by Sara Shepard
The bathroom is filled with women, and I head for a stall, nervously smiling at one of my mother’s friends who looks like she wants to corner me and tell me that she’s got a good story for my next book, if I’m interested. Toilets flush around me, and I just sit for a moment, relishing the privacy. One by one, the sink taps turn off. All the feet vanish from the counter. I step out of the stall. A figure shifts to my left, and when I notice her, my heart freezes solid. It’s her. Dressed in a bathroom attendant’s uniform, slimmer, with shorter hair, but her.
I scream and back away. Part of me has been ready for this meeting. Part of me has never let go of the idea that Eleanor is out there, lying in wait. Well. Here she is.
The woman looks back at me and tentatively smiles. “Hello.”
I have backed up the whole way to the paper towel holder on the other side of the room. The voice coming out of Aunt Eleanor’s mouth is higher, more singsong. It breaks through a blanket-thick layer inside me, conjuring up my hospital bed, the scratchy sound of the blood pressure cuff’s Velcro as it was ripped from my arm, and the smell of antiseptic. I am so relieved I want to laugh.
“Are you . . . Stella?” I say slowly.
She nods gravely, seeming unsurprised that I know. “Yes, I am.”
And I see her, suddenly, so clearly: sitting on my bed at St. Mother Maria’s, watching the gauge, acting flighty when my aunt came in and demanded to know who was prettier. It was so long ago. So blurry. I’d never thought she was actually real.
“I was in St. Mother Maria’s Hospital,” I tell her. “A long time ago. You were a nurse’s aide.”
Do you get ovarian cysts from time to time? Is your eyesight just a touch myopic?
The voice is so clear in my mind. And then, when Stella left, You’d think she would have enjoyed that. Not everyone has a doppelganger.
It’s Eleanor’s voice. Not Dorothy’s. A real voice, a situation I witnessed. And in this moment, it is as though the two strings of my consciousness, real and fiction, thread and lock together, becoming one for good. Other people had bled over from my real life to the fictitious one I created, but Stella had actually been in the hospital with me—far more than my mother was. She probably saw things. And for some reason, looking at her now, I believe undeniably that everything people said happened to me really happened. I had a benign tumor when I was young. I was poisoned. I was abused. I was lied to. And then I killed.
It all happened just like that.
For so long, even in the past three years, I have wondered. Nothing I have found has satisfied me completely in believing that what I wrote and what I remember and what I’ve been told match up. I have, from time to time, still questioned my mother’s intentions, cooking up ideas of conspiracy. When I get a twinge of a headache, sometimes I think, Ah, it’s the tumor. When I pass UCLA, I still believe I was in there for surgery. It has been difficult for me to shed the memories of Eleanor, but it’s also been difficult for me to shed the memories that replaced her, too. At best, they exist in tandem with one another, fighting for prominence.
Until now. Now, I just know.
I step toward Stella, discomfited by the coincidence. What is she doing here, of all places? My mother would have never allowed this—she would have never unleashed an Eleanor look-alike on any of us. It has to be some weird kink in the universe.
I swallow hard. “You look so much like my aunt. She passed away, but maybe you remember her. She stayed with me in the hospital. She asked which of you was prettier.”
She gives a slight, brief nod—still unfazed. “And I saw you, not that long ago. At the Terranea Resort. You were cleaning the rooms. I thought you were my aunt again. I could have sworn it—you were wearing the leopard scarf she loved.” These are details from The Dots, but they are details from my life, too. I close my eyes, and there they are, vivid and sharp.
A muscle in Stella’s cheek twitches. “Ah. Yes. That scarf.”
Her tongue darts out of her mouth to lick her lips. She looks nervous, suddenly. When she meets my gaze again, my skin prickles. All at once, I feel like I’m on the precipice of something huge. I don’t know what it is, but my gut is clenched, and my intuition screams that I cannot leave, not yet. There is something more here.
I grab her hand. “Come with me.”
She follows willingly, more or less. We pass a few women on their way into the bathroom, there for my reading. I duck my head, and they don’t notice it’s me.
