From The Dots
Dot met her boyfriend her junior year in college. Marlon sat in the back row of her Introduction to Art History class, which every undergrad was required to take, no matter your intended major. The rumor swept through the class that in high school, her soon-to-be boyfriend was a performance art ingénue; at the beginning of the year, he stole rats from a local pet store and r
eleased them in the school hallways, and then he videotaped the whole thing. Apparently, it was so amazing some art gallery in Silver Lake was giving him his own show.
Marlon always seemed to be holding court at the back of the lecture room, telling some fantastical story, getting a lot of laughs. Whenever the teacher called on him, he had interesting interpretations of the artists’ motivations. Puzzlingly, though, Dot overheard someone saying he was a physics major and wanted to study quarks after graduation. Dot had no idea what a quark even was. So he wasn’t an artist, then?
One day, Dot noticed him embracing a very short girl in the quad, and she’d seethed with jealousy—what did she have that Dot didn’t? But later, she found out the girl was his neighbor from when he was in kindergarten. Dot was surprised at her relief; by that point, she realized she couldn’t deny her crush. She was good at making the first moves with guys, and so, when she came upon him at a holiday party in her dorm, that’s just what she did.
Apparently, Marlon knew about Dot, too. “You’re famous,” he said, after they’d kissed.
Dot lowered her eyes. She thought he was going to mention her tumor. Her illness had garnered unexpected attention through the years: In junior high, older girls doted on her like a baby doll. In high school, angst-ridden boys found her intriguing because she’d walked the thin line between life and death. In the high school locker room, changing for gym, she noticed girls sneaking looks at her head. She heard the name Frankenstein directed at her more than once. Along with getting a lecture on how Frankenstein was actually the creator and his brain-stitched creation was called “the monster,” those girls also received dead mice in their lockers. Matilda would giggle as she played lookout as Dot placed them there, atop lacy pairs of underwear and love letters and unopened pregnancy tests. But for the past three years in college, she hadn’t bothered to mention it to people. She didn’t want it following her anymore. She wanted to start over. Still, she wasn’t surprised someone had found out.
But no, Marlon said she was famous because she was Dorothy Banks’s niece. “My grandparents live near the Magnolia Hotel,” he said excitedly. “She’s, like, an institution there.”
“She doesn’t live at the Magnolia anymore,” Dot said quietly.
“She doesn’t?”
“Nope. She moved out years ago.”
He looked confused. “Oh. Huh. I swear they said they just saw her.”
“She has this doppelganger, sort of,” Dot said. “Maybe that’s who you saw. She still lives in town, I think. But I haven’t seen my aunt in twelve years.”
“Where’d she go?” he asked.
“She might be at the Sorbonne. In Paris.”
“Really? You should visit her. Paris is awesome.”
Dot started up. Why hadn’t she? Just because her mother said that bullshit about Dorothy being troubled didn’t mean she had to buy into it. And she was old enough now. She could find the Sorbonne and track Dorothy down.
That weekend, home with her family for dinner, she mentioned to her mother she was going to buy a ticket. “Paris?” Her mother wrinkled her nose. “What’s in Paris?”
Dot couldn’t believe her mother had forgotten. “Dorothy,” she said haughtily. “At the Sorbonne? That ringing a bell?”
Her mother looked shocked. “Oh, Dot, I don’t think that’s actually true.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I said she might be there. But she’s probably somewhere else.”
“No, you said she was there.” But as soon as Dot said this, she was sure her mother was right. She’d never definitively said anything. This angered her. She’d hitched her star to Paris. All the fictitious letters she’d written from Dorothy were from Paris. She’d bought coffee table books of Parisian photography so she could imagine Dorothy sitting at the Tuileries Garden or hunting around the Catacombs.
“Do you know where she is at all?” she demanded.
Her mother shook her head. “I haven’t heard from her since you were in the hospital.”
Dot fumed. “If I had a sister, I would cherish her. I would look for her if she went missing.”
