by Sara Shepard
I demand to know what she means. Apparently, Eleanor’s fabulous New York youth, how she worked at a circus, how she was a spy in DC—they were just tales. “All her life, your aunt wanted to be fabulous, but she was mostly on the fringes of things,” my mother says. “She might have been acquainted with some interesting characters in New York, for example—our mother certainly was, and Eleanor idolized her. But she was always too needy, too desperate. That was a turnoff to most people. Even I saw it, as a younger sister. She required too much. She needed so much hand-holding and attention. She was never let into the group. Some people rejected her very viciously—it was almost bullying. But she continued to try. She was so desperate to be loved.”
There hadn’t been a Contact Lens Baron or a DC spy. Eleanor had moved to California with us once my mother married my father. She met her husband out there, but he’d been a construction worker, not something more fabulous. Shortly after she had Thomas, her husband died in a freak accident on the job site—an I-beam disengaged from a crane and fell from a great height, crushing him. With the insurance settlement money, Eleanor bought the beautiful house in Hollywood—the house I grew up in, though it had been excised from my mind that the house had once been hers. But of course it had been hers! Who else would have written those crazy death facts on my closet wall?
“She tried to ingratiate herself with the neighbors when she lived there, but it was clear she wasn’t one of them,” my mother continues. “So she sold the place to us for a steal and moved to the suite in the Magnolia because she was sick of feeling like a social pariah. At a hotel, she could pay people to make her feel like the star.”
I’m stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? Why didn’t you correct me when I went on about how great she was?”
“Because you loved her,” my mother answers simply. “And when your child loves something like that, you don’t want to be the one to burst the bubble. I thought you’d blame me. Besides, you two had so much in common. She delighted in you, and you delighted in her. I didn’t want to be the one to end that.”
I feel sad about this new version of Eleanor. The truth doesn’t come as so much of a surprise, but I hate that everything I’d adored about her was fiction. When Eleanor couldn’t impress her peers, she turned to an impressionable child. I suppose I should find it flattering that I was her audience, but I see it all as a big, complicated sleight of hand.
But there was more to this, a complicated question of identity. So much of my personality was based on Eleanor. Playing Funeral in her suite stoked my love of death. Playing Oscar Night in her gowns convinced me that only melodramatic people were interesting. Would I have attempted to write a novel if she hadn’t paved the way first with Riders of Carrowae? It wasn’t that I regretted who I turned into, but I couldn’t help but get trapped in a solipsistic quandary about the way fate slides and shifts. If I’d known the real Eleanor, who would I have developed into as a teenager and adult? A different person? I might have ended up like Gabby, working in an office, grabbing smoothies after work, driving a PT Cruiser. It’s not likely, but maybe. Maybe any of us could be anybody. Maybe it just depends on who we surround ourselves with.
I wonder if Eleanor thought about it this way, too. I might have been a nine-year-old, but I was a nine-year-old she could unquestionably shape. How powerful that must have felt! How deity-like! I saw her as an icon. Which was better than being a mother, because I didn’t notice her flaws. Until it was too late.
Of course, if that’s the way Eleanor saw it—if that’s what she understood she was doing—then why the fuck would she poison me?
“After you recovered, I assumed you knew more than you let on,” my mother says in another session. “I figured you knew that you were poisoned, and you were furious at me for letting Eleanor handle your care for so long. I thought you’d decided that I’d let it happen. Which was untrue, of course, but I didn’t know how to explain to you that I had no idea without getting into what she actually did.”
“Uh, no.” I look at her like she’s crazy. “I had no idea she poisoned me. Do you think I would have seen her when she came back if I knew? Do you think I would have asked you all those questions about where she was if I knew?”
“Yes, I realize that now.” Her mouth puckers. She stares out the window. “I wish I’d made the connection about Thomas. His situation was so different, and he was a strange boy. I wish there was something I could have done to help him. I feel like I let it happen—all of this happen.” She bites down hard on her fist.
