by Sara Shepard
Still, I can just ask for a manager of the hotel and go from there, right? I click on a link marked Management, and pictures pop up. When I notice the face in the upper right-hand corner, my gaze brushes over him fast, the way it does when I see him in real life. But then I blink and look again. I’m confused. This guy belongs here, in Burbank. Not grinning in a suit next to a bunch of old guys in a photo titled From Our Family to Yours.
It’s Andrew. Dirty, Random-Sex Andrew from the whorehouse bar down the street.
I click on the photo to make it larger, gawking at his oily grin. How has Andrew snuck into a photo of the resort’s founding family? Is this some kind of joke?
There is no caption on the picture, but I notice a link titled Legacy. I am led to a page about how the Tranquility resort was built by the Cousins-Glouster family of hoteliers and how it’s the Cousins-Glouster family’s pride and responsibility to keep their resorts intimate, luxurious, and exclusive. There is a roster of Cousins-Glousters who keep the resorts afloat: George Cousins, second generation, balding and paunchy and pink-faced. Marvin Cousins-Glouster, second generation, taller and handsome, with an overbite. More old men, an incredibly old man, and then Andrew Cousins-Glouster, third generation, with that lascivious prep-school smile and that scar cutting across his eyebrow that I have focused on quite a few times while having a post-coital cigarette.
I gawk for a few still moments. Andrew? As in the guy who always buys the cheapest whiskey the bar sells? As in the doofus who wants to be part of a TV writing staff? An heir to a hotel fortune? A cog in a From Our Family to Yours? How did I not know about his connection to the Tranquility? Did I know?
The front door creaks open, scaring me. I run to the landing, almost expecting it to be Andrew, somehow instantly knowing what I’ve figured out. But it’s Desmond, fresh from work, carrying clothes he’s going to change into in a garment bag.
“Hello, mistress,” he trills, dropping a kiss on my forehead. “I’m going to take a quick shower and then we’ll go, yes? Are you excited?”
“Uh, sure.” I take too long to answer.
Desmond frowns and steps back. “What’s the matter?”
Don’t tell him, a voice in my head begs. I chew on the side of my hand and make a distracted mm.
He starts to massage my shoulder. “If you’re nervous about the show, don’t be. You’re going to be great.”
I dig my nails into my leg. I just can’t hold it in. “Say you just found out someone you know has insider knowledge to the Tranquility. Maybe access to security cameras. And say this person is more than likely down the street at the wine bar that used to be a brothel right now. Would you maybe call that person, or pop in quickly, and ask some questions?”
Desmond sinks onto the couch. “Why does it matter?”
“But it would prove unequivocally what happened.”
“But didn’t Gabby tell you what happened?”
“Maybe not everything. Maybe there’s more. I think Gabby only came at the end. She might be lying about what else I saw . . . or she might not know. If I had a video feed, something, I would know for sure what all went on.”
Desmond looks shaken. “But didn’t that guy you were talking to from the police say the cameras had been out during that time because of a storm?”
“So we ask a bartender. Just something to prove I spoke to Gabby and only Gabby.”
“But why does it matter? Gabby’s the one who pushed you in the pool, right?”
“Yes, but I want the whole truth. I want to make sure . . .” I’m not sure what I want to make sure of. I’ve lost so many memories; it’s puzzling why I’m so driven for this particular one back. Or is it?
“Eliza.” Desmond’s eyebrows knit together. “You know I totally support you on unlocking your memories. But maybe today isn’t the right time. Your mind should be clear. You should be thinking about being on TV. It’s going to be live, after all. You have to be at your best.”
“I know, but it’s not like this would take very long, and . . .”
“Don’t,” he advises. “This seems like sabotage. It’s like you’re setting yourself up for failure. Besides, isn’t the limo picking us up soon?”
“Yeah, but I just thought . . .” I trail off and sigh.
“Drop it. At least for today. If it’s still bothering you tomorrow, we can ask this guy. But for today, just focus on being on the show. Focus on everyone loving your book. Focus on being amazing, because you are amazing.”
