The Elizas_A Novel

by Sara Shepard

  She frowned. “What was he saying?”

  “Forget it,” I said. There was no way I could mention that stuff about Palm Springs and the cops. Then I touched the hem of her sweatshirt. “That’s quite a fashion statement.”

  Kiki stroked the cat’s puffy face. “Yeah. I ran into this breeder my parents used to be friends with, and we got to talking. She sells these on Etsy for eighty dollars. I couldn’t say no.”

  And then she’d blathered on about the MacDonalds’ latest Abyssinian and how the winning Maine Coon looked like an asshole and had let out some putrid gas. I thought the Leonidas thing had blown over, but she gave me nervous glances when we got in the car and headed for home. When I went to my bedroom, I heard her whispering downstairs to Steadman. I can only imagine what she said. Eliza forgot her ex! Is that normal?

  As soon as I bolted the door to my bedroom, I pulled up Facebook and typed in my name. I have a fan page for The Dots; it has 834 likes. There are no pictures on the page besides the cover art and my headshot—certainly none of this Leonidas person and me in UCLA sweatshirts. But if Kiki really did look me up on Facebook shortly after we met, I wouldn’t have had the Dots page yet—I hadn’t even finished the novel.

  I keep searching, but I can’t find a separate personal page for Eliza Fontaine, the Girl. So am I crazy, or is Kiki? Maybe someone took my personal page down? But how could someone remove an account I don’t even remember?

  Then I pounced on my directory from my dorm at UCLA from last year. There was no one named Leonidas in it, not that that really proved anything—he could have lived somewhere else. Was he like the boyfriend I’d written in The Dots? Had I met him in art history class? But I remembered art history. I remembered the teacher with her shelf of dark hair and how she always wore saris even though she wasn’t Indian. I remembered Mariel, the girl I sat next to in each class—she told me once that if Pablo Picasso was still alive, she’d definitely give him a blow job. I don’t remember a boy in the back of the room holding court, or a boy giving astute answers about Mondrian, or a boy I became slowly obsessed with almost against my will.

  So how had we met, then? Why had we broken up? Why was he talking about me and Palm Springs and the police? Who was he talking to? And then, as I was lying there in my bed, a memory struck me, a hard soccer ball kicked to the side of my head. I saw myself lying on the tiled floor in a back hallway. I smelled mozzarella and grease, and I heard loud ’90s glam rock on a tinny radio. I saw that same redhead from the hotel lobby standing over me.

  Leonidas—I assumed it was him, though this memory played for me like a television show I’d never seen and I had to scramble to figure out the characters—glared at me, the blood drained from his cheeks. “You promised,” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t believe you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I heard myself saying. In the memory, I was covered in blood. Was it my blood? Was my brain just conjuring up blood for dramatic effect? I looked back at him, and he lurched toward me, and I let out a squeal. “I’m so sorry!”

  And then, poof, no more. If there’s anything true about the memory, why was he so angry with me? What sort of crime had I committed? Had I had an affair? I wouldn’t put that past me—in high school, I cheated on every boyfriend I had. It was like I couldn’t help myself.

  Maybe this is why I blocked Leonidas out—I’m ashamed of what I did to him. Maybe I am scared of him and what he might do in revenge. Could he have been in Palm Springs, wanting to hurt me?

  It kills me that I don’t have an available answer. I think my brain knows, but it isn’t able to tell me, possibly because of a new tumorous invasion choking vital pathways. Why have I taken all those vitamins, then? Why have I eaten so many fucking blueberries? I should have been gorging on pizza and cigarettes all this time. I could have avoided the shaman in the desert and all that exercise I struggled through. Maybe this is why I drank those bottles of Stoli at the Tranquility. Maybe it’s why I’ve been groping for liquor whenever I can find it these days—I still feel buzzed, in fact, from a shot of whiskey I drank before leaving my house to come to my parents’. I’m digging my own grave instead of letting my faulty brain dig it for me. There’s comfort in what I can control.

  I pull out my phone and type in the address for Dr. Forney, the neurologist I recall being somehow related to my tumor diagnosis. The office picks up when I call and ask to speak to the doctor.

  “Is this an emergency?” the nurse asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I whisper, but then I get myself together and say I just want to schedule an MRI. Just to check. Off the record. It’s not like anyone has to know.

