The Elizas: A Novel(39)
Bill lets me through the door. Once Bill and Gabby moved in with us, the spooky old house was gutted and transformed into an airy, open rectangle with spare furniture and high-end electronics. The moldy furniture that had been here when we arrived was moved out, the secret graves were bulldozed over, the stained-glass windows of hollow-eyed saints and sinners were carefully removed and replaced. I got to keep the creepy death words in my closet for a while, but one day, apropos of nothing, my mother said she’d painted over them. “They were just too morbid,” she said. I cried for days. I mourned the loss of those words. I rewrote the facts I could remember in pencil, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t have the same shaky script. I couldn’t get the backward slant of the letters just right.
How do I remember that so well, but not Leonidas?
“Well, I gotta say, you look great.”
I jump and turn around. Bill’s in the doorway, rubbing his hands together.
“Thanks,” I say, though I know I don’t look great, not at all. I appreciate Bill’s practiced cheerfulness, though. The day the father and son pulled me out of the ocean, Bill drove me to the hospital for treatment. He acted as though we were driving to somewhere innocuous, like Home Depot.
“Oh, look, a farm stand,” I remember him saying halfway there, pulling over. “Eliza, you want a peach?” I often think my mother doesn’t deserve him, though perhaps they work in a yin and yang way, his kindness balancing out her prickliness.
“Want anything to drink?” Bill asks now. “We’ve got water, soda, orange juice . . .”
“Uh, water is fine,” I lie. I’d kill for a shot of bourbon.
He makes a little nicker sound and disappears into the kitchen. I pad toward the built-in bookshelves, also a new addition after he moved in. They’ve got a lot of titles lined up, though most of them are about the Civil War, Bill’s forte. Also on the shelf are southern romances, the pastel-covered kinds, and a gritty memoir about a woman who grew up in a one-room shack and had psychos for parents. They must be my mother’s, though I’ve rarely seen her reading. But then there’s this thin book, really just a pamphlet, lying on the sleek, Lucite side table. On the Meditation of the Mind. On the back is a picture of a man with bulging eyes and frizzy, Einstein hair.
I stop short, a chill running through me. It looks like the guy who said hello to me in the café with Posey. His name is Herman Lavinsky. Goose bumps rise on my skin. Why do I know that name?
I grab my phone and find Google. Herman Lavinsky is a “healer” in Los Angeles. He leads people on “spiritual journeys” through Death Valley. I’m about to call up his website when the floor behind me creaks.
“Here you go!” Bill appears with a Perrier. A lime bobs cheerfully on top.
I show him the book. “Who is this guy?”
Bill shrugs. “No idea. Must be one of your mom’s.” He takes the book from me and puts it back on the shelf. He takes my arm. “Come on, honey. We need to talk to you.”
I give the spine of the book one more glance. On second thought, maybe the writer isn’t the guy from the café—that guy didn’t look capable of writing anything. Still, there is something about this book that starts an itch in my brain. I get a flash—brief, foggy, more a smell and a sound than an actual image—of being in an antiseptic room, someone’s clogs slapping quietly on the floor, and a voice saying, Okay, count backward from ten.
It makes me shiver. What is it from? A nurse giving me anesthesia, maybe, when I had the tumor? Some crackpot I visited post-tumor to ensure I didn’t get sick again?
“Okay,” I say, turning to Bill. “I want to talk to you guys, too.” I want to tell them about Leonidas. If they see him around, they need to tell me. If he knocks on their door, they can’t let him in. Maybe they can fill me in on who he is, too.
Bill might have renovated most of the house with exotic woods and high-end blinds and robotic pneumatic systems that sucked up dust before it has time to settle, but my mother kept the kitchen almost as it was when we moved in. The cabinets were repainted in clean white, but the knobs remained the same round, bland brass buttons. The stove has four burners, the countertops are not marble but made out of some spongy material with little flecks of what they want you to think is stone smashed into the surface. Our old kitchen table, the one I used to impale with the tines of my fork, is still in the corner, as are the wooden chairs with the wobbly legs.
My mother and Gabby stand together at the kitchen table, though when I walk in they jolt apart, as though I’m a big electromagnet reversing their polarization. “Uh, hi,” I say to my mother. And to Gabby, “I didn’t know you were coming.”
They hem and haw. Then, something on the table catches my attention. It’s my book. Just sitting there, spine closed, cover glossy. My heart is in my throat. I point at it. “Where did you get that?”
Gabby’s eyes grow wide. My mother doesn’t answer.
I start to tremble. “I’m serious. Why is it here?”
“We got it in the mail today,” my mother says in a low voice. “There was no return address.”
My mind is racing. Damn it, Posey. I specifically told her I didn’t want my family to receive it. I’d been so clear. She wouldn’t have gone against my wishes. Only, does that mean someone else did? Not Laura, either—so who?