by Sara Shepard
“I just started writing. First it was to try and put words to my experience—you know, being sick. So I wrote about a girl who was stuck in a hospital room looking at the steak house across the street. She imagined herself there, with a cast of interesting characters. I gave her someone to talk to. And then it just . . . morphed.”
“Did you have to do a lot of rewriting? Did you outline?”
Maybe I had been in a fugue state, because I don’t exactly remember my process or how ideas came to me, only that when they did I wrote them down. Maybe there was some invisible beast perched next to me, whispering in my ear. A Roman goddess of fiction. Desmond would probably appreciate that.
I feel insecure not having easy answers; older, wiser authors probably do. Eliza the dilettante, fiddling around at her keyboard, hammering out some words, forming them into sentences, the words rolling their eyes and doing the job for her, somersaulting and catapulting around until they form a story. That’s how writing my book felt. Like something else took over. Like I’d just been along for the ride. “My best thoughts came in the middle of the night,” I dredge up, even though it isn’t true. “From a dead sleep.”
“Marvelous. And do you think we’ll read another book about Dot?”
I make a face. Why would I write another book about Dot? She has nowhere to go in the end. She seals her fate.
“Excuse me.”
The New York City Flasher stands over us. Up close, he smells like Head & Shoulders shampoo. His eyes aren’t as wild as I expect, but still my heart thunders in my chest. He is standing so close we are almost touching.
“Yes?” Posey touches her belly territorially.
The man looks at me. “We’ve met, right?”
I blink. The berry seeds in the few sips of smoothie I drank feel gritty on my tongue. All at once, my heart is throbbing in my throat. Should I know the answer?
A furrowed frown invades his craggy face. “Well. Maybe not. My apologies. Sorry for bothering you.” And then, giving me another nod, he walks off.
Posey wrinkles her nose at him. “Los Angeles is just as weird as New York.” She says this joyfully. The world, I realize, is a funny place to most people. A fascinating place. Nothing to be afraid of. If only I was like everyone else.
Posey takes my hand. “So listen. We just got a really exciting media request for you. It’ll air the day your book comes out. Are you ready? Dr. Roxanne.”
I frown. “A medical show?”
She smacks her temple in an oh, silly me sort of way. “You’re the type who doesn’t watch TV, aren’t you? Of course you are. Dr. Roxanne is a talk show. She’s almost as big as Oprah. Took over the book club thing when Oprah went off the air!”
“Wait, you want me to be on TV?”
“Laura said you’d be okay with it. Please, Eliza? We’ll preview all the questions before you’re on the air. You don’t have to get into your medical history if you don’t want to. Think of it as a spa day—you’ll get your hair and makeup done, you’ll get dressed up in wardrobe, everyone will adore you.” She pops a bite of cake in her mouth. “Besides, you deserve it. Especially after your ordeal in the hospital, you know?”
The door to the café opens; Flasher has gone. Ushered in is a tall, beautiful man who smiles at me. It’s a refreshing trade.
I press my fingers against my knees and then nod at Posey. “Okay,” I say. Because I want her to like me. I don’t want to let her down.
Besides, how bad could it be?
From The Dots
When Dot was in junior high, she became good friends with Matilda. Like Dot, Matilda enjoyed hacking off her hair and dressing in postmodern outfits involving tinfoil. The two of them sat on a sweaty-smelling beanbag in Matilda’s brother Kyle’s bedroom and listened to punk rock on vinyl: The Dead Kennedys, Descendants, Alice Donut. Matilda pierced Dot’s belly button with a needle and rubbing alcohol. Dot shaved Matilda’s head with her dad’s clippers. They made out some. They read Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets over and over, wishing they could inspire such fitful and frenzied feelings in a person.
One day, when they were creating a diorama called Barbie Gets Into an Auto Accident, Matilda’s mother came in the room and said that Matilda needed to see her grandma that day. She was very sick, and she would likely die within a few hours.
Dot asked if she could go along. Matilda’s mother looked at her strangely. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Dot answered, glaring at Matilda’s mother from behind nearly a whole tube of mascara and stick of eyeliner. Matilda’s mother reluctantly agreed. Maybe she was just afraid of her spooky daughter and her spooky daughter’s friend, or maybe she was giving Dot a little extra forbearance. Dot might not have had any relapses since she was nine, but that Los Angeles article had proclaimed she was going to die, after all.