“I wish you would have told me the truth about her,” I say quietly, plunged once again into a particular brand of despair I’ve felt so many times since coming to the hospital. Betrayal and anger, sadness and disappointment all rolled into a sour, heavy feeling that stalls the rest of my thoughts. “Everything about her.”
My mother smiled sadly. “You would have never believed me.”
I pause a moment, thinking this over. “I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t have.”
ELIZA
A FIGURE LOOMS in my doorway a few days later. It’s a woman with a beehive hairdo and slapped-on makeup and hips that could birth several babies at once. I like high heels, but I could never walk in the shoes she’s got on, and by her unsteady gait, she can’t really, either. Her bag is a waxy Chanel knockoff with two huge interlocking Cs across the front. I blink at her blearily. I wonder, with a start, if she’s my new roommate.
“Eliza, yoo-hoo,” she says. “It’s me. Laura.”
I cock my head.
“Your agent?”
I stare at her as I might an artifact in a museum, astonished that such a creature could exist. Here I had been expecting a polished, fingernail-thin suggestion of a woman, all flash and fragrance and white teeth. Laura has a million bobby pins in her hair, and most of them jut haphazardly. When she sits down across from me, I see she’s wearing nylons with a run on the left calf. Her eyes have the cross-hatchings of a woman in her forties, and there’s a plain gold wedding band on her chubby finger.
“I suppose this is one way to get me out to LA,” Laura grumbles, plopping her monster of a purse in her lap. “But oh well. I could use some sun right now. As for you. How’re you doing, kiddo? Hanging in there?”
I stare down at myself. At least my hospital gown isn’t gaping open, but I’m sure my hair is slicked with grease. I haven’t shaved my legs in a week. My breath probably stinks from the weird drugs they’ve got me on. None of that has me that embarrassed, though. Laura knows what happened to me at Dr. Roxanne. Everyone does. It’s a morsel of gossip that’s been kept from me since I’ve been here, but I’m cognizant enough to recall the harsh, mortifying details. The cameras had been rolling, and I’d been standing there on that stage, losing my shit.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Laura says, perhaps sensing my feelings. “All the good authors go bananas here and there. You’re just keeping with your milieu.”
“I’m not an author anymore,” I say quickly.
Laura gives me a circumspect look, then reaches into the bowels of her purse and pulls out a huge container of Tic Tacs. “You allowed to have one of these?” she asks. I nod, and she shakes one into my palm. “Of course you’re still an author,” she says as she pops a few in her mouth. She bites into them like candy. “Your book’s out, darling. And it’s doing great.”
I sit up. “It’s out? You let them publish it? My parents let you publish it?”
Laura chuckles. “I have to say, your mother called quite a few times saying we should pull the plug. But I told her it was too late. And anyway, I don’t know what they’re so worried about. Posey’s thrilled. The critics are thrilled. Everyone has enjoyed it thoroughly.”
My head starts to feel like it’s been plunged under six feet of water. “It can’t be out there. My mother was right. It says too much. People are going to assume . . .”
Laura cuts me off with a wave of her hand and gives me a hard look. “It’s fiction.”
“But it’s not.” Clearly Laura understands this. Clearly she gets that it’s the reason I’m stuck in here, ironing out the differences between reality and imagination. “Most of it isn’t. I didn’t understand that before, but now I do.” I stare into my lap. “I’m sorry. I gave you the novel under false pretenses. It’s not a novel at all.”
Laura shrugs. “So what if it’s kind of real? Most novels have some truth to them. But this is the big secret: nothing is one hundred percent real. This is just your version. It’s real to you, but you’re also—pardon me for saying this—delusional.”
“Thanks a lot,” I grumble.
“It’s a good thing!” Laura cries. “Think of how Eleanor would have written this book had it been from her perspective. Completely differently, right? Think of how your mother would have written it, or a nurse at the hospital. Or even that guy who always shepherded you into the steak house—what was his name?”
“Bernie.”
“Right. Him. They’d all have their own versions. This is your version. It’s not like you’ve written a biography where people are going to dispute the facts. And to be honest? This book has helped Eleanor Reitman’s sales, too.”