“You have a stepsister,” Dot’s mother pointed out, gesturing to her stepsister’s empty chair. The stepsister was at college marching band practice. “And honestly, Dot? I used to hear you talk about her behind her back to that weird girl you were friends with in high school in a voice that says to me perhaps you weren’t cherishing her. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
When Dot made some calls, she found out no one at the Sorbonne had heard of Dorothy Banks. She slammed down the phone, staring at the globe that sat on her stepfather’s home office desk. Dorothy could be anywhere on that spherical map. On one of the bumpy mountain ranges, in the middle of the turquoise ocean.
But then, two days later, while Dot was in an American literature lecture, a grad student called for her in the doorway. “There’s someone here for you downstairs, and they say it’s urgent,” he said in a stoned voice. Dot walked out of the school slowly, afraid it would be her stepfather. Maybe her mother was sick, or even had died. But when her vision adjusted, she gasped.
It was Dorothy. Really her. She was home.
ELIZA
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, I get a text from Bill that says, simply, We need to see you. Can you come for dinner? Hours ago, I would have blown it off. They’re just going to shove the Oaks Wellness Center idea down my throat some more. But after what happened just outside the Cat Show, maybe I need to go to the Oaks. I certainly need something.
Because I am too shaky to drive, a Hyundai with an Uber sticker in the window drops me off at my mother’s place. The house is on North Beachwood Drive, a snake of a street in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a circular, shell-pink bungalow that, when we moved in, reminded me of a cupcake; apparently, in the 1930s, it belonged to a magician who’d died attempting an underwater lock-breaking stunt. I’d heard that the magician had installed a secret door that led to a private lair, but though I’d spent days knocking on the walls, looking for openings, I never found it.
I loved the place when I first moved in with my mother—we’d bought it for a steal at a sheriff’s sale; it was haunted, apparently, which is why no one else wanted it. The building was carved up into lots of small, stucco-walled, womb-like rooms, each crisscrossed with cobwebs and stinking of mold. Dusty, ghost-shaped slipcovers were draped over the sofas, which apparently came with the place, though they were so filthy we immediately put them on the curb for the garbageman. A giant brass candelabrum stood in the middle of the dining room table, each red candle melted into pools of bloody wax. There were gory, dark-red stains on the upstairs Oriental rug that I prayed were blood. A pergola in the backyard looked like it had been chopped up with a dull axe. There was a little cemetery out back filled with little stones marked secrets; I dug them up and found no graves. Shaky script was on the inside of the closet walls in the bedroom that became mine. All of the handwritten messages were facts about death: within three days of dying, the enzymes that digested your dinner begin to eat you. What a remarkable person who lived here before us, I’d thought with glee. We could have been best friends.
A friend I would have remembered. Because you remember friends, don’t you, even ones from long ago? And you remember boyfriends, no matter how inconsequential? How could I have forgotten an entire boyfriend? I remembered random boys I pulled into the dissection room to make out with in high school. I remembered a sickly boy named Darius who felt me up on a school bus trip to the La Brea Tar Pits. And yet a whole boyfriend has been wiped from my hard drive. Was this possible?
“Oh, him,” I’d said to Kiki at the Cat Show, quickly, urgently, to cover up my distress. “Sorry, he just looks so different these days.” I’d dramatically slapped the side of my head. “Brain fart!”
Inside, though, I was panicking. I’d already forgotten the name Kiki had told me. All I remembered was that it was long, complicated, and pretenti
ous. My tumor was definitely back. That had to be it. The doctors hadn’t dug the whole thing out. After the procedure, I was told I might forget moments, names, faces, details . . . but this seemed bigger than anything like that. This was an entire person.
Kiki had looked at me with concern. “I actually never met him, you know. I only recognized him from your Facebook page.”
I frowned. “I don’t have a Facebook page.”
“Sure you do. I looked at it after we went to the bar that first time after workshop. There were pictures of you and Leonidas on it. You were both wearing UCLA sweatshirts. You looked really happy.”
I didn’t know whether to continue to rebuke this claim or go along with what she was saying in an attempt to appear in control of my reality. I decided on the latter. “Oh. Uh, yeah. Well, I’ve been trying to put him out of my mind.”
She cleared her throat. “He wasn’t . . . abusive, was he?”
Her guess was as good as mine, but because I didn’t want her to worry, I smiled confidently. “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just alarming when you hear someone talking about you across a room.”
She frowned. “What was he saying?”