They got into her mother’s Mercedes. Dot was expecting to pull up to a hospital, but instead they wound through Mulholland Drive and came upon a bungalow that overlooked the canyon. “Your grandma’s in the back bedroom,” Matilda’s mother said. Duh, Dot wanted to snark. Where did they think she’d be, swimming in the pool?
Then she turned to Dot. “You can sit in the kitchen and wait.”
“No, I’ll go in, too,” Dot insisted. She hadn’t come all this way for nothing.
Grandma was sitting on a rocking chair, an afghan thrown over her legs. Her eyes were bright, but there were all sorts of tubes running into her. A silver machine pumped oxygen. The people gathered around her freaked out at her every move, asking if she was comfortable, if she needed anything to drink, if she was getting enough oxygen, if she was cold, hot, bored, scared. Dot felt nonplussed by the tableau; something was wrong. Then she understood: normally, she was Matilda’s grandmother. Today she was the healthy one. The one nobody was worried about.
She looked down at herself, astonished. How was it that she’d had seizure after seizure and now . . . nothing? When would the demons wriggle back into her brain? Could her scans really still be clean?
She wished her aunt knew how healthy she was, but Dorothy had never returned from her book research. Five years had gone by with no sign of her—or any signs of the book. Upon leaving the hospital, Dot had tried to text Dorothy her new home address, but Dorothy never replied. Dot sent letters to the Magnolia Hotel, but they were always returned to her, saying Dorothy had given no forwarding information. Regularly, Dot scoured the Internet for news of her, but there was never anything. She looked through magazines, thinking Dorothy might pop up in a society photo—after all, hadn’t she been society herself, once upon a time? She typed her aunt’s full-name-comma-Alabama, her aunt’s full-name-comma-Alaska, and so on down the list of states, canvassing each Dorothy Banks to see if she was a match. She did the same for towns in England and Italy, in Japan and Eastern Europe. She tried to remember aliases Dorothy enjoyed when they played Funeral and Oscar Night: Teresa di Vicenzo. Honey Ryder. Kissy Suzuki. It astonished Dot that they were Bond girls—she’d never known. She watched the Bond movies, thinking they might provide a clue. She wanted to search for Mr. Contact Lens or the government man Dorothy had dated, but come to think of it, she didn’t know their first or last names. Even Milton Banks, dead filmmaker, a link to her ex-husband, didn’t yield any results.
Dot wandered through cemeteries, searching for Dorothy’s son Thomas’s grave, but never found it. She even searched her own cache of memorabilia, poring over the few photos of Dorothy she’d kept. One was a photo of Dorothy and herself poolside at the Magnolia—it was the day, Dot remembered, Dorothy told her about the River Styx. From that day forward, Dot had avoided water. Another photo was Dorothy and Dot in matching fur stoles; Dorothy held a real cigarette on a long holder, Dot smoked one made out of candy.
This person was once here, Dot thought, turning the photo in her hands. But now she’s gone. Was it possible to literally drop out of the world?
A few times, she thought she saw Dorothy around town. She’d see a slender, dark-haired woman waitin
g for a bus or standing in line at the pharmacy, and her breath would catch. Once, after a miserable lunch with her parents at Terranea in Rancho Palos Verdes, Dot came out of the ladies’ room and saw Dorothy pushing a cleaning cart down the hallway toward the guest rooms.
“Dorothy!” Dot screamed, grabbing her arm. When her aunt turned, she was wearing her signature Hermès scarf printed with prowling leopards tied around her neck. Dot flung her arms around Dorothy in joy, forgetting all feelings of anger or abandonment. Dorothy had been found! Huzzah!
But Dorothy reared back. “What? Who? No!”
Her voice was higher, choppier. When she raised her head, her eyes were green. She looked at Dot with fear, probably because Dot was just inches away from her face.
Dot shot away. Something about the woman’s voice clicked a cog into place in her brain. A fuzzy memory came back of her aunt pestering a nurse from the hospital because she was her doppelganger. Could this be the same person? Dot knew she’d learned her name, but she couldn’t conjure it forth.
“Sorry,” she said quickly, and then turned away. She ran all the way back to the dining room, nearly knocking over a bellboy pushing a cart piled with Louis Vuitton train cases.