“What do you mean, sales?”
She reaches into her bag, this time pulling out a wad of papers. The first one she hands to me has a bunch of numbers running across the top. “She self-published that novel you write about her working on a few months before she died. The Riders of Carrowae. See those numbers?” Laura points. “It earned a little money last week. If she were alive, she’d get a royalty check in a few months, though I guess it’ll go to whoever handles her estate. That you? Your mom?”
“I don’t know.” I keep staring at the book’s title on the page. I’ll be damned. She actually wrote it. That exact name had poked through the scrim of my memory and made it into the book unscathed. Funny what I’d remembered verbatim: Dorothy’s book, Thomas’s name, Dr. Singh. Part of me is dying to read Dorothy’s book. The other part needs to stay far away.
“So all’s well that ends well!” Laura crows. “Really, I’m just in here to see when you’re getting out. Your publisher really wants to talk to you about doing another book. And Roxanne wants you back.”
“After that train wreck?” I sputter, turning my head at the memory.
“Not a train wreck.” Laura points at me. “Your appearance got them the highest ratings they’ve had in years. People DVR’d the shit out of it! It’s gone viral on YouTube! Every morning show has featured it! They’ve even done segments on artists and mental illness! You’re part of a national conversation!”
“Oh my God,” I groan into my hands.
“Oh, please. Don’t worry about it, Eliza. You’re famous! You’re eccentric! You’ll come out of this and everyone’s going to be like, There’s that crazy-interesting writer who lost her marbles on Dr. Roxanne! Wonder what she’s going to do next?”
But I don’t want to be the crazy-interesting writer. Eleanor Reitman was that person. It seems like the worst thing to aspire to.
“Oh, before I forget.” She rustles in her bag and lobs me more papers. “I don’t know if you actually know this clown, but someone’s done a tell-all about you. It actually came out the same time as when your Dr. Roxanne appearance aired—I think he was trying to scoop them. It got lost in the shuffle after your breakdown onstage, so we only dug it up now.”
I turn the paper over. My love affair with Eliza Fontaine, reads the headline. And then: Dating an artist can be strange, interesting, and sometimes even exciting. And with Eliza, you really had no idea what was around the corner—but all of it was incredible.
Leonidas, is my first thought—but I hadn’t been an artist with him, had I? And besides, he knew how Eleanor died—he had a lot to lose by exposing himself. Then my gaze lands on the picture at the bottom of the page. It’s Desmond’s quirky smile. I’m standing next to him, my cheek smashed into his shoulder. It’s a selfie of us that he’d taken with his phone the second day we’d spent together.
I let the paper drop to the bed with a yelp. But then I immediately scoop it up and read everything. Desmond wrote about fishing me out of the pool (she emerged from the abyss like a mermaid, moonlight on her lashes), how I have a merry-go-round in my backyard (she was whimsical, original, and artful), how I’d come on to him at my house (good Lord in heaven, how I longed for her, but I was so afraid!), and Steadman’s junk shop (a woman who can be around petrified cat penises all day is a woman after my own heart). Stalking Leonidas’s dad’s office was, apparently, the sexiest date he’d ever been on. Even my seizure at the Tranquility was transcendent. Caesar himself would have chucked aside Cleopatra for a chance with me.
Desmond concludes the article saying that we’d parted ways, not dropping the Andrew bomb at all. It’s as though he forgot it. And then he signs it, Love you always. By the end, my face is wet. I feel foolish to be crying, and yet I can’t stop.
“Don’t feel too bad,” Laura says. “It’s flattering, really. And I doubt anyone’s going to read it.” She plucks the article from my hands and tosses it into a rolling Dumpster of trash that happens to be passing by my room. But after she leaves, I chase that Dumpster down, hurl myself into the can, and dig the article out, picking off a banana peel and dirty Kleenex and empty pill wrappers until it is flat and clean and mine and mine alone.
