The Elizas: A Novel(25)

There’s a pause, and then someone else picks up. “Shipstead.” It’s a man with an Australian accent—Sheepstid.

“G’day,” I say. Whenever I hear an accent I have the urge to speak with one, too. “Uh, I’m a private detective, and I’m checking in on my client’s wife. She says she was at your bar a few nights back, and I want to see if she was there the whole time or if she left and went somewhere else.”

“Okaay.” He sounds circumspect. “Which day was this?” I tell him. “I wasn’t here Saturday. That was Richie.”

“Is he working today?”

“Nope.”

“When will he next be in?”

“Uh . . . tomorrow, I think. Or the next day.”

“I might be dead by then!” My accent is gone. “Can you give me his cell number?”

The bartender bursts out laughing. “Uh, no.”

And then he hangs up.

There’s a blare of a horn, and I jump. I’ve wandered into the crosswalk. I scamper to the curb, my heart in my throat. The image I’ve just seen of someone standing above me as I sink into the pool in Palm Springs skulks around me like a sullen cat. There had definitely been a shadow standing motionless over me, making sure I was floundering to the bottom.

On my phone, I Google Tranquility resort pool accident. The article Kiki showed me is the only one listed. There were no reported accidents at the resort’s pool besides mine.

Then I Google Palm Springs stalkers. A twenty-four-year-old girl was stalked by an ex-boyfriend. A forty-five-year-old nurse posted sexy pictures of herself in Palm Springs on Facebook and some crackpot stalked her to the Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway. Neither situation has much in common with what happened to me.

I Google Los Angeles stalkers, but that brings up too many hits to wade through. Next I search Can the police lie to you. And Police cover-ups. And finally, How to get a memory back from your brain. This leads me to an article about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which tells me something I already know: memories, especially powerful and emotional ones, are stored in the amygdala, where my tumor resided. These same memories are fragile and easily destroyed when they aren’t given time and space to form—there’s a whole biochemical and electrical process that fixes a memory in place. Also, just because you think you remember something happening doesn’t mean it actually occurred the way you remember it. Brains have a tendency to rewrite memories based on what you’d like to remember, or what someone has told you to remember. Or your mind might conflate two memories into one, the synapses in the brains getting tangled and confused.

Is that it? Am I confusing the pool incident with an earlier plunge? I want to think so . . . but no. That face standing over me is so crisp in my mind. I have to believe in it. Once I start doubting myself, the memory will slip away forever.

I need to lie down somewhere. I gaze at the sidewalk, considering it—this street is clean enough to eat off. Then I spot an even more tempting option: a corner bar across from Warner’s that used to be a whorehouse. There’s a winking floozy painted onto the window, a neon wine bottle above the bar. I wonder if a certain someone is inside. My mouth starts to water. My body actually lunges toward the place like a plant leaning toward a ray of light.

I push through the door and am greeted by twilit gloom. It’s a bar with multiple personalities: the jukebox, bad lighting, and bathroom of questionable cleanliness suggest dive, but then there’s this whole wine cellar corner thing going on, the menu features beef cheeks, and there’s a PBS news broadcast on TV.

I settle into a stool and gaze down the sparse line of patrons. Most of them, like everyone hanging out in Burbank at this time of day, are either studio people who don’t want to be bothered or screenplay hopefuls who are hoping to rub elbows with someone who will listen to their pitch. The bartender, Brian, tosses a coaster my way with a grumble. He’s always muttering to some guy about what cunts women are, how they’re liars, how they make no sense, how they’re whorish and opportunistic and way more superficial than men. I also can’t stand his hipster beard.

“Gin and tonic,” I shout to him. He begrudgingly makes it, silently plops it in front of me, and sticks the paper bill in an empty glass.

Then I feel a sort of magnetic pull, and I know the person I’ve come for is here before I actually see him. There he is: denim jacket, stubble, floppy hair, square jaw. He’s sitting at the other end of the bar, reading a magazine. As if suddenly aware of my presence, he looks up and stares at me, too. His lips twitch. He stands and walks over with a bearlike lope. I stretch off the stool and roll on the insteps of my feet, heart pounding, seething at the sight of him, but also relaxing, knowing exactly how this will play out.

“Liza,” he says, when he’s close. “Long time no see.”

I don’t know if he gets my name wrong on purpose or if he really doesn’t know it. It’s also possible I’ve given him this name instead of my real one.

“I’ve been busy,” I answer.

He takes a long sip of his drink—it’s something brownish with clinking ice cubes—and passes it to me. He knows I’m not picky. He knows I’ll drink it, which I do. It’s whiskey, the cheap kind. My throat feels gouged.

He looks me up and down, his eyes twinkling. “You busy now?”