Every once in a while she asked her mother about Dorothy. Dot had stiffened into resentment for her mother—she’d definitely had a hand in sending Dorothy away. Her mother seemed to sense the resentment, but instead of trying to win back her love, like some people’s parents’ might, she was a hard-ass with Dot, constantly riding her to straighten up and brush her hair and do her homework and, goddamn it, don’t wear eyeliner all the way out to your temples, you look insane. Dot would fight back, and their arguments would escalate to screaming matches, and Dot’s mother would finally turn to her new husband and say, “I can’t handle her anymore. I don’t care what she does,” as if Dot wasn’t in the room.
Dot would have thought asking her mother about Dorothy would spark a new argument, but usually her mother was cavalier about Dorothy questions. “The thing about Dorothy is that she could be anywhere,” Dot’s mother mused recently. “Selling rugs in Monaco. Taking a writing course at the Sorbonne.”
“Where’s that?” Dot asked with interest.
“Paris,” her mother answered.
Dot’s eyes lit up. France! She did say she was going there! “But how is it that she’s been there for so long?” Dot asked her mother. “Isn’t France expensive?”
Her mother shrugged. “Money is no object for good old Dorothy.”
Dot placed her hands on her hips. “If she’s so rich, why did you never ask her for money when I was in the hospital?” Her mother stared at her in confusion. “You wouldn’t have had to work so hard. She could have paid some of the bills. You could have visited me more often,” Dot explained. She hated that she had to explain. She felt so weak, so exposed. Her mother should have worked this out years ago.
Her mother shook her head. “No, no. Dorothy’s money is for Dorothy. She doesn’t spend it on anyone else. Well, except for Thomas, when he was alive.”
Dot perked up. “What was Thomas like?”
“He was . . . odd.” Her mother averted her eyes. “Look, I’m not saying Dorothy didn’t have her fair share of pain. However, that doesn’t mean we should overlook her shortcomings.”
Dot snorted. “Which are what, exactly?”
“Dot, it’s time you understand. Your aunt . . . she’s not what you think.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean . . . mentally. She’s . . .” Her mother turned away.
“Are you saying she’s crazy?” Dot demanded. “How can you say that about your sister?”
Her mother shrugged. “I know you love her. But I know this because she’s my sister. I grew up with her. She’s always been this way.”
Dot considered this. The details she knew about her mother and Dorothy growing up together were shaky: they were the daughters of a New York banker father who was always away on business and a mother who dabbled in modeling but mostly just took pills, drank, and entertained friends. They lived on acreage in Long Island; they had a driver and went to Manhattan private schools. They had a day nanny and a night nanny. There were elaborate birthday parties, though Dot’s mother doesn’t recall her parents ever attending. Later, the girls went to boarding school, though not the same ones. So how did Dot’s mother even know what her sister was like if they were sent to different schools? Her mother had to be jealous: her sister had gotten all the looks, talent, and panache. Dot’s mother, on the other hand, turned away the family cash, fixed teeth for a living, and had thin, stringy hair.
“You used to like her,” Dot said miserably.
“This isn’t a matter of me liking her or not liking her. It’s a matter of what’s true and what’s false.”
“Well, she seemed perfectly healthy to me.” To which her mother exchanged a loaded look with her stepfather. Dot rolled her eyes.
Her aunt’s absence had carved a hole in Dot’s chest. Once, she had even gone to the school therapist of her own accord, walking into the office and sitting down at his desk and demanding he stop whatever he was doing and talk to her. Dot had known the therapist had wanted to talk to her for quite some time. She’d seen him watching her lurk in the hallways as she tried to melt the popular crowd with her mind. Several days a week, she wore six-foot wings across her shoulder blades, and she’d heard the therapist whisper to another teacher, “Are those made of human skin?”
In his office, Dot told the therapist how her beloved aunt must have abandoned her because of something she had done. “Why would you say that?” the therapist asked. “What do you think you did?”
Dot considered this. She’d gotten sick? She’d said the wrong thing at the hospital? She hadn’t seemed grateful enough? She’d thrown that fit about the magazine, even though it was justified?
“I think you may have to just pretend that she’s passed on,” the therapist said. (He wasn’t, Dot would learn later, an actual therapist, but a school counselor with a teaching degree.) “Talk to her, and she will listen, but you have to make peace with her leaving. We have to believe she’s in a better place, and you have to try to get yourself to a better place, too.”
