The Elizas: A Novel(15)

“We’ll go there for burgers. I hear they make delicious ones.”

Dot studied the restaurant out the window. It had golden light seeping from its core. The bar was full. A TV in the corner played the news. A group at a table in the front talked animatedly.

“Maybe I’ll just live there,” Dot mused. A week before, her mother had announced she was going to marry the man she was dating, a man Dot barely knew, and who had a child Dot had never met.

“Where would you sleep?” Dorothy asked. “On a banquette?”

“No, in the room where they chop up the meat.” Dot had an unusual affinity for the smell of blood.

Dorothy chuckled. “You have quite the imagination.”

“And every night, I could dine with interesting people—fortune tellers, witches, elves.”

“Elves! Who else?”

It became a riff. Every day, they added to the tale of Dot at the Chop House. Dot would find a secret cave in the basement filled with crystals and stalagmites and gold doubloons. A dumbwaiter that led to a portal back to Gothic England, and she’d befriend Jack the Ripper. Dot of the Chop House had quite a few pets, but her favorites were her dog, Ko, and her bat, Tristan. Tristan had the power of speech, but he could only recite sonnets. Dorothy was impressed that such a little girl knew what a sonnet was.

“For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night,” Dot recited gleefully.

“A genius!” Dorothy proclaimed.

“Your aunt’s quite the firecracker, isn’t she?” Dr. Koder said one day, popping into Dot’s room unannounced when Dorothy had taken a coffee break.

Dot looked into the doctor’s wet, Hershey-kiss-colored eyes. She had a bit of an Anna Nicole Smith thing going, with the blonde hair and the huge boobs, but her glasses softened that, rendering her wise. Ish.

“Yes,” Dot answered proudly. “Did you know she was once a model? And she got through half of medical school. In Tunisia, while she was taking a break from the CIA.”

Dr. Koder’s smile wavered a little. “Well, yes, but she’s not a doctor here.”

Dot frowned. “I know.”

Dr. Koder leaned a little closer. “If you ever need some time alone, if it ever seems like too much, just tell us.”

“If what is too much?”

“Well, sometimes family can be a little . . . suffocating. And it must be hard not being around kids your own age. You should check out our hangout area. We have a Ms. Pac-Man machine!”

Dot was confused. Maybe Dr. Koder didn’t like the Halloween decorations Dorothy had brought in: doll parts popping out of coffins, decapitated bats, rotted eyeballs in cauldrons. Maybe they didn’t like how Dorothy flirted with the male specialists. Maybe they didn’t like the time she brought that bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and drank it in Dot’s room. But it wasn’t like she’d given Dot any.

And really, if the doctors should be mad at anyone, it should be Dot’s mother. She barely showed up anymore. She just thrust all the responsibility on Dorothy while she attended office birthday parties and ate chocolate cake. Meanwhile, Dorothy helped Dot around the clock. Sometimes, Dorothy would come into Dot’s room and collapse exhaustedly in a chair, even nodding off for a few moments, jolting awake if Dot so much as coughed.

“She probably does need a rest,” Dot said. “She’s trying so hard.”

Dorothy swept in not fifteen minutes later wearing a Chanel suit and the Hermès scarf printed with prowling leopards, Dot’s favorite.

“Did you see Doctor Koder in the hall?” Dot asked. “She said you might want a rest from here. You could go back to the Magnolia. I know how much you miss their eggs Benedict.”

Dorothy paused from unraveling her scarf from her neck. “Why would she say I need a rest?”

“Well, I might have hinted that you were tired . . .”

“What else did you say about me?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” Dot said cautiously. Her aunt’s voice had grown so loud and shrill. “Nothing, really.”

Dorothy stomped around Dot’s little room. “Jesus. Those jealous assholes. One of them gets an idea in her head, and it just infects everyone else. And meanwhile, it’s you who suffers. My baby!” Then she whirled away from the window. “You don’t really agree, do you? You don’t want me gone?”

“I— Of course not.” Dot had no idea what her aunt was talking about.

Dorothy collapsed to the chair and covered her face with her hands. “Oh God. You do, you do. This is how it starts. This is how I am abandoned.”

“Aunt Dorothy,” Dot whispered. “Please. Don’t cry.”

“Everyone leaves me,” Dorothy said into her hands. “Thomas. Your mother. My mother. My husbands. Now you.”

“Don’t say that.”

Her aunt kept her head down as she stumbled out of the room. “I can’t be in here right now. I can’t look at you.”

“Wait!” Dot scrambled out of her bed, getting tangled in all the cords that fed into her body. “I’m sorry! Whatever I did, I’m sorry!”

She hobbled down the hall after Dorothy, dragging the IV pole behind her, but Dorothy was already through the exit’s double doors. A nurse found Dot in the stairwell and walked her back to her room, saying that she couldn’t leave the children’s ward. Dot flopped back onto her horrid hospital bed and flipped through the TV channels. Everything on at that time of day was either terribly violent or a talk show featuring people yelling and sobbing. She turned the TV off and stared at the ceiling, listening to the soft murmurs of the intercom in the hall. After a while, she fell asleep, her scratchy, bleached pillow wet with tears.