  “You’ll need to get a referral for that,” she says. “I can make you an appointment with Dr. Forney here in the office. He has an opening next week.”

  On second thought, maybe I don’t want to talk to the doctor. Dr. Forney might be able to tell I’ve been drinking, and he’ll scold me. Dr. Forney might know about my fall into the pool and assume I did it on purpose. He might recommend I recover in a place like the Oaks. But what I want is empirical evidence only. A picture on a scan. An amorphous, ruinous blob.

  “Thanks, I’ll call back,” I tell the nurse, and hang up.

  I start up the walk to the house. This is the street tourists use to enter Griffith Park to hike to the Hollywood sign and today, like always, the street is jammed with parallel-parked rental vehicles. Giddy tourists armed with cameras and water bottles leisurely saunter in the middle of the road as though heading to a large outdoor concert. All of them have winsome, eager smiles of people who don’t have to stay in LA for any length of time. When I was a teenager, I used to hang out an upstairs window and throw water balloons at them. “Stop,” Gabby would hiss when she caught me. “That’s not nice.” I always rolled my eyes. She was always so obsessed with being nice.

  On the porch, I stop. I suddenly smell a perfume I recognize but cannot place. It actually stuns me for a moment, rendering me stupid. I hear screeching in my head.

  The door whips open. “Eliza!” Bill’s arms are outstretched in a T. “How are you? Doesn’t it smell good out here?”

  I smile dazedly. “Yes. What is it?”

  He gestures to a tree I’ve never noticed before. The thing has big orange fruits hanging low and breast-like from branches. “When did you plant that?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “It was here when we moved in.” He looks at me curiously. “You all right?”

  Part of me wants to collapse at his feet and tell him the opposite, but I’m afraid of what this will usher in. Better that I handle this myself, quietly, without panicking anyone else. “Fine,” I say in a clipped voice. “Just great.”

  Bill lets me through the door. Once Bill and Gabby moved in with us, the spooky old house was gutted and transformed into an airy, open rectangle with spare furniture and high-end electronics. The moldy furniture that had been here when we arrived was moved out, the secret graves were bulldozed over, the stained-glass windows of hollow-eyed saints and sinners were carefully removed and replaced. I got to keep the creepy death words in my closet for a while, but one day, apropos of nothing, my mother said she’d painted over them. “They were just too morbid,” she said. I cried for days. I mourned the loss of those words. I rewrote the facts I could remember in pencil, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t have the same shaky script. I couldn’t get the backward slant of the letters just right.

  How do I remember that so well, but not Leonidas?

  “Well, I gotta say, you look great.”

  I jump and turn around. Bill’s in the doorway, rubbing his hands together.

  “Thanks,” I say, though I know I don’t look great, not at all. I appreciate Bill’s practiced cheerfulness, though. The day the father and son pulled me out of the ocean, Bill drove me to the hospital for treatment. He acted as though we were driving to somewhere innocuous, like Home Depot.

  “Oh, look, a farm stand,” I remember him saying halfway there, pulling over. “Eliza,
you want a peach?” I often think my mother doesn’t deserve him, though perhaps they work in a yin and yang way, his kindness balancing out her prickliness.

  “Want anything to drink?” Bill asks now. “We’ve got water, soda, orange juice . . .”

  “Uh, water is fine,” I lie. I’d kill for a shot of bourbon.

  He makes a little nicker sound and disappears into the kitchen. I pad toward the built-in bookshelves, also a new addition after he moved in. They’ve got a lot of titles lined up, though most of them are about the Civil War, Bill’s forte. Also on the shelf are southern romances, the pastel-covered kinds, and a gritty memoir about a woman who grew up in a one-room shack and had psychos for parents. They must be my mother’s, though I’ve rarely seen her reading. But then there’s this thin book, really just a pamphlet, lying on the sleek, Lucite side table. On the Meditation of the Mind. On the back is a picture of a man with bulging eyes and frizzy, Einstein hair.

  I stop short, a chill running through me. It looks like the guy who said hello to me in the café with Posey. His name is Herman Lavinsky. Goose bumps rise on my skin. Why do I know that name?

