by Sara Shepard
I swallow hard. I have no idea.
“Was it a man? A woman? Anything?”
Still nothing. I’m not even sure I was talking to someone.
“Can you tell me which bar you were at? I could look into it.”
According to the big binder in my room at the Tranquility, the resort has six bars. D’Oro’s, the casual one off the lobby; The Stuffed Pig, for business dinners; Trax, with the DJ; Meritage, a wine bar; Shipstead, the nautical-themed martini bar; and Harry’s, a tiki bar. So I have a one-in-six chance of getting it right. Stingers, buzzes a little insect in my head. I drank a stinger last night. How had that come about? That’s not a drink I usually order.
“Ah. Here it is. You were most likely at the Shipstead. That’s the only bar whose door leads to the pool area.” Lance looks up from his notes and squints at me. “It’s possible, though, that you don’t remember the night properly. There’s the issue of your toxicity report, for one thing. And I happened to get a look in your bag, too—I found . . . well, I suppose you know what I found.”
“What?” my mother gasps.
Lance is still looking at me. “Are you sure that’s not why you fell in the pool? Maybe you were too wasted to realize what you were doing?”
I try to swallow, but my throat is so dry. I can picture the label of the bottle he found. It reads Xanax, 1 mg, twice daily. “I don’t suppose you noticed all the other things in my purse, did you?” I finally say. “All the vitamins? Metabolic maintenance, immuno drops, Metformin, CoQ10?” I give Bill and my mother a self-righteous glance. “It’s everything the doctors ordered me to take to keep the tumor from coming back. I’m trying.”
“We know you are, chicken.” Bill pats my arm. “We know.”
“Are you on any other prescription medications?” Lance asks.
This is unbelievable. “I’m sorry, but do cops usually ask these sorts of questions?”
“Actually, I’m a forensic psychologist. But I have ties to Palm Springs PD, and I report everything we’re speaking about to them.”
I scoot away from him in the bed. “We’re done, then. Conversation over.” I’ve had enough of talking to shrinks.
“Eliza.” My mother crosses her arms over her chest. “Honey, please. He’s just trying to help.”
“Too bad,” I say, like a toddler. And stop calling me honey, I want to add. It’s just too incongruous . . . and heartbreaking.
“I promise I can help put the pieces together for you,” Lance says. “But for this process to work, you have to be a willing participant. So how about you tell me if you took any other meds last night before you fell into the pool?”
I chew the inside of my cheek. I hate the turn this has taken.
“You know, even just mixing Xanax and alcohol can give you blackouts, memory gaps, and—”
“That might be true, but I didn’t take all those last night,” I cut him off. “You’re not listening to me. This isn’t a memory gap. This really happened.”
Lance looks at me easily, but I detect a slight smirk on his face. As he shifts in the seat, he’s lined up squarely with a poster of a curly-horned mountain goat in the hall. His head tilts just so, and it looks like he’s the one with the horns.
“Let’s talk about the drinking,” Lance circles back. “So why drink so much? Were you upset about something?”
I stare down at the sheets. “No.”
“You sure?”
I look him square in the eye. Focus, I tell myself. Breathe. “Of course I’m sure.”
“And what prompted this visit to Palm Springs, anyway?”
Why the hell does that matter? “I don’t know. It’s . . . pretty there. I like the dry heat. I like art deco. And I like hotels.”
“You should have told us you were going, sweetie,” Bill chimes in.
This takes me by surprise. “Am I on probation?”
“You promised us you’d tell us if you went anywhere outside LA,” my mother says.
I push my tongue into my cheek. I did?
Lance sits back in the chair and crosses his ankles. “That must have been tough to have a brain tumor last year, huh?”
I wrinkle my nose. He’s using his Shrink Voice. I’ve heard a few of those in my day. “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“You don’t have to downplay it. Cancer scares the shit out of everyone.”
“Of course it scared her,” my mother says. “As a kid, she worried she was going to get a tumor. She worried about a lot of things. Illness. Death. She was an unusually anxious child. And then she got a tumor. She was beside herself.”