Dot had never heard such bullshit in her life. But she did follow a bit of the counselor’s advice: every night, she wrote letters to Dorothy in her journal. They mostly listed details of her day. Had another MRI, and I’m still clean. I made out with Brody Fish in the dissection room. He seemed scared because we were sitting next to twenty half-opened cats. Matilda and I set our hair on fire after school. It smelled awful.
She penned Dorothy’s responses, too. Each told of the amazing things Dorothy was up to in Paris. Living in an apartment with a view of the Arc de Triomphe, shacking up with the president of France, busking on the streets of Cannes with a ukulele and a Standard Poodle. Dorothy was always good at belting out The Who. But the responses never filled the hole. They barely helped at all.
At Matilda’s grandmother’s deathbed, surrounded by all that medical equipment, Dot watched an old woman who definitely was going to die hug Matilda fiercely. There was this brave look in her eye that puzzled her. Was it true bravery, or was she putting on a facade because she didn’t want her family to worry? That, Dot reasoned, was the ultimate show of love, a love she’d been deprived of for so long. She felt a pang inside her, wishing for Dorothy so desperately she could practically taste it, metallic, cold, addictive, on the back of her tongue.
ELIZA
ON WEDNESDAY, I make a list of people who might hate me. Friends from childhood, old neighbors, my parents, Steadman, people from the writing group Kiki and I belong to whose fiction I critiqued the teensiest bit too harshly, customers from Steadman’s curiosities shop I snubbed, that man I rear-ended earlier this year and, instead of giving him my insurance details, I fled the scene. Any of them could be the right answer, but they all feel wrong. I have done worse things. I know it. I just don’t kno
w what they are.
So how can I get more information on what happened? I try the Shipstead several more times to no avail. I listen to my self-hypnosis tapes in hopes that I’ll put myself into a trance that will conjure back the memory. I look up Amygdala tumors to see if they regularly recur. They can. I look at pictures of some amygdala tumors for a while. They are ugly, white splotches against a dark, spongy mass.
Then I type in Eliza Fontaine-comma-amygdala-tumor, in hopes of . . . well, I’m not sure what. It’s not like the hospital would list my medical records on a public forum. It would be nice, though, to see a scan of my tumor; it would make it easier to picture it in my head again now. But the only stories about me are about my pool plunge and links to the book, which I peruse quickly, then click out of because they all suggest that I’m either suicidal or extremely attention seeking.
I stalk old friends online to see if any of them were in Palm Springs the night I fell into the pool. None of them were. I look up Desmond Wells, too. His picture is front-and-center on the official site of the Ludi Circensus festival in San Fernando. There is Desmond with an ivy wreath in his hair and wearing a toga with a rope for a belt. His legs, I note, are oddly hairless. I wonder why the hell I’m looking at his legs.
I also need to prove to Kiki that I’ve got my shit together and don’t require her concern. It all dovetails nicely into an invitation to her to the Greater Los Angeles Kitty Splendor Cat Show this afternoon. When Kiki was young, so the story goes, she and her family paraded a chubby Maine Coon named Buster around the country in hopes that they’d make the national finals. She still has pictures of Buster all over her bedroom, and rumor has it her parents keep him, stuffed, on their mantel. We don’t have a cat now—her brother hated the experience as much as she loved it, and clearly he makes all the rules—but Kiki says just being in the presence of feline excellence helps fill the void.
The show is in the ballroom of a Westin hotel one block away from the Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. All the tables in the space are against the walls, and the room is full of meowing. Most of the cats are in cages, and it’s hard to know who the judges are because everyone’s kind of a clone, male and female alike—dumpy, frizzy-haired, bespectacled, talky. I see about a hundred puffy-paint cat sweatshirts. Men with beer guts wear message tees that say Meow Power. We pass a group of cat dorks telling a joke; the punch line has something to do with a Siamese. “Mister Mistoffelees” from Cats blares over the PA. Admittedly, the cats are gorgeous—most of them look like completely different species than the mangy messes I’m used to dealing with. A Persian looks at me with such intelligence I’m pretty sure he’s reading my mind. I shake a feather I plucked from a drawer at home at a Sphinx, and I swear he rolls his eyes, like I’ve got to be fucking kidding.