I lay my head on the couch pillow. Desmond is right, of course. Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t I just accept what I’ve been told? Why am I so dreadfully mistrustful?
“I’m going to take a shower,” Desmond says again. “I’ll be out in a second, okay?”
He goes upstairs, and soon I hear the water start to run. Desmond hums a minstrel song he has on auto-repeat in his car. I lay on my back for a moment, trying to relax, but it feels like there are pins driving into my skin.
I rise, walk to the third floor, and look out the window. From up here, I have a perfect view of the bar down the street. There are a few cars in the parking lot. One of them might be Andrew’s. But even if he’s there, there’s no guarantee he knows the information I need. And just going there, just risking seeing him, opens a can of worms I’d rather keep closed. I know what Andrew’s terms will be for giving me the information. I don’t want to have to be faced with that decision.
Then again, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering.
My phone pings with a new email. I glance at it, eager for distraction. It’s from the Imaging Center. Your MRI results are in. I frown. It’s a whole day early. And what, the place is so cheap they don’t have someone call you and personally tell you you’re dying?
I peer up the stairs, knowing I should wait until Desmond is out of the shower, but there’s no way I can keep the email closed for another second. I select it, then open the attached PDF. At the top, it says my name. In the radiologist’s notes, most of it is medical mumbo-jumbo, but I know which line to look for: the radiologist’s impressions at the bottom. I blink several times, unsure of what I’m looking at. No abnormalities.
It can’t be possible.
I check my watch—half-past four, meaning the office is probably still open. I dial the number, and a nurse answers. “This is Eliza Fontaine, and I just got some results that I think have been switched with someone else’s,” I say in a rush.
The nurse asks me to spell my name slowly and give my date of birth. I hear keyboard tapping. After she asks me to respell my name and go through about fifteen different security indicators to prove that I am, indeed, Eliza Fontaine, she says, “Ah, yes. An MRI. We sent the results today. What did your PDF say?”
“Negative. Normal.”
“Well, it is negative. The radiologist signed off on it—I see it right here. So there you go.”
“But that’s not possible.”
She laughs incredulously. “I’m sorry?”
“The tumor I had a year ago isn’t gone. I can tell. I’m having symptoms. I can practically feel it inside me. I really think my scan got confused with someone else’s.”
“I don’t think so . . .”
“Look, can I just speak to a doctor?”
“Hold on,” the nurse says, a slight groan in her voice. She clicks off. Muzak lilts into my ear. I rub my fingertips against my silken pillow. Desmond is still humming in the shower. I feel a pang in my head and touch a spot between my eyes. I want it to be the tumor, I realize. I want it to still be lurking in there, messing things up.
“Miss Fontaine?” A man’s voice. “This is Doctor Geist, the radiologist on staff. How can I help you?”
I go through my spiel, explaining my tumor and surgery. I try not to sound hysterical—or like I completely mistrust doctors. After I’m done, there’s a silent gap. “Where did you say you had surgery earlier this year, Miss Fontaine?”
“I wrote it down on my forms. UCLA.”
“With which surgeon?”
“Doctor Forney. He’s on staff there.”
“No, he’s a neurologist. I mean your neurosurgeon. Who operated on you?”
“I don’t . . .” I’d been so out of it. A guy with glasses, maybe? “Isn’t it in a chart?”
“That’s the thing. We tried to get your chart from UCLA so we could compare your new scan to an old scan. But you have no chart with UCLA.”
“What?”
“You have no recent records at UCLA. Certainly nothing about brain surgery.”
My legs go numb. As do my cheeks. I feel dizzy, too, so I slide off my bed to the ground until my butt touches the carpet. “What about the neurologist I just mentioned? Doctor Forney?”
“He says he’s never heard of you.”
I press my hand into the carpet fibers. Hadn’t I spoken to Dr. Forney before? Wasn’t that who discharged me from the hospital? “But I was at UCLA. I remember.”
