Little Black Lies (15 page)

T
he car is hot.

Sweat trickles down the back of my neck. The landscape whips by the window, and I turn to my mother in the driver's seat.

“Slow down,” I say, but she is ignoring me. Or maybe she can't hear me. I reach over to shake her shoulder, and her head drifts down. Her eyes are closed, and she is nodding off.

“Mom! Mom!” I scream, shaking her with all my strength. She is leaning over the steering wheel now, the horn blaring, and I can't budge her. “Mom!” I am crying, but she is asleep or dead. She won't wake up.

The car is swerving; my stomach lurches. The guardrail expands in front of us and we are pitching. I hold on to her arm, not ready to die, and we are hurtling off a bridge, now falling slowly, dreamily. I am so high up that the ground below looks miniaturized, as if I'm on an airplane. Dark blue water crawls down below me, studded with whitecaps. We hang in the sky, a pearl-blue sky, and I think it would be so beautiful if we weren't falling.

In an instant, we are swooping down madly, a roller-coaster descent, and my mom awakens and turns to me.

“Mom,” I say sadly, already mourning our death. But she does not look sad or afraid. She smiles, then her face changes into another face.

The face of Sofia Vallano.

“Sofia?” I say. I can't hear my voice over the engine and the wind rushing by. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

“Your father raped me,” she says, with a chilling smile.

And we crash into the water.

S
o what do you think the dream means?” Sam asks.

I am sitting in an oversized chair, boycotting the uncomfortable brown couch today, though the chair might actually be worse. I feel as if I'm sitting on a striped rock. “I'm not sure it means anything,” I answer.

“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.”

This is exactly the annoying type of thing we psychiatrists say all the time. “I mean, I get the car.”

“Okay.”

“That's got to be about my mom falling asleep at the wheel and killing her best friend.”

He nods. “Sounds right to me.”

“So the question is, why am I her best friend, and why does she turn into Sofia Vallano?”

“Yes,” Sam says. “Those are the questions.”

This is what you call “reflective listening.” I mastered this in my peer counseling group in college. It is so obvious to me at this point that hearing it practiced is just plain irritating. Or maybe I'm just in a shitty mood.

“Let's start with the friend part,” he says. “What do you think that's about?”

I cross my legs, shifting in the chair. I have to talk to this guy about investing in some comfortable furniture. “I don't think my mother is trying to kill me.”

“Okay,” he says. “I don't think so either.”

“And I don't really feel like I'm her best friend.”

Sam leans back in the recliner. I notice he is no longer mirroring. “I don't think it has to be so literal.”

“Okay,” I say. I hate riddles, and my life is turning into one big riddl
e
.

“What if,” he says, “this is about betrayal?”

I look at my hands, tracing my scars. “Betrayal,” I repeat.

“What do you think of that?”

I turn my head, catching my reflection in the nautical mirror. “She didn't mean to betray her friend.”

“No, I don't think she did. That was just an accident.”

“And Sofia betrayed her mother. Betrayed Jack.”

“Certainly you could see it that way.”

Then the lightbulb goes on. “She betrayed
me
,” I say, at once feeling the full weight of it. “My mom betrayed me,” I repeat, half to myself. “She's been lying to me about Beth Winters this whole time.”

He doesn't say anything.

“The whole time,” I say again, as this registers fully.

“Listen, we don't know if it's true,” Sam stresses. “And if she did, she may have thought she had a good reason to lie. But it doesn't change the fact that to you, it may feel like a betrayal.”

I pick up a pillow that I had moved onto the floor when I sat in the chair. It is a needlepoint pillow of a cat. One of those folk-art designs. It does not remotely match the masculine decor of the room, let alone the striped chair. I examine it. Sam does not seem like a cat person either.

“It's a present from a patient,” he says.

“Oh.”

“How about we focus on the dream some more?''

“Okay.” I put the pillow back down at my feet. “So why does she turn into Sofia?”

Sam twiddles his thumbs. “Why do you think?”

“Maybe it's just that day residue again.”

“Maybe,” he says, but I can tell he doesn't think so.

I lean over and pick up the pillow again, tracing the cat's overly long whiskers. “If it's about betrayal, then Sofia's committed the ultimate betrayal.”

“Yes, I think you got it,” he says.

I smile with satisfaction. “Freud was right. It's all about your mother, huh?”

Sam laughs then, a real laugh, as if maybe I'm growing on him a little.

Later that morning, I sneak the yearbooks back into my mom's room when she is in the cafeteria. As soon as she is wheeled into the room, I'm waiting for her.