• • •
And then I can smell Desmond before I see him: mothballs, capriole ham, the carpeted interior of the Batmobile. He peers in tentatively, and because I’m turned away from the door, he darts backward. Then I roll over and sit up. “Oh.”
“Okay if I come in?” His voice cracks. “You’re not sleeping?”
I don’t say anything, but he takes that as an invitation and sits on the green plastic chair farthest away from my bed. A bouquet of roses wrapped in crinkly cellophane twists in his hands.
“Those are hideous,” I say dourly.
“I know,” he says in a small voice. “I wanted black tulips, but to be completely truthful, I came here on a whim. I didn’t even tell work, and it’s two days before the conference. This is all that was available in the gift shop.”
I sniff indignantly and face the wall. I suppose I’m supposed to feel like he’s made some sort of sacrifice by missing his precious pre-conference prep?
“You know, I forgive you,” he says. “For that . . . fellow. In the bar. I understand why you had to do that.”
I’m glad he can’t see my red cheeks.
“I understand why you had to know. I like your determination. I always have.”
“I suppose that’s why you wrote that article, then?”
There’s a pause. “I had to,” he says. “Stefan was going to write something awful.”
I turn to him. “Your brother?”
He has bent a few of the rose stems because he’s holding them so tightly. “It’s another thing he dabbles in. Gossip pieces. He chases minor celebrities for the tiniest speck of dirt. When he found out I’d met you, he started grilling me about what you were like. I told him I didn’t want to be part of some sort of tell-all. Then I found out he was working on a story anyway. It was all based on things he’d overheard us rehashing or things he found on the Internet. So I had to write something first, something about all of those things, so that when he wrote his own piece it sounded . . . lame. As told to the roommate brother sort of bullshit. And because I’d written something so positive, no one would want what he had.”
I cross my arms tightly over my chest. “So you didn’t actually mean that stuff you wrote, then.”
“Of course I did!” Desmond moves to my bed and sits down. I shift away from him, but not before our calves touch. A shimmer goes up my back. “I meant every word.”
Outside my room, the girl who so proudly talked about shitting herself shuffles by, doing an arm-flap dance that sometimes overtakes her. Crystal. Her name suddenly pops into my head. Desmond watches, too, and then turns back t
o me, offering a real smile this time instead of something posed and uncomfortable. “Is that what most people here are like?” he asks, gesturing to the hall.
“Pretty much.”
“I bet you walk around with your hair in your face, scowling at everyone.”
I snicker. “Yeah, well.”
“I bet you’re like, If you dare talk to me, I’ll bury your cat alive.”
I glare at him, about to say, As if you know me? But then I realize. He does. Kind of better than anyone. I can tell, for instance, that he understands the truth of who I am. That he knows my book is true. That he’s put the pieces together. I will ask him, tomorrow, when he comes back, and we will talk through it all, and I will tell him everything, but it will be surprising how much he has already guessed.
All of a sudden, as if he understands what I’m thinking, he stands and presses his hand to my shoulder. I feel that taut string between us, still there. I squirm away and say, with vitriol, “Watch out. I might just be dangerous.”
“Well, if you are,” he says, spinning me around so that I am facing him. He catches my wrist and holds it tight, entwining his fingers in mine. “I would love to be one of your victims.”
• • •
“My family thinks I’ve done something,” I tell Albert in a session a week later.
“Something good? Something bad?”
“Something bad. Something you’ve probably heard. The only problem is that I’m not sure it actually happened.”
Albert pauses to sip his tea. The whole room smells like Earl Grey. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I’m surprised I’ve brought it up. So far, I’ve stayed away from this topic, primarily because I don’t know what I think about it, exactly, and I don’t want to talk about a potential crime I might have committed. I have to believe that my fate played out like Dot’s: I freaked out at the funeral, I started jumping into pools, I begged to confess, and my parents told me not to, and when I refused, they found a method that would erase what I’d done. It shocks me, now that my memories have returned, how much I’d wanted to kill Eleanor. How rid of her I needed to be. Ignoring her would have never been enough.