The Elizas: A Novel(105)

“Now, Eliza is here to read from her new book, Pawns, which comes out next week. Once dessert is served, we’ll have her up here for an excerpt and for signing. So until then, enjoy, drink, be merry, and please buy a copy of Eliza’s book in advance if you want it signed. Thank you.”

There’s a smattering of applause, and the music comes back on. My mother smiles at me from across the table, but I’m too jittery to smile back. Downing the rest of my water, I drop my napkin on my chair and head to the bathroom. I need cold water on my face and pulse points. The last thing I want is to faint up there on the stage. I pass a table covered with copies of Pawns and about twenty Sharpies in varying colors and styles. My stomach tumbles. This time, I have to actually promote a book, go on tour, give interviews. But I can do it, I think. I can tell the truth. Mostly because I know what the truth is.

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.