“Zoe!”

“Hi, Mom.” I give her a kiss and help her into her rocker.

“How are you?”

“Good,” I answer, then take a deep breath. “Mom, I need to talk to you about something.”

“Okay.” She starts a comfortable rocking.

“I know about Beth Summers.”

There is a pause. But she does not look stricken or even nervous. Just a touch confused. “Beth Summers?”

“Yes, Beth Summers. Your best friend from high school.”

“Oh yes!” she says, as if the recognition just hit her. “Of course. Have you heard from her? I always wished I had kept in touch.”

I stare at her a moment and decide she is not lying to me. Or if she is, she deserves an Oscar. “You don't remember? She died in a car accident.” You killed her, I want to add, but I don't.

“Oh, that's right,” she says, her face clouding over. “I did know that.” She looks down at her lilac afghan and smooths it. “My memory's not what it once was,” she says for clarification.

I bite down a laugh. Really now? I was wondering what we were doing in the nursing home!

“Patient in flight, room eight. Patient in flight, room eight,” a female voice calmly announces over the intercom. There is a patter of footsteps past my mom's room as a man with a hospital pajama top and no bottoms streaks by and then a louder flurry of staff footsteps catching up to him. A high-pitched alarm stops as the escape hatch is closed.

“Come on now, Mr. Lampke. It'll be all right. Let's get back to your room and get some clothes on.”

“Get away from me, you hear? I'll have you arrested, each and every one of you!”

“You know him?” I ask my mom.

She shakes her head. “Not really.” She pauses and leans toward me in a whisper. “I think he's got dementia.”

“Is that right?”

Mom nods and rocks some more in her chair. I notice the roots of her hair, bright silver. My mom looks old today. We sit in silence, staring out the window as snowflakes flutter around the lamppost like moths.

“I'm just wondering,” I say, “doesn't it strike you? Beth Summers, Beth Winters. Kind of a weird coincidence, don't you think?”

Mom waits, then looks at her watch as if she has somewhere to go, and I realize I am holding my breath when she answers, “I don't know a Beth Winters. I know a Beth
Summers
. She was my best friend in high school. Beth Winters, I'm not so sure about that one.”

“Beth Winters, my birth mother? You honestly don't remember her?” My voice is rising, my face getting flushed. “Mom, supposedly
she
was your best friend, from the social work agency. Beth Winters, the woman you've always told me was my mother.”

She stares at me blankly.

“The name on the birth certificate: Beth Winters. The name scribbled on the back of my picture: Beth Winters. You're telling me you don't remember?” I take a deep breath to calm myself down. Getting angry isn't going to help, but I am angry, like it or not.

My mom continues to stare at me, bewildered. “Honey, I wish I knew what to say to you. I don't know why you're so interested in my high school friend, but I'll tell you what I can remember. It was forty years ago, honey. I don't remember her that well anymore.” She pauses and looks up at the ceiling, as if searching for a memory. “I know,” she says, her face lighting up, “she loved roller coasters, loved them!” She giggles like a high school girl. I imagine her elbow to elbow with Beth Summers, racing by the fair games and the spinning rides, riders squealing on high. “She once dragged me on Montezuma's Revenge seven times in a row. I remember because I got completely sick and threw up in the garbage can, and she was running onto the next roller coaster.”

I have heard this before, yes, but I thought then she was talking about my birth mother. Beth Winters, not Beth Summers. “Do you remember anything, Mom, anything, about my birth mother?”

She flicks something off her sleeve that I don't think is even there. “It was a sad, sad story,” she says.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “There was a fire, I think.”

“Right.” I feel as if we are running upstairs in a spiral maze that has no end. No cheese for this rat to find.

“Did I tell you I met a very nice man?” she asks, changing the subject, or not. I'm not sure which subject she was on.

“Yes, you did mention that.”

“I think”—she leans in—“he's got a crush on me. Not to toot my own horn,” she says proudly, “but I'd lay money on it.”

Later, at home, I am on my red corduroy couch, staring at the walls and listening to the grandfather clock ticking, trying to read about obsessive-compulsive disorder, when the thought hits me like a lightning bolt.

“Scotty!” I yell, putting down my hot chocolate. It is my third one anyway, and I am a little keyed up.

“What?” he yells back from his room, sounding huffy as usual.

I run over and rip open his door. He is in his boxers still, though it is past noon, typing away at his computer. Code or something, I don't know, I never got that. His room has that college dorm smell. “What the fuck, Zoe? Haven't you heard of knocking?”