“Mom,” I warn.
My mother shrugs. “But you were.”
Lance peers at me expectantly. I swallow hard, readying my own version of what it was like to have gone through brain surgery and recovery at twenty-two years old. The thing is, though, my mother is right. I was a strange child. A kid who worried. A kid who had obsessions, obsessions that still exist today. I was that kid who lined a storage bin with silk, climbed in, shut the lid, and lay there for hours, pretending, absorbing, fantasizing. I used to make my Barbies strangle, bludgeon, asphyxiate, stab, and hack apart one another. I was that kid who hanged every one of my stuffed animals from nooses in the closet doorway, pinning miniature suicide notes to their plush bodies. My mother found those suicide notes. She asked me why I’d done such a thing. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time, but I guess I was just curious about how someone could sink to that level of despair. I identified with that level of despair, though I didn’t know why. It came from somewhere deep inside of me, a place I was too young to understand.
Maybe my errant amygdala was to blame. Being diagnosed with the tumor was a bit of a paradox for me—it was nightmarish, yes, but it also kind of explained why, sometimes, I made very strange and unhealthy decisions. It was like a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was no longer responsible for my actions.
“Look, it wasn’t fun, but I got through it,” I answer. “And I’m doing well now. I have my own place. I have a job. I even wrote a book.”
Lance raises an eyebrow. “A book?”
“A novel. The Dots. A publisher bought it and everything.”
“How about that!” Lance glances around at my family. They shift from foot to foot. “What’s it about?”
Gabby makes a loud throat-clearing sound near the door, but when I try to catch her eye, she doesn’t look up. “It’s a coming-of-age story,” I say.
Lance nods encouragingly. He probably expects me to tell more, but I don’t want to. The last thing I want to do is explain my creative endeavors to my family. This is my achievement, not theirs—they didn’t foster it in the least. They aren’t artists. They aren’t even readers. They’ll deem it silly, probably. Frivolous. Melodramatic. They don’t even know that it’s publishing in a month. I hope they miss it entirely and never read a word, because then I won’t have to hear their misinterpretation.
“Eliza, let’s try and think this through,” my mother says. “You had a shock last night, and I think you need some time to rest. If you don’t want to stay in this hospital, maybe consider this place instead.” She fishes in her Band-Aid-colored bucket bag and hands me a pamphlet. It takes me a moment to make sense of the words on the cover. The Oaks Wellness Center. There’s a picture of people sitting around a farmhouse table, eating soup and looking joyful and serene. Psychiatric treatment in a relaxed, soothing environment, reads the cover.
Acid rises in my throat. “No way.”
“The last year has been hard for you,” Bill says. “It’s okay to admit you’re going through a rough patch again.”
“This isn’t a rough patch!”
“It’s okay, Eliza.” Lance puts his pen in his front pocket. “People with serious illnesses often have psychological relapses.”
“I. Didn’t. Jump. Into. That. Pool,” I tell the room. “I felt . . . hands.” I hold up my two shaking palms and make a shoving motion. “I don’t need a rest. My
tumor isn’t back. And I definitely don’t need a psych ward.” I look at Lance. “Can you at least ask around again, see if anyone saw anything, or if there was a backup video? Or even just ask the bartender on duty if they saw anyone with me in the bar that night?”
“But you seem like a nice girl, Eliza,” Lance says. “Would someone really want to hurt you?”
My brain catches. A nice girl. It’s comical. On the other hand, am I someone a person would like to hurt—even kill? Someone must have consciously made the decision to thrust me forward into the water. Someone must have hated me that much. It has to be someone who knows me. Someone who knows I can’t swim.
Sometimes I pick flowers, beautiful flowers, off people’s lawns. People I don’t even know. I don’t do anything with them. I smell them, drop them, and sometimes step on them.
I can be cruel and withhold affection.
I’m a liar. A fabulist. It’s probably why I wrote a book so easily post-tumor.
A lot of my decisions don’t make sense. I piss people off. I burn bridges. I do nothing to repair them usually, either.
