The Elizas: A Novel(98)

I’m glad he can’t see my red cheeks.

“I understand why you had to know. I like your determination. I always have.”

“I suppose that’s why you wrote that article, then?”

There’s a pause. “I had to,” he says. “Stefan was going to write something awful.”

I turn to him. “Your brother?”

He has bent a few of the rose stems because he’s holding them so tightly. “It’s another thing he dabbles in. Gossip pieces. He chases minor celebrities for the tiniest speck of dirt. When he found out I’d met you, he started grilling me about what you were like. I told him I didn’t want to be part of some sort of tell-all. Then I found out he was working on a story anyway. It was all based on things he’d overheard us rehashing or things he found on the Internet. So I had to write something first, something about all of those things, so that when he wrote his own piece it sounded . . . lame. As told to the roommate brother sort of bullshit. And because I’d written something so positive, no one would want what he had.”

I cross my arms tightly over my chest. “So you didn’t actually mean that stuff you wrote, then.”

“Of course I did!” Desmond moves to my bed and sits down. I shift away from him, but not before our calves touch. A shimmer goes up my back. “I meant every word.”

Outside my room, the girl who so proudly talked about shitting herself shuffles by, doing an arm-flap dance that sometimes overtakes her. Crystal. Her name suddenly pops into my head. Desmond watches, too, and then turns back to me, offering a real smile this time instead of something posed and uncomfortable. “Is that what most people here are like?” he asks, gesturing to the hall.

“Pretty much.”

“I bet you walk around with your hair in your face, scowling at everyone.”

I snicker. “Yeah, well.”

“I bet you’re like, If you dare talk to me, I’ll bury your cat alive.”

I glare at him, about to say, As if you know me? But then I realize. He does. Kind of better than anyone. I can tell, for instance, that he understands the truth of who I am. That he knows my book is true. That he’s put the pieces together. I will ask him, tomorrow, when he comes back, and we will talk through it all, and I will tell him everything, but it will be surprising how much he has already guessed.

All of a sudden, as if he understands what I’m thinking, he stands and presses his hand to my shoulder. I feel that taut string between us, still there. I squirm away and say, with vitriol, “Watch out. I might just be dangerous.”

“Well, if you are,” he says, spinning me around so that I am facing him. He catches my wrist and holds it tight, entwining his fingers in mine. “I would love to be one of your victims.”

? ? ?

“My family thinks I’ve done something,” I tell Albert in a session a week later.

“Something good? Something bad?”

“Something bad. Something you’ve probably heard. The only problem is that I’m not sure it actually happened.”

Albert pauses to sip his tea. The whole room smells like Earl Grey. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I’m surprised I’ve brought it up. So far, I’ve stayed away from this topic, primarily because I don’t know what I think about it, exactly, and I don’t want to talk about a potential crime I might have committed. I have to believe that my fate played out like Dot’s: I freaked out at the funeral, I started jumping into pools, I begged to confess, and my parents told me not to, and when I refused, they found a method that would erase what I’d done. It shocks me, now that my memories have returned, how much I’d wanted to kill Eleanor. How rid of her I needed to be. Ignoring her would have never been enough.

And yet.

“I have such a blurry memory of that night,” I answer. “I mean, I have what I wrote, and I think that’s the truth, but why didn’t I hear Eleanor fall onto the highway? And when I look back on that memory, Eleanor’s face is a caricature—there’s something so odd about her.”

Albert cuts me off. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, really. It’s just like she transformed into a demon in those last moments. Into someone I didn’t know at all.”

Albert spins in his chair. “Maybe you don’t want to recognize her in your memories. Maybe if you can shape-shift her into something else, you’ll feel less guilty.”

I stare at my lap. “You’re probably right.”

“The mind is very mysterious.”

I pull a pillow close to my chest. It’s embroidered with a large question mark; Albert told me a patient cross-stitched it for him. The mind is mysterious, and don’t I know it. There are some days when I wake up and have this overwhelming feeling that none of this happened to me. The memories that have come back are simply the ones in the book replacing dull, drab scenes of me stuck in a hospital somewhere, perhaps. I mean, hell, for all I know, I could have been sick for years, right? In a hospital with brain issues for years, and only recently let out, and to supplant years of monotony, I made up this fantastical story.

It’s possible, isn’t it?

But mostly, I choose to buy into the memories, though sometimes I think my interpretation of them is incorrect. There are times when I wonder if Eleanor was the victim. I’ve read my book again; I see how Dot desperately wants to think her mother’s the one in control. What if that is the truth? Could my mother have fabricated Eleanor’s Munchausen-by-Proxy behavior? Could she have fed the nurses lies to get Eleanor evicted? It wasn’t as if there was documented proof that Eleanor had, beyond a doubt, been in possession of strychnine and figured out a way to get it into my body, causing the seizures—the police would have only started an investigation when the claim was filed, and by then, Eleanor had taken off. Yes, there were my seizures, and my blood tests were positive for strychnine poisoning. I don’t want to presume my mother was in charge of fabricating the tests, too—or, more horrifyingly, giving me the strychnine herself—but I’ll never really know. What if she did it for my own good? But would she go to such great lengths?