“Have you heard of facial recognition?”

“Huh?” He doesn't look up from his screen. He is putting together a Web site, a hair salon maybe. Models with improbably shiny hair fill the screen.

“Facial recognition.”

“What about it?”

“Can ordinary people do it?”

He taps his foot, waiting for something to load. “What are you trying to ask me, Zoe?” His hand flies on the mouse, moving text and pictures around the screen.

“If I wanted to find someone's identity, a picture let's say, could I use facial recognition to do it?”

Scotty shoots through a rapid series of mouse clicks and the font changes to an ornate italic, then the background to a creamy tan filled with seductive women in severely shaped haircuts that no one would actually get. I have to admit that it looks good. He shrugs, still moving text around. “It's doable. The FBI does it. Facebook does it.”

“How about for me? Can I do it?”

“What do you need it for?” he asks, leaning into his computer screen. The blocks of colors reflect on his face.

I pause.

“And don't tell me it's this fucking Beth Winters thing again, because that shit is getting full-on annoying at this point.”

I don't answer right away. “Okay, I won't tell you it's about Beth Winters.”

He spins his chair away from the screen, looking at me. “What, you want to take her picture and do facial recognition on it?”

I raise my eyebrows. “I was thinking about it.”

He shakes his head, clicking again. “That's beyond stupid.”

“I know. But it's better than hypnosis.”

“Well, that's for damn sure.”

I wait for him to say more. Scotty runs his hand rapidly back and forth through his hair. “This Web site makes my scalp itch.” He keeps working for another minute, and I stand, watching him decide. “I know there's some facial recognition shareware out there. I can probably work on it for you, but not today.”

A grin fills up my face.

“Maybe next week. And no promises. It might not even work.”

“Thank you,” I say, leaning over to give him a hug.

He briefly relents. “You really are a pain in the ass, you know that?”

I
t turns out that matricide is less common than you might think, if you thought about it much to begin with. Only a handful of cases per year. Infanticide has a much higher rate, though it's an undeniably easier affair. A couple of pounds of screaming newborn versus a hundred-plus-pounder who has raised you from birth. Most matricidal patients are schizophrenic (not the case for Sofia), whereas most patricidal patients have personality disorders and a long-standing relationship conflict with the victim (sounds like a better fit). Incest is a rarity, not the norm. And some old articles are still fixated on working the oedipal complex into the equation.

The library clock shows it's four. That means one more hour to wait around, which should be easy-peasy. I could take a chance and leave early, but that's just tempting fate for the dreaded 4:45 ER call. So I am spending a pleasant hour by the window in the hospital library, perusing the latest literature review on matricide in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
while the sun sets, turning the sky Creamsicle orange.

I figure if I can't solve my own life, I might as well work on the eternal riddle of Sofia Vallano. Putting down the article, I check my phone again for any new hits from the outside world. It is an ADHD tic, this senseless multitasking, and I know it, but knowing it and stopping it are two different beasts. I flip through another page in my article, and just as I'm about to check again, my phone pings happily with a new e-mail. I always picture the phone smiling, alive with promise: “Hey, I just got another one for you!” Usually this is a Nigerian prince asking me please, please to help him out, just this once, but I check anyway, because I'm nearing my next Adderall dose.

The e-mail is spam about making thirty thousand dollars working from home. I was hoping for something from an old friend from high school, Parker Bryant, who is working at the Syracuse newspaper right now. He was going to look into the paper's article about the fire. He is “on it,” he said, in that officious way of his. Though he couldn't promise me anything this week. He's working on a big story about the mayor, so he says.

My pager beeps, a high-pitched, whining tone. I push the button and recognize the number with a sigh, internal and external. The ER.

It is 4:47, of course.

The patient in the ER is what you might call “floridly manic.”

These are, in fact, the exact words I am writing in her chart. She is wearing a skimpy pink sundress, despite its being February in Buffalo, and reeling off, in rapid staccato, all the reasons she doesn't belong in the hospital, let alone the fine psychiatric ward where she will soon be heading. I am standing next to her because she refuses to sit.

“Normal?” she says. “What is normal really? I mean, I put that to you. Normal is a setting on a washing machine. Normal has no other meaning in my life. I am not normal, never have been normal, never wanted to be normal, never planned on being normal, never will be normal, and that's never going to change. Of course, lock up the woman for having some feelings.” She pronounces this “feeeeelings.”

“Give her a medication!” she continues. “God forbid she be allowed to
feel
something,
be
something,
ascribe
to something, other than the government's pseudobourgeois notion of emotion.”