There are certain things I don’t remember at all, huge chunks gone. I’ve been told the tumor’s to blame, but sometimes I wake up with a residue of shame over me, as gritty as sand. And sometimes, I still get the feeling I’ve done something. Something awful. I just don’t know what. So maybe someone does hate me that much.
I jut my chin into the air. “I guess that’s for you to find out, isn’t it, Lance?”
Lance looks at my family. My mother raises her eyebrows. Bill breathes out, looking heartbroken. Gabby is trying to morph into the wall. And then I glance at Lance’s clipboard again. He has flipped to a sheet of lined paper with the heading Eliza Fontaine. But he hasn’t written a single thing. No testimony. No details of my attack.
It doesn’t take me but a moment to get it. In his mind, there was no attack. He has sided with my family. I’m just a crazy girl. I don’t know what’s real.
I look desperately to Gabby, hoping she’ll speak up in my defense, but she’s pointedly consulting her phone as if we’re all just inappropriately loud strangers she’s stuck sitting next to on public transport. And for a moment, I entertain the idea that perhaps there is a third girl in the room, a different Eliza, and they’re talking about her, not me. After all, I’m the Eliza who’s better. I’m the Eliza who just had a few too many drinks. I’m the Eliza who remembers hands at her back pushing her into the water. I’m the Eliza who has the niggling worry that someone might have done it on purpose, for something I deserved.
That last bit strikes a dissonant chord. Only, no. This isn’t like the other times, those paranoia-fueled plunges brought on by a twisted lump of abnormal cells. Someone really is after me. Whatever happened to me this time, my fear is completely and unequivocally justified.
I just wish someone else believed it, too.
An excerpt from The Dots by Eliza Fontaine
Once upon a time there was a girl named Dot, and she loved her aunt—her namesake—Dorothy. They were two peas in a pod, Dot and Dorothy. Two dots connected by a solid, straight line. They could finish each other’s sentences. They looked very much alike. Sometimes, Aunt Dorothy joked that Dot was a clone of herself, a perfect genetic match. Dot hoped so, because that would mean great things for her future.
Her aunt’s full name was Dorothy Ophelia Banks. With her pale skin and violet eyes, the story went that, as a teenager, a modeling agent plucked her off Henry Street in Brooklyn and told her she was going to be a star. She went on to model for a brand of mints that weren’t quite as good as Tic Tacs, an airline that was plagued with technical problems just months after taking to the skies, and a brand of butt-hugging jeans that should have been the next Jordache but never caught on. Soon after, she married a tycoon who’d invented a new type of contact lens. She bounced around New York doing the club circuit, socializing, making friends with writers and playwrights and countesses and people who had fleets of helicopters; one man had his own spaceship. She was the type of woman who could charm any person in any room. She could wear a silk jumpsuit and platform heels; she was proud to traipse around in a thong bikini. A trapeze school in New York City opened; she was a natural at high-flying and spent a little time with a small postmodern circus. She did stand-up comedy at smoky clubs and always got belly laughs.
Two years later, she ditched Mr. Contact Lens and dated a man working for the government, changing her wardrobe to tweedy shoulder-padded power suits and dark Ray-Bans. Rumor had it she was activated by a phone call one sunny Sunday morning and went undercover in Tunisia. Assuming her undercover identity, she learned to parachute. She took up puppeteering. She raised champion Airedales. Later on, tired of DC and espionage, she moved to Los Angeles and married a film producer who promptly died, though not before giving her a son, Thomas, who then died, too. She joined a cult in New Mexico and made pottery. She wrote a novel called The Riders of Carrowae and spent years editing it. She distilled her own whiskey. She sold off a tech stock her late husband purchased in its infancy; with the handsome capital gains, she bought a house in the Hollywood Hills that had a clichéd but lovely view of the Hollywood sign off the back deck. She submitted Riders of Carrowae to agents. Everyone rejected it.
She went to parties. She flirted with men. People gave her gifts, mostly museum-quality jewelry and keys to safe-deposit boxes. She frequently gambled in Vegas—her favorite casino was the Golden Nugget—and always won. And then her niece, Dot, was born. And that’s when everything changed. Dot became the center of Dorothy’s life.
