The Elizas: A Novel(5)

“You should have told us you were going, sweetie,” Bill chimes in.

This takes me by surprise. “Am I on probation?”

“You promised us you’d tell us if you went anywhere outside LA,” my mother says.

I push my tongue into my cheek. I did?

Lance sits back in the chair and crosses his ankles. “That must have been tough to have a brain tumor last year, huh?”

I wrinkle my nose. He’s using his Shrink Voice. I’ve heard a few of those in my day. “It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

“You don’t have to downplay it. Cancer scares the shit out of everyone.”

“Of course it scared her,” my mother says. “As a kid, she worried she was going to get a tumor. She worried about a lot of things. Illness. Death. She was an unusually anxious child. And then she got a tumor. She was beside herself.”

“Mom,” I warn.

My mother shrugs. “But you were.”

Lance peers at me expectantly. I swallow hard, readying my own version of what it was like to have gone through brain surgery and recovery at twenty-two years old. The thing is, though, my mother is right. I was a strange child. A kid who worried. A kid who had obsessions, obsessions that still exist today. I was that kid who lined a storage bin with silk, climbed in, shut the lid, and lay there for hours, pretending, absorbing, fantasizing. I used to make my Barbies strangle, bludgeon, asphyxiate, stab, and hack apart one another. I was that kid who hanged every one of my stuffed animals from nooses in the closet doorway, pinning miniature suicide notes to their plush bodies. My mother found those suicide notes. She asked me why I’d done such a thing. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time, but I guess I was just curious about how someone could sink to that level of despair. I identified with that level of despair, though I didn’t know why. It came from somewhere deep inside of me, a place I was too young to understand.

Maybe my errant amygdala was to blame. Being diagnosed with the tumor was a bit of a paradox for me—it was nightmarish, yes, but it also kind of explained why, sometimes, I made very strange and unhealthy decisions. It was like a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was no longer responsible for my actions.

“Look, it wasn’t fun, but I got through it,” I answer. “And I’m doing well now. I have my own place. I have a job. I even wrote a book.”

Lance raises an eyebrow. “A book?”

“A novel. The Dots. A publisher bought it and everything.”

“How about that!” Lance glances around at my family. They shift from foot to foot. “What’s it about?”

Gabby makes a loud throat-clearing sound near the door, but when I try to catch her eye, she doesn’t look up. “It’s a coming-of-age story,” I say.

Lance nods encouragingly. He probably expects me to tell more, but I don’t want to. The last thing I want to do is explain my creative endeavors to my family. This is my achievement, not theirs—they didn’t foster it in the least. They aren’t artists. They aren’t even readers. They’ll deem it silly, probably. Frivolous. Melodramatic. They don’t even know that it’s publishing in a month. I hope they miss it entirely and never read a word, because then I won’t have to hear their misinterpretation.

“Eliza, let’s try and think this through,” my mother says. “You had a shock last night, and I think you need some time to rest. If you don’t want to stay in this hospital, maybe consider this place instead.” She fishes in her Band-Aid-colored bucket bag and hands me a pamphlet. It takes me a moment to make sense of the words on the cover. The Oaks Wellness Center. There’s a picture of people sitting around a farmhouse table, eating soup and looking joyful and serene. Psychiatric treatment in a relaxed, soothing environment, reads the cover.

Acid rises in my throat. “No way.”

“The last year has been hard for you,” Bill says. “It’s okay to admit you’re going through a rough patch again.”

“This isn’t a rough patch!”

“It’s okay, Eliza.” Lance puts his pen in his front pocket. “People with serious illnesses often have psychological relapses.”

“I. Didn’t. Jump. Into. That. Pool,” I tell the room. “I felt . . . hands.” I hold up my two shaking palms and make a shoving motion. “I don’t need a rest. My tumor isn’t back. And I definitely don’t need a psych ward.” I look at Lance. “Can you at least ask around again, see if anyone saw anything, or if there was a backup video? Or even just ask the bartender on duty if they saw anyone with me in the bar that night?”

“But you seem like a nice girl, Eliza,” Lance says. “Would someone really want to hurt you?”

My brain catches. A nice girl. It’s comical. On the other hand, am I someone a person would like to hurt—even kill? Someone must have consciously made the decision to thrust me forward into the water. Someone must have hated me that much. It has to be someone who knows me. Someone who knows I can’t swim.

Sometimes I pick flowers, beautiful flowers, off people’s lawns. People I don’t even know. I don’t do anything with them. I smell them, drop them, and sometimes step on them.

I can be cruel and withhold affection.

I’m a liar. A fabulist. It’s probably why I wrote a book so easily post-tumor.