“Okay,” I say calmly. Challenging these people is a bad idea and will result in further pressured speech for another good hour at the least.
“I can understand what you're saying”—which is not 100 percent true—“but let me just ask you a few questions.”

“Ask away,” she says, waving her hand toward me with a flourish. “You're the examiner; I'm the examined. You do the touching. I am to be touched. I know our roles. I'm not ignorant; I'm not childish; I'm not new to this land or ill versed in the ways of the world; I'm not—”

“All right,” I break in. It is generally frowned upon to interrupt patients in psychiatry, but with manic folks, you sometimes have no other choice. “What are your medications?”

“You mean the medications I'm prescribed, or the medications I'm taking?”

“Both.”

“The medications I'm prescribed would be Lamictal, 200 milligrams twice daily, Trileptal, 450 milligrams twice daily, with a side of Neurontin, 300 milligrams three times a day.”

I am jotting madly.

“What I am taking is absolutely none of the above. Medications, I've discovered, are numbing agents, meant to anesthetize your soul, and I for one have decided to fight back against the tyranny of big pharma, and big government, big hospitals, and all the rest of the bigs, and just lift myself out and feel life. Experience life, be life—”

“Yes, I can see that. Are you by chance taking any medications you weren't prescribed? Or anything over-the-counter?”

“No, I am a free vessel. I am open to life in its rawest form. I am striving to remove the barrier between me and the outside world. Let the world attack me, I am ready for it. I am not afraid to feel the wind on my face, smell the grass, swim with the dolphins in the ocean of life—”

“That sounds good. Any allergies to medications?”

“Ferrets.”

“Ferrets?”

“Yes. Ferrets. Not an allergy per se, but a genus I avoid if at all possible. I have discovered that ferrets are actually creatures of the devil. All creatures on the earth are divine, woven from God, to be treasured, loved, and respected, not eaten, mind you, because meat is murder. So, as I was saying.” She breaks off and peers around rapidly, as if someone just ran in front of her, but I can attest that no one did. “Did you see something?”

“No.” But I look just in case, because she is convincing.

Suddenly, she looks me straight in the eye. “You're rather tall, you know that?”

I pause to register this. Because while true, it is seemingly out of nowhere. But at least it means she is in touch with reality. “Um, yes. I did know that.”

“Where was I? Ferrets! Ferrets! They are teaming with Satan.”

Before I could hear the theory behind the demonic properties of ferrets, my text goes off.
Dum-dum-dum-dah.
Jean Luc. My heart goes squirmy.

Skype?

Can't now
I type furiously.

Later?

Maybe. Got 2 go

I turn back to my patient, who has not paused for a breath. “Stare at me. Stare at me. Stare at the animal. Stare at the elephant in the circus. I am a trained elephant on a high wire…” She is pretending to walk a tightrope over the teal-blue tile, and I get an image of her walking on water. We are way past ferrets. I am picturing an elephant, trained or otherwise, on a high wire, and how that would not go very well in the end, and wondering what Jean Luc was texting about, and if my heart will ever learn to stop skipping at the mere glimpse of his number or whether it is destined to dangle, always, like an elephant on a tightrope.

“I think it's rather pretty, actually,” the patient is saying. She is spinning, twirling the bottom of her dress. “My mother never wanted me to wear pink. Pink, pink, pink. ‘
Whores
wear pink, Claudia,'” she says, imitating her mother, her voice turning ugly. “Whore, whore, whore, whore!” she starts screaming.

I grab the curtain and find a nurse. “Can we get two milligrams Ativan, please?” I call out.

“IV or IM?” she asks.

“IM,” I answer. “And pull five of Haldol, too, would you?”

“My pleasure,” she answers, padding away.

“Nice place you've got here,” Claudia says, circling around the ER cubicle as if she's just walked into a five-star hotel room.

“Not bad, huh?”

“My mom was a whore, my sister is a whore”—she counts on her fingers—“my first-grade teacher…the biggest whore.”

My phone rings out the Fifth again, and I pull it out of my lab coat.

Forget Skype. Just call me pls.

My heart does the jig, but this time I ignore the text and tell my heart to go fuck itself.

My patient is now dozing blissfully in her five-star hospital room after two milligrams Ativan, and I am also near dozing blissfully in my eggplant settee at the Coffee Spot, Wagner droning on in the background. I hate their Wagner mix though I'm not sure why, could be a Jewish thing. I've bitched about it enough that Scotty usually changes it when I walk in.

