The Elizas: A Novel(23)

Now, I pad to the fridge, open it, and grab a bottle of water. The shelves are stuffed with Trader Joe’s fare. Steadman’s name is written on the soy milk and individual pots of Greek yogurt. He pens S.R. across the skin of each individual clementine in the bag. This is why I moved my vitamins upstairs. I don’t want to have to put my name on them.

I can feel Kiki and Steadman staring at me.

“So is it true?” Steadman asks.

“What’s that?” I ask after taking a long drink.

“The pool, Eliza!” Kiki holds up her phone. “Did you almost drown?”

I swallow hard. “How do you know that?” Could Desmond have told them on his way out?

“A website in Palm Springs wrote a piece about you. I just read it. I thought it was for your book, but it’s about someone pulling you out of a swimming pool.”

“So it is in the news?”

I snatch the phone from her. Woman Rescued from Near-Drowning reads the headline on the screen. The story posted twenty minutes ago—my Google Alert, which I’d set to ping whenever a mention of me popped up online, must have missed it. The article says a young woman, twenty-three, fell in the pool and that the police were called. They mention my name, but there’s no picture of me. No mention of foul play, either.

I hand it back quickly, feeling queasy. “This doesn’t tell the whole story.”

“Okay, what’s the whole story?”

“What happened in Palm Springs is her business, Kiki,” Steadman interrupts. He looks at me. “But, if you’re going through something, maybe you should talk to us. I mean, I have a business to run. And when you show up on your off days acting erratic, the business loses money.”

I squint. “Huh?”

“What happened on Friday, Eliza. You showed up all . . . I don’t know. Weird.” He wiggles his arms and shoulders, octopus-style, to demonstrate weird.

I squint, trying to remember Friday. As far as I know, I hadn’t left the house. My big excursion to Palm Springs had happened the following day.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

Steadman sips from his mug and swallows noisily. “Herb said you came in all dazed, but when he tried to talk to you, you clammed up and left. You freaked him out, which says a lot, you know?”

“Herb was wrong. That wasn’t me.”

He slaps his arms to his sides. “Eliza, come on. It was you. So what are we dealing with here? Drugs? Alcohol? Do you need to go to rehab?”

“Look, I’m fine. And if I did do that, I’m really sorry,” I try, adding a little laugh. “How about we just forget this?”

Kiki grips a Bakelite napkin ring in the shape of a tarantula. Over Steadman’s head is a squirrel skeleton. The moment Steadman moved in he brought tons of knickknacks from the curiosity shop with him, and though I don’t mind most of it, the raccoon penis he fashioned into the centerpiece of a dream catcher that hangs over the sink doesn’t exactly put me in the mood to do dishes.

“This is all so worrying,” Kiki says quietly. “All your memory lapses, and now the drowning thing . . .”

“I didn’t drown. I’m still here.”

“But you tried to drown,” Kiki points out.

“No I didn’t!” I consider mentioning the murder angle, but this is definitely the wrong audience. “It was an accident.”

Silence. Steadman taps his long nails against the mug. Kiki stares out the window and looks like she wants to cry. I’ve still got “Maneater” in my head. Oh-oh here she comes . . .

“When you say all my memory lapses . . .” I say. “Can you give me another example?”

“Well, there was that time two weeks ago when I saw you at yoga,” Kiki says. “You were leaving, I was coming? I waved, and I swear you saw me. But then I bring it up later and you look through me like I’m nuts.”

I try to laugh. “I remember that—or, I remember you telling me you’d seen me at yoga. But I wasn’t there. I haven’t been to your studio in months.” I tried to like yoga, I really did, but I kept laughing through the instructor’s chants. I kept rolling my eyes at the Sanskrit names for the poses.

“But I saw you,” Kiki asserts. “You looked right at me!”

My gaze shifts down. Could I have been there? Why don’t I remember? “I think you were confused,” I insist.

The siblings exchange another look. Steadman starts to pace. “It’s other things, too. Not keeping up with the household responsibilities when you say you’re going to. Not cleaning like the schedule dictates.”

I blink hard. “Wait, that thing was real?”

Steadman put up a chore schedule on a white marker board in the mudroom. I’d actually made fun of it to Kiki. Maybe even in front of Steadman.

“Plus you sometimes eat our food, and you use the toilet paper you didn’t buy, and you never paid cable last month, and we basically had to go without cable until the two of us coughed up some funds,” Steadman adds. “And you said you were going to get cable. You said you called the cable company.”

“It’s my house!” I exclaim. “If I don’t want to have cable, then we’re not going to have cable.”

But as soon as I see the rage in his expression, I realize my mistake. If Steadman leaves, Kiki might, too.