Little Black Lies (2 page)

T
he nightmare is always the same. Bloodstains on my hands, red as finger paint.

I am hiding, but I don't know why. I don't know where I am, or who
I'm hiding from.

A whirring noise buzzes in time with my hands; my fingers are pulsing in pain. Moonlight streams through the window, spattering the tile floor, interlaced with shadows of tree branches. I rub my cheek against my teddy bear. Soft, blue teddy bear, bristles stiff with drying blood. Teddy's name is Po-Po. His black-bead eye glints in the moonlight. His other eye went missing weeks ago, rolled somewhere, under a kitchen rug or in between the couch cushions maybe. No matter, I love my one-eyed teddy. I am hiding Po-Po, too.

The room is warm, blazing warm, and I smell smoke all around, like sweet tobacco. Like the smell of my dad's rolled cigarettes.

The shadows of the tree branches move on the floor, like witch's fingers.

“Zoe?” a voice calls out, sweet as pie, patient. “Zoe?” It is a singsong voice. I tuck myself in tighter, barely breathing. If I fold myself up, they will not find me. My heart bangs in my ears. I watch the slit of light beneath the door for movement. My teddy trembles in my wet, bleeding hands.

“Zoe? Honey, come here. We just want to help you. Come on, honey.”

The voice is calm, soothing. Mommy? Is she calling me? Relief surges through my body like water on a fire.

“Mommy!” I scream with every fiber in my body. I forget that I am hiding, forget that someone may find me. “Mommy! Mommy!” It is a shriek, a prayer.

And then the door opens, and my heart stops.

“Zoe!” Scotty is shaking me by the arm. My heart leaps out of my chest and I sit up like a shot, my pajama top slimy with sweat.

“What the fuck?” he asks. Charitable, considering he is my brother. And my screaming just tore him from the arms of his latest paramour, now wide awake and wondering why he's living with some crazy woman bellowing in the next room. “What was that all about?”

“The fire,” I say, confused, catching my breath.

“The fire?” He looks confused, too, maybe because he just woke up, or maybe because the fire was over twenty years ago. “I didn't know you were still having those nightmares,” he says, his voice gravelly with sleep.

“I didn't either.” I haven't had a nightmare about the fire since high school.

My brother stands up from my bed, all limbs, hair tousled. Half of his face looks monstrous in the shadows, like the Phantom of the Opera. He stretches up his arms with a yawn, his eyes turning toward his bedroom. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine.” I'm not sure this is true, but after all, he does have someone waiting in his bed. And I am old enough to go back to sleep without my mommy.

“Thanks,” I call to his retreating figure. Soft voices float into the hallway as he returns to his bedroom, “What's-wrong-with-her?” noises. I lay back down in bed, my pattering heart slowing. Headlights flash on my wall as a car rumbles down the street.

Three in the morning.

A brown spider twirls on a web in the corner of the ceiling. Thinking back to my medical school lecture on poisonous spiders, I vaguely recall it's the brown ones you have to watch out for, that would kill you dead in seconds. Or maybe it was the brown ones that were harmless, and the red ones that were deadly. This does seem like an important distinction, though not necessarily at 3:03 a.m. I shut my eyes and try to sleep, but I've played this game before, and sleep has no intention of coming, not anytime soon. Sleep is perverse in
that way, abandoning you just when you need it most.

Unless I have some Xanax left.

This hope drags me to the bathroom, the bright light stinging my eyes. I untwist the cap and peer in to see my little white pill shining up at me like a beacon from its orange plastic bottle. Thank God. I'm not addicted to the stuff, but it's easy to see how that could happen. I have, in fact, seen it happen.

I pop the pill into my mouth and climb back in bed. My brain slows to a thrum, listening to the Xanax. Arms jelly, legs jelly, brain jelly, melting into the bed. But before I fade off, the finest gossamer of a thought sticks in my brain like a burr.

The fire. After twenty years, why am I dreaming about the fire?

T
ell me about the dream,” Sam says.