Speaking of which, Scotty says he finally got the facial recognition software working so I'm waiting for him to finish his shift and show me. My DSM V book (which Dr. A has probably memorized by now)
sits unattended on the table while I surf merrily on my iPad, indulging in my coffee with its disintegrating milk-foam rose, not one of Eddie's better designs. Eddie wanders by, wiping off a nearby table.

“So,” I call over in a stage whisper, “how did the date go?”

He turns a dark crimson, a hesitant smile on his face. The coffee saucer clinks in his hand, trembling a second. “Good, actually.” He glances down at the dark wooden floor, still smiling, then back up at me. “We're going on a second one.”

“Good for you. You sly devil, you.”

“I don't know about that,” he says but looks delighted. “Hey, can I?” He points to my cup.

“No, I'm good.”

He nods with half a wave and walks back to the kitchen.

The bell tinkles pleasantly with a new customer arrival, a shot of cold air whisking through the doorway. I look over unintentionally and see a face I did not expect: Mike. And a woman. Wagner booms out of the background as if on cue.

I had braced myself to see him in the ER during the consult, but he wasn't there. I wasn't expecting him to infiltrate my favorite coffee joint. Though it is a free country, and they make good coffee. Grudgingly I would admit that he is allowed to patronize the place.

Mike glances at me, gives a cursory smile, and strides up to the counter to order. He leans into the woman, tall like he is (maybe he has a type?), and then orders. I flip open my DSM V, which is a good prop if nothing else, and put on my best heavily concentrating face. The woman laughs at something and punches him in the arm, and he laughs back. She has dark hair, long ringlets, a kind of Amazon beauty. It strikes me that she is a complete counterpoint to Melanie.

I focus my eyes on my book.

The mnemonic for depression rings out in my head back from medical school:

SIG-E-CAPS. Sleep, interest, guilt, energy, concentration, appetite, psychomotor activity, suicidal ideation. And how does one Zoe Goldman fare this fine evening?

Sleep: pretty crappy, lots of nightmares, thanks for asking.

Interest: okay, if it's interesting.

Guilt: no problem there; it wasn't my fault.

Energy: the proverbial bunny.

Concentration: never been my strong suit.

Appetite: alarmingly good.

Psychomotor activity: jittery, but maybe that's the Adderall.

Suicidal ideation: thankfully, no, but Wagner isn't helping.

I hear Mike's big, bear laugh as he turns away from the counter. He and the woman are heading back my way, bright red Coffee Spot paper cups in hand. “See you later,” Mike says to me, holding the tinkling door for his significant other as the cold air seeps through like a smack in the face.

“See you,” I answer to his exiting back.

Scotty emerges from the back room, putting an arm through a sleeve of his puffy, black down coat and then pulling his winter hat down on his head, which flattens his hair like a monk cut. “You ready?”

Scotty places the picture of my brown-eyed mom and fuzzy-haired me on the scanner. “Now don't freak out if this doesn't work,” Scotty says, which I suppose is his way of being supportive. “If the woman from your photo isn't on the Web, no facial recognition program will pick her up.”

“Who's not on the Internet nowadays? She'd have to be from Mars.”

“I agree, it's unlikely.”

The scanner imports the picture with a buzzing noise, the white light flashing on and off. It does seem like science fiction, sending an unknown face out into the stratosphere and awaiting a match. Cue some heavy-handed orchestral music with lots of short notes, a hero wearing a shirt a few sizes too small and cracking the code with a password that's somebody's pet's name, and we could be in a Hollywood thriller.

It takes a while. Images shoot up on the computer screen in rapid succession, then are discarded back into the stratosphere. A hundred women with black hair and brown eyes file onto the screen one after another, faces eerily morphing together. I can't take my eyes off it. At last the dizzying parade slows to a crawl as the computer settles on three fuzzy faces. A red laser pointer traces every feature, crystallizing each one
.
Then the computer simulates the sound of a winning slot machine: the one-armed bandit creaking, three happy dings, and coins falling into the dish. Three Beth Winterses in a row.

Triple jackpot, we won.

“Who do we have here?” Scotty asks.

“Adelina Branco,” I say, reading off the first one. “From Portugal.” The face looks exact, her skin tone just a touch more olive. The hit is from a Web site for a bank in Portugal, with one smiling bank teller named Adelina Branco. Clicking on her bio, we get her high school and junior college history (where she maintained a 97 percent average) and also learn she likes handball and walks on the beach. Luckily, this narrative is given both in Portuguese and English, so we can easily rule out this suspect as my mother. Unless I'm secretly Portuguese.