Instead of turning toward the ballroom and my podium, I lead Stella in the opposite direction, to an empty back hallway that butts up to the swimming pool and the gym. The air smells faintly of chlorine, and I can hear an exercise machine whirring on the other side of a wall.
I sink down onto a small leather couch and pull her down, too. My heart is pounding. She looks conflicted, but not confused. It’s like she knows what I’m going to ask.
“My aunt gave you that scarf, didn’t she?” I ask quietly.
Stella’s throat bobs. She tucks a piece of hair behind her ears. “Well . . .”
“Please tell me the truth. Tell me why.”
The wind presses against the big windows only a few feet away from us. I picture Posey pacing, wondering where I am.
Stella lowers her head. “I’ve been trying to tell you. I’ve showed up where I thought you’d be—I needed this off my chest. It was hard to find you. But then when I did, I chickened out.”
“What were you trying to tell me?”
She doesn’t seem to hear this question—her eyes are glazed, and she’s staring at the floor. “I tried to film a video of myself on your phone, thinking you’ll have it as a confession—but I still couldn’t do it! I was worried you’d wake up and see me and panic. I worried you’d take all of it the wrong way.”
I open my mouth, then close it again. My phone. The hospital. Had she made that video? She’d been in my room, handling my phone?
I don’t have time to process this because Stella straightens up and looks at me head-on. “Your aunt made me an offer. I was to spend a whole day at the spa under her name, and she’d give me an Hermès scarf and one thousand dollars in return. It was too good to be true. Of course I told her I’d do it. But then I found out what happened.” She pauses, her face crumpling. “That poor doctor did nothing to deserve it. I know why your aunt pushed her. There was talk in the hospital of what was going on. The doctor suspected, too.”
It takes a few seconds for me to process. In real life, Dr. Koder’s name is Dr. Richards—but I checked, and just like Dr. Koder, she suffered a paralyzing fall down a flight of stairs shortly after I left her care. If a doctor suspected Eleanor of poisoning me, of course Eleanor had to get rid of her. I’d wondered about this accident, wondered if Eleanor had had something to do with it, but I’d had no way to prove it until now.
“Eleanor made you go to the spa in her place so she could hurt the doctor,” I say slowly, putting the pieces together. “She used you to establish her alibi. Because you look like her. It was foolproof.”
Stella nods. “I only realized that afterward. I shouldn’t have been so stupid. I knew your aunt was bad news. And then the doctor didn’t remember what happened. She thought the fall was an accident. I threatened your aunt that I was going to tell on her, and guess what she said? I was at the spa all day, wasn’t I? My name is in the appointment book. People saw a woman who looked like me. But what about you? I was the one who didn’t have an alibi that day—I’d even taken the day off work to go to the spa. I worried I was the one who’d get in trouble—the doctor might remember a face, my face, because we looked so similar. Your aunt told me that I should quit my job at the hospital to be safe.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “So you’ve been following me, trying to tell me this?” All at once, it makes sense: with a quick glance, people could mistake this woman for me. We are the same build. Stella has more lines around her eyes, but they’re not very obvious. She takes care of her skin, her hair. It was Stell
a at the yoga studio, at Steadman’s store, maybe even lurking at my parents’ house. And then it hits me, like a thin, strong beam of light: “You were the person I spoke to at the bar in Palm Springs!”
Stella nods vehemently. “Yes. I needed to tell you. I followed you to the resort, thinking we could talk there. But at the bar, the moment you saw me, you panicked. You thought I was her—and that I was going to hurt you. So I ran, but it gave me even more of a reason to get through to you. You needed to know the truth.”
I narrow my eyes. “The truth about what? That my aunt pushed my doctor? That she was crazy?”
“No . . .” Stella stares down at her hands. She studies them as if trying to memorize every tendon, every wrinkle. I have no idea how much time passes. Two minutes? Ten?
