Little Black Lies (13 page)

I
swirl the remains of the foamy milk heart around in my mug. Ragged and misshapen, it is a lousy metaphor for my own heart right now, à la Jean Luc, who has fallen off the radar. But then again, if he had called, I would have ignored him anyway.

Fake frost, the merry, sprayed-on stuff, coats the bottom of the storefront windows at the Coffee Spot. But the cheery Christmas messages—Let It Snow, Winter Wonderland, and Joy to the World—have been scrubbed out. Pretty soon, Be My Valentine and I Love Yo
u
will be scratched in.

The matricide article I keep intending to read sits next to me in silent reprimand on the coffee table. Instead, my brain keeps circling around Beth Summers. I have searched for her on the Internet from my laptop but came up empty-handed. There are some matches, but they are all the wrong age or from the wrong country. And the closest ones look nothing like her picture from the yearbook. And I can't ask my mom without risking another outburst.

“You good?” Eddie asks, pushing in some chairs with a squeak.

“Yeah, thanks.”

Eddie nods, heads off again. There's a certain bounce to his step, I notice. He looks good. He's even whistling. Scotty passes by him on his way over and splays out in the velour chair next to me.

“What's up with him?” I say, cocking my chin toward Eddie.

“Him? Oh, he's got a date.”

“Oh.” I raise my eyebrows theatrically. “A hot date?”

He shrugs. “She actually is pretty hot. He met her in yoga.”

“Hot date with a hot chick from hot yoga.” I laugh. “Calisthenics in a sauna—now that's my idea of a good time. Maybe she's got a matching ohm tattoo.”

He rubs his hands together and jumps up from the chair. “Back to the grind. Pun intended.”

“Hey, before you go. Remember Beth Winters?”

“You mean your birth mother, who is suddenly so fascinating to you?” Scotty motions practicing a golf swing, which is odd in the middle of winter, unless he's working on his Wii game.

“Right. Did you know then that Mom had a best friend in high school? Named Beth Summers?”

Scotty shrugs, dropping his pretend golf club. “From that yearbook?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So what about it?”

“Doesn't that seem a bit odd to you? Beth Summers. Beth Winters.”

“Seriously, what the fuck, Zoe?” he says, exasperated. “Who cares? What are you doing digging around in Mom's past anyway?”

“It wasn't intentional. I saw it in her yearbook when we were visiting.”

“So fine. What about it?”

“I've been trying to get some info on Beth Summers. She's nowhere to be found on the Internet.”

“And?”

“Well, I thought you might know better where to look.” I point to my computer screen, giving him my most endearing smile.

Scotty huffs, bending down over my computer. Appealing to his superior computer skills always does the trick. “You're a pain in the ass, you know that?”

“I can't help it. I'm a psychiatrist.”

“You're crazy is what you are,” he mutters. He types her name into a couple of search sites, ones I haven't heard of. He is biting his lip unconsciously, scrolling in milliseconds through various Beth Summerses. But he gets no further than I do. “Why don't you just ask Mom?” He stands back up, knees cracking.

This gives me an idea. “You think she's still up?”

Scotty looks over at the clock, which has an odd, rectangular face with all the numbers melting like a Dali painting. The small hand nears a warped number eight. “Probably,” he says. “I'd run over with you but I'm closing tonight.”

I glance down at my matricide paper. Sofia Vallano will have to wait.

My mom is easy to spot in the audience; she is the youngest in the nursing home. Tonight's big show: a local middle school string orchestra. They are almost done butchering Mozart, the conductor waving his hands with great fervor, imagining himself perhaps a few miles down at the Buffalo Philharmonic. The children sit like statues, eyes focused on their rumpled scores, elbows jutting out of time with each other, scratching out incoherent notes. My mom sees me and waves me over, and I sit in the empty foldout chair next to hers, peering over at her program. Thanks be to the Almighty, there is only one song left—“The Pink Panther.”

After many oohs and ahs, but mercifully no encore, the crowd of wheelchairs and walkers disperses, and we mosey back to her room.