“We checked the system, Miss Fontaine. We have access to UCLA’s records, and they do a good job with patient data. There’s no record of you there.”
I pinch the skin on the top of my hand hard, hoping this will steady my memory and bring back the right details. But I can’t locate anything. All I remember is the day I left the hospital. My mind was clear. I sat up, swung my legs over the bed, got dressed, and went back to my parents’ house.
My parents. They must know, then. They were in the room when I was discharged. They paid all my bills. They can straighten this out. Or can they? If they were lying to me about Gabby and the pool, then what else are they lying about? After all, why didn’t they insist on my getting an MRI when I was in the hospital in Palm Springs? Because they knew nothing would show up, a voice in my head tells me. Because they knew the doctors would say I’d never had surgery in the first place.
I can’t believe I didn’t think this through sooner. But maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe a deep part inside me urged me to just look the other way.
I shudder with fear. A second fear nestles into me, too, iron-cold and blade-sharp: it was comforting when I thought the errant wiring in my head was what led to my skewed decisions and the memory loss and the recent delusions. So where does this leave me now?
Dr. Geist advises me to check my insurance company—perhaps I was at another hospital and have the names confused. But somehow, I know that isn’t the case. I hang up and look at the blank screen, then dial my mother’s number. She doesn’t answer. Heart in my throat, I try Bill, Gabby. Nothing. It’s like they know I’m looking for them. It’s like they realize I’ve found out.
But what did I find out?
I walk into the hallway and listen to Desmond in the shower. I want to tell him the news, but I’m afraid of what he’ll think. Bizarrely, a clear scan is terrible. Because what was that recent freak-out at the Tranquility about, then? The one where I ran from the bar, from Desmond, and started trembling in the lobby? If my messed-up brain wasn’t synthesizing the fear, then what the fuck was making me afraid?
I try my family again, blam, blam, blam, all in a row, but still they don’t pick up. I need answers, though. I need the answer to something. I walk to the window again and stare at the bar down the block. All the same cars are still there. The neon Budweiser bottle blinks in the window.
It’s not a good idea. I stare down Olive, then at the Batman symbol superimposed over the WB water tower. It’s really, really not a good idea. I squeeze my eyes shut once more, begging the memory out of me. Any memory. But nothing comes. There’s only darkness, a blank hospital, a drunken day, “Low Rider,” and a few useless words.
From The Dots
On a Monday morning, Dot was getting ready to go to class. Her head hurt, but not because she’d drunk with Dorothy last night. She hadn’t seen her aunt in a few weeks, actually—not since what her mother told her. Instead, the night before, she’d nursed a bottle of Stoli Vanil in her dorm room, draining almost the whole thing by herself. She knew this was self-destructive behavior, but she was hoping, praying, that drowning her system with that much alcohol would change what was real. What she feared might be real. And also, she just liked the escape.
Marlon eyed her soberly from the chair in her dorm room. A lot had happened in the past month. At first, things had been chilly between them. Dot didn’t confront him about how he’d betrayed her confidence; instead, she conveyed her fury by giving him one-word responses, or by taking the last chocolate-chip cookie in the dining hall (the only real edible thing there), or by denying him blowjobs. He kept trying to bring it up—“I’m sorry,” and “What happened?” and “I just love you so much. I was just so worried”—but Dot would always change the subject, loudly solving the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune, or yelling out a quote about Hinduism from their World Cultures textbook.
But then she looked up Dorothy’s past. Before, when Dorothy was missing, Dot had always concentrated on looking into what she was up to in the present—she’d always taken Dorothy’s stories about her history at face value. She went to the largest branch of the public library, a place she hadn’t been to in years. There, after hours of searching, she found a photo of Dorothy in a Life magazine article about a place called Bridgewater Hospital.