  I grab my phone and find Google. Herman Lavinsky is a “healer” in Los Angeles. He leads people on “spiritual journeys” through Death Valley. I’m about to call up his website when the floor behind me creaks.

  “Here you go!” Bill appears with a Perrier. A lime bobs cheerfully on top.

  I show him the book. “Who is this guy?”

  Bill shrugs. “No idea. Must be one of your mom’s.” He takes the book from me and puts it back on the shelf. He takes my arm. “Come on, honey. We need to talk to you.”

  I give the spine of the book one more glance. On second thought, maybe the writer isn’t the guy from the café—that guy didn’t look capable of writing anything. Still, there is something about this book that starts an itch in my brain. I get a flash—brief, foggy, more a smell and a sound than an actual image—of being in an antiseptic room, someone’s clogs slapping quietly on the floor, and a voice saying, Okay, count backward from ten.

  It makes me shiver. What is it from? A nurse giving me anesthesia, maybe, when I had the tumor? Some crackpot I visited post-tumor to ensure I didn’t get sick again?

  “Okay,” I say, turning to Bill. “I want to talk to you guys, too.” I want to tell them about Leonidas. If they see him around, they need to tell me. If he knocks on their door, they can’t let him in. Maybe they can fill me in on who he is, too.

  Bill might have renovated most of the house with exotic woods and high-end blinds and robotic pneumatic systems that sucked up dust before it has time to settle, but my mother kept the kitchen almost as it was when we moved in. The cabinets were repainted in clean white, but the knobs remained the same round, bland brass buttons. The stove has four burners, the countertops are not marble but made out of some spongy material with little flecks of what they want you to think is stone smashed into the surface. Our old kitchen table, the one I used to impale with the tines of my fork, is still in the corner, as are the wooden chairs with the wobbly legs.

  My mother and Gabby stand together at the kitchen table, though when I walk in they jolt apart, as though I’m a big electromagnet reversing their polarization. “Uh, hi,” I say to my mother. And to Gabby, “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  They hem and haw. Then, something on the table catches my attention. It’s my book. Just sitting there, spine closed, cover glossy. My heart is in my throat. I point at it. “Where did you get that?”

  Gabby’s eyes grow wide. My mother doesn’t answer.

  I start to tremble. “I’m serious. Why is it here?”

  “We got it in the mail today,” my mother says in a low voice. “There was no return address.”

  My mind is racing. Damn it, Posey. I specifically told her I didn’t want my family to receive it. I’d been so clear. She wouldn’t have gone against my wishes. Only, does that mean someone else did? Not Laura, either—so who?

  The person who wants to hurt me? I swallow hard. Is that insane?

  My mother lets out a breath. “And we have a problem.”

  There is suddenly a surplus of saliva in my mouth. It takes three swallows to get it all down. “What do you mean?”

  My mother points to the book. Her eyes are blazing. “You can’t actually publish this, Eliza.”

  Sweat dots my back. I think, for a moment, I’ve heard her wrong, but then Bill adds, “We’ve tried calling your editor already, but she hasn’t called back.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say slowly. “So . . . you read it?”

  My mother looks exasperated. “Yes. We read it.”

  “And . . . you didn’t like it, I guess.” I laugh self-consciously, though it comes out choked.

  My mother’s eyes bulge, as if this is the most asinine question I could have asked. I am burning with shame. Maybe what I’ve worried about all this time is true: my book is literally the stupidest, pettiest, most ridiculous piece of writing ever to be put down on paper. Only, if it is, why did my agent applaud it? Why did my editor buy it? What the fuck is going on here? I review what my mother just said and feel a ball of anger knot in my chest. “And you called my editor?”

  “Yes, and you have to call her, too,” my mother says forcefully.

  I grab my book and press it to my chest. “I didn’t ask for you to read it. I never told you about it because I knew you wouldn’t like it. Just like you don’t like anything I do.”

  “Eliza,” Bill starts. “That’s not—”

  “No, forget it.” I grab the book from the table. My cheeks are blazing. “I have to go. I’ll see you later.”

  “Wait!” Bill catches my arm. “It’s just that . . . the story you wrote . . . are you sure? Maybe you should pull back, have a think. You’re a lovely writer. You must have other stories in you.”

