The Elizas: A Novel(7)
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 Keds. 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.
“At least let us drive you home, Eliza,” Bill finally offers.
“I can take a cab back to the resort to pick up my car. No biggie.”
The nurse shakes her head. “No, dear, you can’t get behind the wheel. There’s too much medication in your system.”
And just like that, we’re walking out to the parking lot toward Bill’s Porsche Panamera.
My father died when I was very young—I barely remember him—but my mother was lucky to hook up with Bill thirteen years ago for this car alone. He opens the back door for me, and I sink into the leather seat in the back and shut my eyes, relaxed by the sudden growl of the engine. Who knows how my car will get home from the resort’s parking garage?
Gabby slides into the backseat, too, her hands flat across her thighs. She gives me a sideways glance, grimaces slightly, and scrunches against her door. “I know, I know.” I gesture to the Lakers shirt. “They said they washed this stuff in Clorox, but they should have burned it.”
Gabby’s smile flickers. “I guess it’s better than wearing the gown home.”
“Totally,” I agree, because I think this is her idea of a joke, and I think she’s being kind, and I need her on my side.
Bill inserts a paper card into the automated pay booth, and the barricade lifts. Soon enough, he turns onto the I-10. Drab desert sweeps by. We’ve got the SiriusXM business channel at a low volume. No one is talking. Clearly they want to; I can feel it in the air, crackling. Everyone would love to scream at me how it was a terrible idea for me to have checked myself out. It wafts off them like sweat.
Gabby shifts next to me, and I sneak a peek at her. She’s typing furiously on her phone. “Whatcha doing?” I ask, as though we have conversations all the time.
She flips the phone over, concealing the screen. “Um, just work stuff.”