The Elizas: A Novel(14)

Dot decided to try her hardest not to need her mother. She turned away from her kisses and didn’t answer her questions. “Oh, you shouldn’t be so hard on her,” Dorothy said. But then, not a half beat later: “Of course, you’ll always have me.”

That was right, Dot thought. Dorothy was more than enough.

There was a rotating cast of nurses, aides, doctors, and specialists in to see Dot, eager to figure out why her brain kept locking up. She had CAT scans, PET scans, bone density tests, blood plasma draws, a spinal tap. Dorothy lorded over every treatment, wanting to know about every aspect of Dot’s care: what went into changing the sheets, why they took her blood so often, the types of needles they used for Dot’s IV, what sorts of medications they gave Dot when she had a seizure, and the nutritional value of the smoothie they always gave Dot for lunch. She learned so much that she could probably have performed many of the minor procedures herself. In fact, one day while dozing, Dot felt the blood pressure cuff wrap around her arm and opened her eyes to find her aunt taking her vitals. “They let you do this now?” she asked, chuckling.

Dorothy blinked. “Sorry?”

It was a different voice—higher and less raspy. Dot looked again. The woman taking her blood pressure had dark hair and a finely boned face, just like Dorothy’s. The only difference was that her eyes were green.

Dot told her aunt about the look-alike, and not much later, Dorothy got to experience her for herself. The woman, whose name was Stella, shuffled in to take Dot’s blood pressure, not even noticing Dorothy in the chair, and Dorothy, for once, didn’t make her presence known. When she left, Dorothy exhaled. “That was amazing. It was like I was in the presence of a paranormal event! I’d split in two! She should play a look-alike of me at parties.”

“Or you could play a look-alike of her,” Dot quipped.

Dorothy wrinkled her nose. “Why would I do that?”

The next time Stella came in, Dorothy invited her to sit on Dot’s bed and chat. Stella was younger than Dorothy, and her nails were bitten to the quick. Dorothy moved close, lifted a lock of Stella’s hair, and sniffed it.

“Do you get ovarian cysts from time to time?” she asked. “Is your eyesight just a touch myopic?”

Stella’s eyes darted. “Pardon?”

Dorothy looked at Dot. “I want to see if her insides are the same as mine, too.” Then she pressed her face close to Stella’s. “Who’s prettier?”

By this time, a nurse had entered the room and was giving Dorothy a skeptical look. Dot surreptitiously pointed in her aunt’s direction, not wanting to offend Stella, though it was the truth. Stella was younger, but Dorothy was prettier.

“Do you need anything, dear?” Stella asked Dot as she stood and bunched her blood pressure cuff under her arm. Dot shook her head, and Stella was gone.

Dorothy chuckled after Stella left. “You’d think she would have enjoyed that. Not everyone has a doppelganger.”

To gauge Dot’s pain, one of the nurses suggested Dot grade her days, with A as perfectly healthy days and F as times where she felt close to death’s door. Dot rated a lot of her days at the hospital a C-minus, sometimes even a D. On those days, the corners of the room warped into dragons and yetis. Her scalp itched tremendously, and every time she grappled for it, a clump of hair fell out. Dot’s port, a gaping hole in her chest that fed medication straight to a vein, ached, and it became infected several times. The worst days were when she had seizures, because just before one started, she would feel the most nauseated she ever had in her life, and her vision would flip inward on itself, and she’d lose control of her limbs. She’d slip somewhere deep inside her body then—she witnessed everything, could see everything, but had no way of controlling what her body was doing. When she came out of it, her headaches were excruciating. Her skin felt like it was on fire. One time, the seizure was so violent that she almost bit through her tongue, and she had to have a giant bandage wrapped around the muscle for four days, lest she get another infection. She was so prone to infections. Bacteria adored her.

The only thing that got her through any of it was her aunt’s presence. If Dot needed Dorothy to sit by her side all night, Dorothy would. If Dot needed her to shove her finger into Dot’s mouth during a seizure so she’d bite Dorothy’s skin straight down to the bone instead of her own tongue, she would—and did, having the indentations to prove it. Every day, Dorothy came into Dot’s room with fat medical books she’d purchased from the UCLA Medical School bookstore, researching unusual brain, lymph, blood, metabolic, and autoimmune diseases that could be making Dot seize. She demanded private audiences with Dot’s doctors and had even procured Dr. Koder’s home phone number. She cornered her nurses in the hall and asked for “the real scoop” in case Dot’s doctors were mincing words. One time, Dot saw her sneak into an unattended nurses’ station and fiddle with the computer.

“What were you looking for?” Dot asked after Dorothy had scurried away just as a nurse came around the corner.

“Notes in your file, of course,” Dorothy whispered. “Just in case there’s anything I can look up. It’s possible these doctors don’t read all of the journals, you know. I’m filling in the gaps.”

She sat by Dot’s side for hours, reading her books, watching Dot’s favorite programs on TV, making up stories. They fantasized about the food Dot would eat once she was out of here and able to eat a normal diet again—the hospital was keeping her on a very restrictive food regimen, thinking perhaps that she’d developed a bizarre allergy. She pointed to a restaurant called M&F Chop House across the street.