The Elizas: A Novel(33)

Dot would have thought asking her mother about Dorothy would spark a new argument, but usually her mother was cavalier about Dorothy questions. “The thing about Dorothy is that she could be anywhere,” Dot’s mother mused recently. “Selling rugs in Monaco. Taking a writing course at the Sorbonne.”

“Where’s that?” Dot asked with interest.

“Paris,” her mother answered.

Dot’s eyes lit up. France! She did say she was going there! “But how is it that she’s been there for so long?” Dot asked her mother. “Isn’t France expensive?”

Her mother shrugged. “Money is no object for good old Dorothy.”

Dot placed her hands on her hips. “If she’s so rich, why did you never ask her for money when I was in the hospital?” Her mother stared at her in confusion. “You wouldn’t have had to work so hard. She could have paid some of the bills. You could have visited me more often,” Dot explained. She hated that she had to explain. She felt so weak, so exposed. Her mother should have worked this out years ago.

Her mother shook her head. “No, no. Dorothy’s money is for Dorothy. She doesn’t spend it on anyone else. Well, except for Thomas, when he was alive.”

Dot perked up. “What was Thomas like?”

“He was . . . odd.” Her mother averted her eyes. “Look, I’m not saying Dorothy didn’t have her fair share of pain. However, that doesn’t mean we should overlook her shortcomings.”

Dot snorted. “Which are what, exactly?”

“Dot, it’s time you understand. Your aunt . . . she’s not what you think.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean . . . mentally. She’s . . .” Her mother turned away.

“Are you saying she’s crazy?” Dot demanded. “How can you say that about your sister?”

Her mother shrugged. “I know you love her. But I know this because she’s my sister. I grew up with her. She’s always been this way.”

Dot considered this. The details she knew about her mother and Dorothy growing up together were shaky: they were the daughters of a New York banker father who was always away on business and a mother who dabbled in modeling but mostly just took pills, drank, and entertained friends. They lived on acreage in Long Island; they had a driver and went to Manhattan private schools. They had a day nanny and a night nanny. There were elaborate birthday parties, though Dot’s mother doesn’t recall her parents ever attending. Later, the girls went to boarding school, though not the same ones. So how did Dot’s mother even know what her sister was like if they were sent to different schools? Her mother had to be jealous: her sister had gotten all the looks, talent, and panache. Dot’s mother, on the other hand, turned away the family cash, fixed teeth for a living, and had thin, stringy hair.

“You used to like her,” Dot said miserably.

“This isn’t a matter of me liking her or not liking her. It’s a matter of what’s true and what’s false.”

“Well, she seemed perfectly healthy to me.” To which her mother exchanged a loaded look with her stepfather. Dot rolled her eyes.

Her aunt’s absence had carved a hole in Dot’s chest. Once, she had even gone to the school therapist of her own accord, walking into the office and sitting down at his desk and demanding he stop whatever he was doing and talk to her. Dot had known the therapist had wanted to talk to her for quite some time. She’d seen him watching her lurk in the hallways as she tried to melt the popular crowd with her mind. Several days a week, she wore six-foot wings across her shoulder blades, and she’d heard the therapist whisper to another teacher, “Are those made of human skin?”

In his office, Dot told the therapist how her beloved aunt must have abandoned her because of something she had done. “Why would you say that?” the therapist asked. “What do you think you did?”

Dot considered this. She’d gotten sick? She’d said the wrong thing at the hospital? She hadn’t seemed grateful enough? She’d thrown that fit about the magazine, even though it was justified?

“I think you may have to just pretend that she’s passed on,” the therapist said. (He wasn’t, Dot would learn later, an actual therapist, but a school counselor with a teaching degree.) “Talk to her, and she will listen, but you have to make peace with her leaving. We have to believe she’s in a better place, and you have to try to get yourself to a better place, too.”

Dot had never heard such bullshit in her life. But she did follow a bit of the counselor’s advice: every night, she wrote letters to Dorothy in her journal. They mostly listed details of her day. Had another MRI, and I’m still clean. I made out with Brody Fish in the dissection room. He seemed scared because we were sitting next to twenty half-opened cats. Matilda and I set our hair on fire after school. It smelled awful.

She penned Dorothy’s responses, too. Each told of the amazing things Dorothy was up to in Paris. Living in an apartment with a view of the Arc de Triomphe, shacking up with the president of France, busking on the streets of Cannes with a ukulele and a Standard Poodle. Dorothy was always good at belting out The Who. But the responses never filled the hole. They barely helped at all.

At Matilda’s grandmother’s deathbed, surrounded by all that medical equipment, Dot watched an old woman who definitely was going to die hug Matilda fiercely. There was this brave look in her eye that puzzled her. Was it true bravery, or was she putting on a facade because she didn’t want her family to worry? That, Dot reasoned, was the ultimate show of love, a love she’d been deprived of for so long. She felt a pang inside her, wishing for Dorothy so desperately she could practically taste it, metallic, cold, addictive, on the back of her tongue.