The Elizas: A Novel(32)
One day, when they were creating a diorama called Barbie Gets Into an Auto Accident, Matilda’s mother came in the room and said that Matilda needed to see her grandma that day. She was very sick, and she would likely die within a few hours.
Dot asked if she could go along. Matilda’s mother looked at her strangely. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Dot answered, glaring at Matilda’s mother from behind nearly a whole tube of mascara and stick of eyeliner. Matilda’s mother reluctantly agreed. Maybe she was just afraid of her spooky daughter and her spooky daughter’s friend, or maybe she was giving Dot a little extra forbearance. Dot might not have had any relapses since she was nine, but that Los Angeles article had proclaimed she was going to die, after all.
They got into her mother’s Mercedes. Dot was expecting to pull up to a hospital, but instead they wound through Mulholland Drive and came upon a bungalow that overlooked the canyon. “Your grandma’s in the back bedroom,” Matilda’s mother said. Duh, Dot wanted to snark. Where did they think she’d be, swimming in the pool?
Then she turned to Dot. “You can sit in the kitchen and wait.”
“No, I’ll go in, too,” Dot insisted. She hadn’t come all this way for nothing.
Grandma was sitting on a rocking chair, an afghan thrown over her legs. Her eyes were bright, but there were all sorts of tubes running into her. A silver machine pumped oxygen. The people gathered around her freaked out at her every move, asking if she was comfortable, if she needed anything to drink, if she was getting enough oxygen, if she was cold, hot, bored, scared. Dot felt nonplussed by the tableau; something was wrong. Then she understood: normally, she was Matilda’s grandmother. Today she was the healthy one. The one nobody was worried about.
She looked down at herself, astonished. How was it that she’d had seizure after seizure and now . . . nothing? When would the demons wriggle back into her brain? Could her scans really still be clean?
She wished her aunt knew how healthy she was, but Dorothy had never returned from her book research. Five years had gone by with no sign of her—or any signs of the book. Upon leaving the hospital, Dot had tried to text Dorothy her new home address, but Dorothy never replied. Dot sent letters to the Magnolia Hotel, but they were always returned to her, saying Dorothy had given no forwarding information. Regularly, Dot scoured the Internet for news of her, but there was never anything. She looked through magazines, thinking Dorothy might pop up in a society photo—after all, hadn’t she been society herself, once upon a time? She typed her aunt’s full-name-comma-Alabama, her aunt’s full-name-comma-Alaska, and so on down the list of states, canvassing each Dorothy Banks to see if she was a match. She did the same for towns in England and Italy, in Japan and Eastern Europe. She tried to remember aliases Dorothy enjoyed when they played Funeral and Oscar Night: Teresa di Vicenzo. Honey Ryder. Kissy Suzuki. It astonished Dot that they were Bond girls—she’d never known. She watched the Bond movies, thinking they might provide a clue. She wanted to search for Mr. Contact Lens or the government man Dorothy had dated, but come to think of it, she didn’t know their first or last names. Even Milton Banks, dead filmmaker, a link to her ex-husband, didn’t yield any results.
Dot wandered through cemeteries, searching for Dorothy’s son Thomas’s grave, but never found it. She even searched her own cache of memorabilia, poring over the few photos of Dorothy she’d kept. One was a photo of Dorothy and herself poolside at the Magnolia—it was the day, Dot remembered, Dorothy told her about the River Styx. From that day forward, Dot had avoided water. Another photo was Dorothy and Dot in matching fur stoles; Dorothy held a real cigarette on a long holder, Dot smoked one made out of candy.
This person was once here, Dot thought, turning the photo in her hands. But now she’s gone. Was it possible to literally drop out of the world?
A few times, she thought she saw Dorothy around town. She’d see a slender, dark-haired woman waiting for a bus or standing in line at the pharmacy, and her breath would catch. Once, after a miserable lunch with her parents at Terranea in Rancho Palos Verdes, Dot came out of the ladies’ room and saw Dorothy pushing a cleaning cart down the hallway toward the guest rooms.
“Dorothy!” Dot screamed, grabbing her arm. When her aunt turned, she was wearing her signature Hermès scarf printed with prowling leopards tied around her neck. Dot flung her arms around Dorothy in joy, forgetting all feelings of anger or abandonment. Dorothy had been found! Huzzah!
But Dorothy reared back. “What? Who? No!”
Her voice was higher, choppier. When she raised her head, her eyes were green. She looked at Dot with fear, probably because Dot was just inches away from her face.
Dot shot away. Something about the woman’s voice clicked a cog into place in her brain. A fuzzy memory came back of her aunt pestering a nurse from the hospital because she was her doppelganger. Could this be the same person? Dot knew she’d learned her name, but she couldn’t conjure it forth.
“Sorry,” she said quickly, and then turned away. She ran all the way back to the dining room, nearly knocking over a bellboy pushing a cart piled with Louis Vuitton train cases.
Every once in a while she asked her mother about Dorothy. Dot had stiffened into resentment for her mother—she’d definitely had a hand in sending Dorothy away. Her mother seemed to sense the resentment, but instead of trying to win back her love, like some people’s parents’ might, she was a hard-ass with Dot, constantly riding her to straighten up and brush her hair and do her homework and, goddamn it, don’t wear eyeliner all the way out to your temples, you look insane. Dot would fight back, and their arguments would escalate to screaming matches, and Dot’s mother would finally turn to her new husband and say, “I can’t handle her anymore. I don’t care what she does,” as if Dot wasn’t in the room.