The article was dated January 14, 1979. It featured a photo of Dorothy—and it was definitely her, with her porcelain skin and almost identical haircut and that saucy little upturned mouth—sitting in a faded gray gown in what looked to be a music room. The picture was blurry, and she wasn’t looking at the camera—it didn’t even seem like she knew the camera was there. According to the article, Bridgewater was a psychiatric hospital in Menlo Park, California. Some say it was the inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The article was about the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals to community mental health services, though Bridgewater, at that time, was still very much an isolated institution whose staff used manipulative and coercive methods. Most of the patients in the hospital had severe mental incapacities and were considered dangerous and unsuitable in other hospital environments.
So there was that.
Dot kept searching. Wading through the records for the county of Los Angeles, she found a protection order filed with the court against one Dorothy Banks. Protected in that order was her niece, Dot, and, surprisingly, Dot’s mother. Dot sifted through documents to see if the order had ever been lifted or revoked or whatever you’d call it in legal-ese, but she found no record.
Dot felt furious. She didn’t want her mother to be right about any of this. She also felt devastated. If her mother was right, then who was she to her aunt? A pawn? Did Dorothy ever love her? Did Dorothy love anything? Or perhaps this was all some sort of complicated ruse. What if it was her mother who was pulling the strings here? Perhaps creating a story of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, and convincing the nurses of it, too, and getting Dorothy sent away, and drafting that restraining order out of spite? But there was the record of the strychnine. Could her mother have drugged Dot herself, and then pinned it on her sister?
What was the truth? Who could she trust?
She didn’t know what to do. She found herself spinning into violent rages over so very little—a guy who cut her off on the freeway, a snappish sales clerk, how the Q button on her keyboard kept sticking. She threw books. She didn’t like this new version of herself. Finally, two nights ago, she told Marlon everything she’d found, including her mother’s accusations. How they matched up, dreadfully, with her experience in the hospital when she was young. In her dreadful research, she’d found out that in California, she was still well within her statute of limitations of bringing what her aunt had done to her to trial. Or her mother bringing it to trial, if it came to that.
And maybe it would come to that. Her mother had called the police, after all. Had they gone to the Magnolia? Was Dorothy in jail? Dot kept scouring the news, but she found nothing. Wouldn’t a Munchausen story be interesting to the local public? A glamorous ex-socialite behind
bars for torturing her niece? Finally, she called the Magnolia Hotel and asked if Dorothy Banks was still staying there. “No, she checked out several weeks ago,” a concierge said. But was that true, or was the Magnolia protecting her?
That morning, as she was nursing her hangover, a hangover that felt authentic and nothing like the obliterating fog that hung over her on the mornings she woke up in Dorothy’s suite, a knock sounded at her dorm room door. Her boyfriend looked up but didn’t stand. Dot walked calmly to the foyer, but a few feet away, she froze. Dorothy was on the other side. Dot just knew.
She turned back to her boyfriend, her eyes wide. Her heart was thumping in her throat. He cocked his head. And then: “Dot?” Her voice. “Darling, can you let me in?”
Her boyfriend paled and half stood. Dot licked her lips and motioned for him to remain still.
The pounding began. “I know you’re in there. I saw you through the window.”
Dot met her boyfriend’s horrified gaze across the room.
“I miss you, darling,” came Dorothy’s voice. “What’s going on between your mother and me is our business—she shouldn’t be putting you in the middle of it. I just want to see you for a moment. I have something for you.”
Dot was biting down so hard on her knuckles—she knew there would be teeth marks in her skin. Finally, she walked to the door and opened it a crack. Dorothy stood on the other side. Her face was drawn, and her hair was shot with gray. There were bags under her eyes and wrinkles corrugating her forehead and around her mouth. She smelled sour and unwashed. A mink stole hung limply on her shoulders. It was as though she hadn’t slept or eaten or done her makeup since the last time Dot had seen her. Dot wondered, suddenly, if she had fled from the Magnolia—from the police. Maybe she’d been living in her car. It was probably a risk for her to be here.
Relief flooded Dorothy’s face when Dot opened the door, and she threw her arms around Dot’s neck. “Oh, darling,” she breathed. “I missed you so much.”
Dot let her arms hang at her sides. Her heart was pounding very hard. “Um, I have class soon.”