“She called me again, years later,” she finally says. “Said she had something else she needed me to do. I told her no way—but she threatened me. Said she’d send the doctor an anonymous letter accusing me of attacking her on the stairs. Said she had pictures from a surveillance camera—she bribed some guy in management to get them. This was probably a lie, but who knows?
“I felt trapped, so I said yes. She said she wanted me to hide at a restaurant where she was having dinner, and when she got up to leave, I had to slip into her place, order one more drink, and sign the check.” Stella’s chest heaves in and out. “I had no choice. So I went. But then I saw that she was having dinner with a young girl. You. I became afraid that she was going to do something awful to you. You’re so young.”
My throat catches. Is she talking about that last dinner? I close my eyes and put myself in Dot’s place, remembering that small flicker of movement she’d sensed in the hallway just before going back to the table to switch the drinks. Had that been Stella? Had she been hiding, waiting?
“You saw us,” I said, trembling. “You saw what happened.”
Stella’s gaze is off to the left, on a generic print of a beach scene. “Yes. I didn’t take her place at the table, like she wanted me to. When you two left, I followed. And I listened. That woman is a monster. She deserved to die.” She whips around and looks at me head-on, her green eyes wide and unblinking. “And she did die, Eliza. She did. She’s gone. I saw her fall.”
The words sink into me, fizzling like acid. “You saw me push her,” I eke out.
Her expression tells me all I need to know. “I’ll never tell on you. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because you need to know she’s gone. I wanted to get to you much sooner, right after it happened—but your family took you away. As time passed, I couldn’t bring myself to say what I knew.” Stella gives me a hard look. “But here I am.”
I sit back, resting my hands on my thighs. “Wow. Wow.”
Stella’s smile is crooked and small. “Yes. Wow. And I’m so very sorry.”
I have so many more questions for her. So many more tiny things and big things to ask. But just as I’m gathering them up in my mind, my phone rings. It’s Posey. I wince.
“I’ll be there in a sec,” I say as I answer. “Two minutes.”
I hang up and give Stella an apologetic look. “I don’t want to stop talking.”
“No, go,” she says, waving her hand. “I shouldn’t have taken up this much of your time.”
“Are you kidding?” I cry. I linger on her for a moment. I want to hug her, sort of, but instead I just touch her hand and mouth Thank you, and then hurry back to the ballroom.
Waiters are placing plates of crème brûlée on the table. Posey gives me a worried look when I approach the stage, but I shrug her off. She returns to the microphone and introduces me, and I try to pull it together as I take my place at the podium. My purse carries a marked-up copy of my book. But as I open it to the right page, I hear voices in my head.
It was like I was in the presence of a paranormal event! It’s Eleanor. Dorothy. I’d split in two! She should play a look-alike of me at parties.
Or you could play a look-alike of her, I answered.
Then the story of Gigi Reece and Diana Dane pops into my mind. There’s a marvelous story about a murder at this hotel, Dorothy had said. Eleanor said it, too. And they both said, later, in the same dreamy, faraway voice, You know what would be interesting? If the famous starlet was actually the one in trouble with the goons in Palm Springs, but she sent this other gal in her place to bear their wrath.
Had Eleanor been trying to tell me the whole time? Of course she used Stella to her advantage. She was her look-alike. She was a get-out-of-jail-free card.
But what if she took it even further? If my aunt used Stella as a convenient stand-in for an alibi, and if my aunt had Stella at her disposal the night she planned to kill me, what if she also used Stella in those last moments? Yes, Stella had told me, moments ago, that she’d only been there to slip into Eleanor’s seat at the table, and that she’d watched me push Eleanor over the guardrail. I could believe that at face value—but should I? After all, in my murky recollection of what happened, Eleanor had looked so different in those last moments before she fell. Like herself . . . but also not like herself.
Was it possible that, amid our scuffle, Eleanor had wrested Stella from the shadows and forced her to take her place?
I can’t exactly wrap my head around how Eleanor could have convinced someone to do this, or why Stella wouldn’t have immediately revealed to me who she really was. I also don’t know how Eleanor could have recovered from the poison, because of all the memories that are blurry, those images of Eleanor vomiting bile moments before her fall are still crisp and vivid in my mind. And yet . . .
