The Elizas: A Novel(9)

Desmond Wells. See, there are certain moments where my memory slips away from me, evasive and taunting, but there are other times where it’s as accurate as a photograph. Yesterday with Lance, despite the cocktail of drugs, despite my frustration, I remember perfectly. Every detail Lance gave me, every tiny shred of a clue I could cling to—it’s all there. Desmond Wells was one of those clues. My rescuer. The person who pulled me out of the pool. His was a name in all caps in Lance’s notebook. There was a phone number next to that name, its digits lining up so orderly in my brain.

My name is Eliza Fontaine, I’d texted to that phone number on my newly returned phone. I think you helped me Saturday night at the Tranquility resort pool. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?

Sure, he responded. I happen to be free today. I can meet you.

Lance might not be looking into what happened to me, but I sure as hell am.





From The Dots


Dot didn’t remember a lot about the start of her illness. There were the grinding headaches she complained of for weeks that made exploding nebulae flash in front of her face. She crumpled against walls, clutching her temples. There was also the blurred vision that doubled the number of Jack Skellingtons on the Nightmare Before Christmas DVD she couldn’t stop watching. One night, hopelessly dizzy, she tipped over while carrying her dinner plate to the table, carrots and chicken all over the floor in a vomitus mess. “There’s something wrong with me,” she said, finding herself on the floor, too.

Her mother looked startled. “Do you need to go to the ER?” But Dot shook her head. She just wanted to lie in bed. She just wanted the room to stop spinning. Her mother climbed in with her, stroking Dot’s sweaty hair. But twenty minutes in, she checked her watch. “Honey, I’ve got to go to work now. I’m sorry.” She worked as a dental assistant, peering all day at people’s teeth and gums.

“You have to work today?” Dot groaned.

“That’s how we eat. I’m your sole support.” Long ago, Dot’s father had passed away. Dot barely had any memory of him except for a kind-eyed man handing her a plastic egg from a grocery store gum machine and saying, “Dottie, there’s a surprise inside.” She couldn’t recall what the surprise had been.

“How is it that Aunt Dorothy doesn’t have to work, then?” Dot asked.

Her mother slid out from under the covers. Her expression hardened. “She’s in a different boat than us.”

“Can you see if she’ll come over?”

“I guess,” her mother said, reluctantly.

Dot told Dorothy about her mother always having to work. Dorothy sighed. “You know, your mother doesn’t realize that time with a child is so fleeting. Money isn’t everything. Work isn’t everything. If I were to do it all over again with Thomas, I wouldn’t have spent a moment on Riders of Carrowae. I would have devoted all my time to him. I would have watched him while he slept. I would have never taken my eyes off him. Maybe he would have lived. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”

Thomas. Dot always held her breath when her aunt mentioned her dead son. He had died a few years before Dot was born, so Dot had never known him. Dorothy carried around a photo of him, though, a little blond boy in a baseball cap clutching a toy train. Apparently Thomas was a peculiar, moody child, prone to wild fits and severe bouts of melancholy that no medication could fix. At ten years old, Thomas had found a handgun Dorothy kept in the house as protection after her husband died. Thomas figured out how to load it and turned it on himself.

Dot knew Dorothy still thought of Thomas constantly. Her aunt kept some of his clothes and toys in a closet in her bungalow—she showed Dot the box once, though she said never to look inside. Dot wondered if Thomas had said anything prophetic to Dorothy before he passed on. And where did children go when they died? Heaven? Was there a kid version? She wondered if Dorothy had seen him die, and if she’d sat with his body for some time afterward, soaking up its blood, watching it grow cold and stiff. Dot would have.

Dot didn’t remember the epic seizure that had her knocking against the wall in the middle of the night, waking her mother in her room next door. Nor did she remember the ride to the hospital and the nurses whisking her back immediately. Nor did she remember the slide into the long tube that clanked and bonked, though she knew it must have been one of the first things that happened—it was the way the doctors searched for dark trouble. There must have been a conversation, too, where a doctor explained the mass they’d found in her head. The mass was pressing on a critical part of Dot’s brain; they would have to operate immediately. Dot would likely survive, the doctor told Dot’s mother, but the post-op recovery could be very hard on a child, so they had to be ready for that.

The next thing Dot remembered, she was waking up on a little bed with curtains pulled tightly around it. The air was cold, and she was alone. Her head was wrapped in bandages. Her body felt too heavy, like she’d gained a hundred pounds. Outside the curtain, she heard beeps. Someone was gagging. Her last memory had been going to sleep in her bed; she’d had a dream about Wednesday Addams, whom she idolized. Sometimes she wrote Wednesday Addams on the line for her name on tests. But where was she now? She stared in horror at a needle taped to the back of her hand. It fed into a tube, which led to a bag on a post. She wanted to pull the needle out, but something told her not to—that it would hurt even worse.