Dot thought Dorothy was the most amazing person ever. The hours she spent with Dorothy were magical. She disappeared into Dorothy’s walk-in closet in the hotel bungalow where she’d made her residence and emerged in Dorothy’s furs, gowns, and jewels. Dorothy took pictures of her and told her tales of where the outfits came from—a mink from a prince who’d fallen in love with her, a diamond necklace from a director who wanted her in his movie, a handmade beaded shift from when she was in a Vogue photo shoot, though her photos hadn’t made the issue’s final cut. Dorothy spritzed Dot with her signature scent she’d had a Portuguese perfumer concoct for her out of bergamot oranges. Then they played Oscar Night, Dot strutting on the red carpet, Dorothy conducting the interviews. Other days, they played Funeral, Dorothy settling into a silky coffin she kept in a back room, Dot weeping for her and giving a heartfelt eulogy. Often, from inside the coffin, Dorothy stage-whispered lines to add to the speech.
They spent days in bed eating Oreos and Brie and watching The Third Man and other old noir films. They wrapped Dorothy’s Hermès scarves around their heads—Dot’s favorite was the one printed with prowling leopards—and tooled around town in Dorothy’s Cadillac convertible. They made up stories—Dot told the beginning, Dorothy the middle, as middles were hard, and Dot the denouement.
Dot needed Dorothy. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother, but there was something so familiar about Dorothy. So recognizable. Her aunt sharpened who she was; she made Dot’s existence feel important and meaningful and tethered to a larger, brighter, bigger something. Dot pitied those who didn’t have a Dorothy in their lives. That’s what made what happened later on so tragic. When things soured, when things got tempestuous, it wasn’t just a hurricane-level disaster. It was an exploding atomic bomb.
This is that story.
ELIZA
THE NEXT MORNING, as I’m adding antioxidant powder to the smoothie I’d had delivered from a juice bar down the street, I hear my mother’s voice in the hallway. Most of what she’s saying is garbled murmurs, but I clearly make out the words paranoia and illness and suicide. A conversation about me, then. Naturally.
Moments later, she blusters into my room with a confrontational look on her face. She stops short when she notices I am no longer in my gown.
“Am I a picture of fashion or what?” I gesture to my clothes. I’m wearing an oversized Lakers T-shirt, acid-washed jeans, and K
eds. A nurse brought all of it up from the Lost and Found; the dress I’d worn at the resort had been ruined by pool chlorine, and I hadn’t packed anything else. “But beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”
“You’re checking out?” My mother’s voice cracks.
“Yep.” I try to sound rested, sober, healed. I hold up my phone. “I even got this back.”
My phone had been across the room the whole time, on top of a plastic bag that contained my ruined dress and shoes. A nurse finally noticed it this morning, and I’d pounced on it hungrily, scouring Google News for evidence of someone pushing me into the pool. There was no evidence. Whatever happened to me didn’t make any feeds, not even a local news report, not even the Tranquility’s Twitter account. Though I suppose bragging about random women lying facedown in the resort swimming pool probably isn’t the best PR strategy.
“A-are you sure you don’t want to stay another day?” my mother asks.
I give her my healthiest smile. Inside, I’m shaky, but I have to do this. I have to leave. I have to prove that what happened to me really happened. And I have an idea. One that doesn’t involve being stuck in here.
My mother hurries over to the nurse who happens to be in the room tidying up for the next patient. “Where’s the physician on duty?” she murmurs. “Can you find him, please?”
The nurse ambles slowly to the door and peers into the hall. “Don’t see him anywhere.”
I slide off the bed and look at my mother. Her face is pale. Her violet eyes have narrowed on me, and I know what she’s thinking. She wants to talk a doctor into forcibly keeping me here. But I did the research: they’d have to get a court document to make me stay against my will. Such a thing would take days, maybe weeks. For now, I’m free.
As though he’s sensed the tension, Bill appears at my mother’s side. She quickly fills him in, and he looks just as concerned. But I’m not going to be persuaded. Not by them.