  I wrench away. “Everyone else thinks it’s great. My agent tells me it’s getting a lot of good buzz.”

  My mother looks at Bill in horror. “Others have read it?”

  “No one but my editor and agent, and maybe some others at the publishing house, but reviewers are looking at it now.” For a split second, I wonder if Laura has recruited my mother in a twisted reverse psychology initiative, because now I want it to go to reviewers. I want the whole world to review it. I want to show her that others think it’s decent. Why does she get to deem something unpublishable? It’s like she’s taking it personally!

  Then I get it. I step back and laugh. “You’re pissed about the mother character, aren’t you? Because I made her nice at first, but then she’s totally unsympathetic. You think it’s you.”

  My mother bites hard on her bottom lip and says nothing.

  It’s so telling. Of course it’s the only thing she noticed, and she isn’t able to see past it, and she decided, based upon that fact and that fact alone, that my book is shit. Her disapproval of the one true thing I’ve done with my life so far falls in line with everything else she’s ever felt about me, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

  So why am I surprised? Why do I care so much? Why does it physically hurt?

  My mother strides forward, yanks the home phone from the wall, and hands it to me. “Please. Call your publisher right now. Tell them you’ve changed your mind.”

  I bark out a laugh. “Just because you think it’s a bad book doesn’t mean you get to cancel its existence.”

  “Eliza!” Her eyes are wild. She looks like she might cry. “Please!”

  I take the receiver from her and slam it back into its cradle. “No,” I say. “You’re not being fair.”

  Bill places his hands on the table. “Eliza, why did you write this book?”

  It feels like a trick question. “I don’t know. Because . . . I’ve always wanted to write a book.”

  There’s a bubbling sound at the stove, and a charred scent to the air. My mother glares at Bill. He holds his palms up in the air. No one moves.

  My skin prickles. “Does t
his have something to do with someone pushing me into the pool?”

  My mother shuts her eyes. “No one pushed you into that pool, Eliza.”

  “But the guy who pulled me out of the water saw someone running away from the scene.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  I scoff. “How do you know? Why would the guy lie? I think the person who pushed me was Leonidas.”

  My mother, to Bill: “Her college boyfriend?” Then to me: “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “How do you know?”

  Finally, Bill seems to notice the burning sauce. He sidles to the stove to save it. “I mean, isn’t Leonidas a hundred pounds soaking wet?”

  “He’s still capable of pushing,” I say through clenched teeth. “He could be dangerous. He hurt me when we were dating.”

  “He did?” My mother looks astonished.

  I duck my head. I really have no clue.

  “I don’t think it was Leonidas,” Gabby says in her small, meek way.

  I turn to her, eager for more. “Why do you say that?”

  One shoulder lifts. “He . . .” She trails off. “He always seemed nice.”

  “Didn’t he rescue rats from a pet store?” My mother’s voice cracks. “Wasn’t that his big claim to fame?”

  “No, that was Dot’s boyfriend you’re thinking of. You’re getting us confused.” I’m astonished she retained anything from the novel, considering how vehemently she loathed it. “Look, I overheard him talking to someone on the phone today. About Palm Springs. And about calling the police.”

  “But couldn’t it be a coincidence?” Gabby says carefully.

  “That’s ridiculous,” my mother says at the same time.

  My head swivels between them. “It’s not ridiculous. Someone is after me. Someone wants to hurt me.”

  “Eliza. Honey.” Bill presses his hand on my shoulder. It’s warm and large, and his fingers clamp down on bone. “No one’s going to hurt you. We’re right here. We’ll make sure. We want you to get better.”

  Across the table, Gabby nods. When I look at my mother, her eyes have softened. The atmosphere distorts. They look so earnest, suddenly. Like my well-being really is the only thing on their minds. And it seems possible, in this moment, that if I just give in, if I tell them that I’m lying and that what happened in Palm Springs was just like all the other times, their love for me will blossom, and they will keep me safe. I mean, it’s partly what I’m worried about anyway, right? That I’m sick again? So why can’t I let them help me? I picture a fantasy: I’m whisked upstairs and taken to my old bed. Bill wheels in the TV and brings me soup. Gabby reads to me from a magazine. My mother cries quietly into a handkerchief.