“So,” Mom says, settling into her rocker, afghan on her shoulders. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Nothing, just wanted to see you.”

“Oh,” she says, eyes filling up with tears. “That is so sweet.”

My mom was never a crier BD, but tears come unexpectedly now, as if she's making up for lost time. “Actually”—I sit down on my assigned corner of the bed, tossing my purse and brown leather satchel on the floor beside me—“can I ask you something?”

“Okay,” she says, on the wary side. “About your birth mother again?”

“Not exactly.”

“What is it then?”

“It's about Beth Summers.”

Her face registers something. Her eyebrows furrow just an instant, her lips twitching downward, then the look pops off. “I don't remember a Beth Summers, honey.”

“Really?” This surprises me, considering she nearly bit my head off over her name the other night. “It looks like she was a good friend back in high school,” I remind her.

“High school?” she guffaws. “Honey, I had a ton of friends back in high school. You think I remember any dang-blasted one of them now?” Then she pauses. “Though the name does sound familiar. I knew a Beth Winters, I think.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That was my birth mother.”

“Oh, right,” she says. “I knew it sounded familiar.” After a moment, she pats her knees. “I have to run to the potty,” she says, standing up shakily from her rocker and heading toward the bathroom. She walks slowly without her walker. “Just be a minute.”

As soon as the door clicks shut, I inch toward the bookcase, slide out the three yearbooks (it seems junior year is missing), and stash them in my satchel. Mission accomplished. I feel guilty at how easily the deed was done. I think back to the day we packed up these yearbooks for her, along with a ton of other books she insisted on bringing, most of which ended up in a closet in our apartment. Scotty and I, moving boxes and bickering, Scotty was stinking of weed and denying it, and I was fresh off a plane from Yale and a teary farewell to Jean Luc. Not a happy scene.

Mom emerges from the bathroom and shuffles by inches over to her rocker, settling back down as if it's her throne. “How's the Frenchman?” she asks.

“Same old, same old,” I say, which is easier than explaining that we've broken up for real this time, for the millionth time.

“How's Tom Burns?” I ask.

“Tom who?” she says, yawning, and I lean over and kiss her forehead.

“I've got to go. It's getting late.”

“Okay, honey.” She fights another yawn.

Driving home, I think of the look that flashed on my mom's face when I mentioned Beth Summers. Was that a relic of a memory, springing up before the holes of dementia sucked them back again? Or is it that she does remember, and she's lying to me?

“How's the Lexapro working?”

“Okay,” Sofia answers, staring at the white ceiling tiles. Her face has a drawn look that tells me the Lexapro isn't working that well. Since she revealed her secret to me, her clinical disposition continues to worsen.

“Maybe this is the hump she needed to get over,” claims Dr. Grant. I'm not so sure about that one. Her previously cocky, immutable demeanor now dissolves unpredictably into waves of tears, hours shut up in her room, refusing to go to group, lashing out at the nurses. It's the usual behavior in this place, unusual only in that it is Sofia Vallano, the former model patient, displaying it. It's as if she just figured out she's been committed to a mental institution for killing her mother.

“I drew a picture in art therapy.” She snorts out the phrase “art therapy.” I can't blame her. For her, other patients' artwork of rainbows and angry clowns does seem like some kind of bad joke.

“Can I see it?”

“Sure.” She reaches over to the glossy white window ledge and produces it, then lies back down in her bed.

The picture, done with her charcoals, is frightening. That's the only way to put it. There is a teenage girl in one corner, black eyes, black hair, bony shoulders, her face the pale white of the paper. Above her, a leering face, the same wide face as Jack Vallano, but with sharper features, a beaked nose. This, I assume, is her father. His hands are huge, freakishly big for his frame, reaching out with menace. Her mother is another teeny figure in the corner, fetus-sized compared to the father. The mother is peering out of the page with a fearful look, her arms hugging herself even smaller. In another corner, I think I recognize a boy version of Jack Vallano. He is standing, arms too long and by his sides. His upright posture belies the fear buried in his eyes. In the last corner, a crudely drawn question mark. This is the first thing that draws your eyes.