What if the woman I’d just spoken to wasn’t Stella at all?
I start to shake. Stop it It was Stella. Let it go.
Detective Carson told me the police had identified Eleanor Reitman by her driver’s license. For the crazy scheme I have just cooked up to have happened, my aunt would have had to slip the ID into Stella’s pocket before she fell into traffic—or else Stella had had it on her person all along. But it could have happened, right? No blood had been taken to prove it was Eleanor. No autopsy had been performed. Dr. Singh, who I’d never been able to find, came to the morgue, took her away, and disappeared, too.
I look up. My audience is staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to start.
“I’ll be right back,” I say.
There are murmurs as I step off the stage. Posey grabs my arm. “What’s going on now?”
I smile bravely. “Just . . . the bathroom again.”
I jog away. I have to pass my family; Desmond is looking at me in alarm. He knows me best—he probably can sense the panic on my face. I only pray he doesn’t come after me, though when I peek over my shoulder, he isn’t.
I want to run, but I don’t want to draw attention to myself. The distance to the ladies’ room seems farther than the first time I walked here. I fling open the bathroom door, heart thumping. I’m prepared for anything from an uncomfortable confrontation to a gun being shoved in my face. All I know is that I need to talk to Stella—or whoever she is. I just need to make sure.
When all I see is an elderly woman staggering out of a stall, struggling to pull up her panty hose, I’m struck dumb. “Oh!” the woman says when she looks up. “Goodness, I’m sorry.” She yanks down her skirt so that her underwear isn’t showing. “These damn nylons. They’re all twisted.”
I stare at the corner where Stella had been. Even her toiletries are gone. “Did you see someone here?” I ask breathlessly. “A bathroom attendant?”
The lady smiles. “Now wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe she could get me a new pair of panty hose. Now I’ve got a run.”
“So you didn’t see where she went?”
The woman just smiles at me daftly. I scurry over to the spot where Stella was standing. It’s wiped clean. Was she ever even here?
Whirling around, I head back into the hall, desperate to see Stella’s—or Aunt Eleanor’s—bobbing black head. I press my hand to the wall to steady myself.
“Eliza?” Posey has appeared at my side. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“I just needed the bathroom,” I say shakily. “I’m fine.”
And I try to be fine. I stand at the microphone again. I apologize for my little break. I try to make a joke about it—a little too much water at dinner! A nervous bladder! I thank everyone for coming, open the book to the page I’ve marked, and start to read. I know the pages so well, I don’t have to concentrate very carefully to get through the reading, so my mind is left to race.
I get to the end of the passage, indicating I’m finished by closing the book shut and giving a nod. The group applauds. I smile. Posey reappears and announces that signing will begin and everyone should form a line. I step off the stage. I’m furious at myself. Furious I’d rushed back into the ballroom so quickly. And where could Stella have gone? What does this all mean?
I take one more look into the crowd, wondering, for a brief spell, if she’s maybe just out there, watching benignly, no longer interested in doing harm. It could be the old Aunt Eleanor of my mind, the one who enjoyed me so much, the one who only wanted to love me unconditionally. I know this isn’t feasible. That’s not who Eleanor is. But still, when I see a black head close to the door, my heart lifts, and part of me wants to leap from the table and run to her, arms outstretched, and tell her how sorry I am, and how all I want is for things to go back to the way they used to be, the way I used to believe them to be.
Her eyes meet mine. Her head arches up then, revealing thick cords in her neck. She gives me a thin, mysterious smile that could be interpreted as conspiratorial . . . or mischievous.
My throat is dry and raw. I look to my mother, but she isn’t studying the crowd—she’s looking at me with alarm. There must be something telling in my expression, something that gives away that the ghost has wormed her way back into me, that I’m possessed again, that I’ve seen her. Her face pales perhaps to the shade of mine. She widens her eyes in disappointment and heartbreak, because it’s so clear what I think I know, and it’s even more abundantly clear that I’m still not to be believed.