“What's the question mark for?” The paper wobbles in my hand.

Sofia doesn't answer, and I wait a long minute as she stares, unmoving, at the ceiling tiles. “I guess I need a therapist to figure that one out.” Her voice has just a hint of a sneer.

“Hmm,” I say, not taking the bait and handing her picture back. She shoves it back on the ledge, where it rattles then settles down flat.

“Can we be done for today?” she asks.

I fight the urge to ask her if she's got big plans. “Sure.” We are not accomplishing much anyway, except establishing that the Lexapro isn't working. “Maybe we should go up on the Lexapro?”

“Whatever,” Sofia says, turning her back toward me, her body toward the gray-blue, pocked wall, girding herself for another morning of aimless sleep.

Over at the nurses' station, Jason is chatting with the nurses about the latest singing contest on TV. They're quite animated about their choices, though, to me, there are a million of those programs, all pretty much the same, none of which I've ever seen. I grab Sofia's chart when the scent of soft pine emerges next to me.

“Hello,” says Mike with a smile. Not a warm smile, not a cold smile.

“Hello.” I try to sound casual but end up sounding nervous.

He is scratching out a note as if he is in a race.

“What are you in for?”

“Oh,” he answers, “bed seven.” He motions that way with his head, still writing. “Taking out stitches from her wrist wounds.”

“Oh right.” Tanesha Johnson, Jason's patient. Tried to kill herself and did a decent job actually, for a woman. Went horizontal this time. Guess Mike beat Dr. A to taking out the stitches this time. “You're on surgery?”

He finishes the note and stacks it in the rack. “That I am.”

“Thanks,” I say. “If we get an appendix rupture, we'll call you.”

Then he lets down his guard an inch and smiles, a bit warmer maybe. “See you around, Zoe.” He loops his surgical pack over his arm and heads off to the stairs. And I know one thing for sure: I missed out on some mean manicotti.

Finally, after seeing all my patients, I have a chance to take a peek at the yearbooks. I sit ensconced in a library chair, the heater buzzing next to me. I start with sophomore year, but I've already thoroughly mined the contents of that volume and put it aside for senior year. A couple of medical students down the table laugh, catch the stares of the other library-g
oers
, and pipe down.

Senior year. Within a few pages, there is a picture of my mom in a tight cable-knit sweater, her hair a softer brown wave now. The yearbook offers the usual senior year fare: togas, Spirit Days, pie-eating contests, handsome male teachers with a bevy of females students, and vice versa, football teams, hockey teams, debate teams, poetry clubs. The way we filled our lives when we were kids. But oddly enough, there is nothing more on Beth Summers. No class photo, no club pictures, no entreaties to “Never forget hot dog and ‘root beer' night at Stacy G's!!!” It's as if she just fell off the map.

I flip through the book one more time. What the hell happened to Beth Summers? She probably just transferred out her junior year, the one yearbook my mother doesn't have, but that doesn't explain Mom's reaction when I first said her name. And it doesn't explain the too-close-for-comfort similarity to my birth mother's name. Curiouser and curiouser. I do a quick Google search for Beth Summers again, this time adding Glenview High School, and try the White Pages but come up empty there, too. Pulling out my phone, I notice the librarian giving me a cold stare, pointing to the No Cell Phone Use sign. I wander over to the library phone on the wall instead. The receiver is greasy and smells of aftershave.

“City and state, please?” the operator asks.

“Glenview, Illinois,” I answer quietly, so as not to disturb the other patrons.

After some runaround, I speak to the principal of my mother's high school and explain the circumstances in ten words or less, including the case of the missing yearbook. I am told the following: Old yearbooks are stored in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere; she may or may not be able to round it up, and if so, she would then have to find someone willing to copy the whole thing and mail it to me, but if I want to come and personally visit the school, she would see what she could do.

Any half-sane person would have dropped it at this point but this I am surely not, so I set up an appointment for Monday. Which means a road trip and a bout of the flu planned for Monday as well.