I am lying on the stiff, chocolate-brown leather couch in his office, playing with an iron puzzle. Rings and figure eights that supposedly unlink into a necklace, with the apparent purpose of driving crazy patients even crazier.

“It's about a fire,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, in a measured voice. Sam always has a measured voice, part of the psychiatric bedside-manner thing I need to work on. He taps his knuckles on his glossy wooden desk. Everything in his office is glossy. It reminds me of the inside of a yacht: shiny, dark-cherry wooden furniture, deep navy-blue walls, anchor bookends, and a brass barometer on his desk. He has an oversized compass, too, with a desert-tan face and red and blue hands that always point true north. Which is odd, because the room faces east. I pointed this out once, and he gave me a polite smile that said,
Maybe your Adderall needs adjusting
. “Tell me more,” he says.

“About the dream? It's a nightmare, really. A memory.”

“A memory of what?”

I shake some blood back into my feet, which are dangling over the couch. This couch is not meant for tall people. Then again, most people probably don't actually lie on the couch. “Does anyone else actually lie on the couch?” I ask, since the thought strikes.

“Zoe, how about we try to focus on the dream?”

I sit up, clanking the iron puzzle back on the table. Focus, right.

“You say the dream is a memory. A memory of what?”

“A memory of the fire. The fire that killed my birth mother.”

Sam stares at me. “Go on.”

“It was just the two of us in the house when it happened. I was four years old. I survived, obviously, but she didn't.”

“Wow,” he says, though it's a measured “wow.”

“My mom, my
adoptive mom, told me about it when I was little, because I don't remember it very well. Only what I can piece together from the nightmare.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Sam says. “Mmm-hmm” is big in psychiatry. Another thing I have to work on: getting just the right tone for my “Mmm-hmm.” “And what do you remember?” he asks.

I think back to the house. My parents showed it to me when we visited their old neighborhood once, a boring suburban house with skimpy dent
al
trim around the front door. Somehow I had envisioned a different house, wet with ashes, smoke still rising. But of course, this was years later, and a new house now stood in its place. Phoenix will
rise again.

“I remember the smell of smoke,” I say. “And my hands,
I remember my hands being cut.” I show him the fine white lines that zigzag my palms. Show-and-tell. “Something fell off the house when it was burning, sliced them up.”

“How about your mom? Can you remember her at all?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Not really. I wish I could. I have a photo of us from when I was a baby. That's all I really have of her. Everything else was destroyed in the fire.” I pick up the heavy metal puzzle again from the table and clink it around. “My mom knew her, though. My adoptive mom. She was her best friend.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She agreed to raise me if anything should ever happen. And then the fire happened.”

Sam leans back in his own chocolate-brown leather chair with a creak and crosses his arms. I can tell he is viewing me in a new light. I've met with him only a few times since I came back home, so it's been mainly a getting-to-know-you affair, mixed with some Adderall tweaking to keep my thoughts from flying too far. We haven't had the “My mother died in a fire” chat yet; I like to go two or three dates before springing that on a new psychiatrist.

“But the real issue,” I say, “is why am I dreaming about the fire again?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I used to have the nightmare every single night when I was a kid.”

He considers this. “Likely a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Yes, PTSD was my official diagnosis for a while,” I say. When my poor new mom didn't sleep for years, comforting me as I screamed out night after night for my other mommy. We tried a spate of medications for the nightmares: clonidine, clonazepam, melatonin, phenobarbital. Nothing worked. Then one night, freshman year of high school, the nightmares just stopped. Like magic.

“Do you have any ideas about it?” Sam asks. “Why you had the nightmare again?”

“I don't know.” I unlink a knot in the dull metal chain, the leather crunching as I lean forward on the couch. It is a spectacularly uncomfortable couch. “Probably because I'm back in Buffalo.”

“Now that you're home for residency, you mean?”

“Right, because I didn't have the nightmare at all when I was at Yale. I didn't even think about it, actually.”

Sam nods, playing with his beard. His beard, eyes, and hair are all the same exact shade of coffee brown. He matches the room. Sam is better-looking than most psychiatrists I've met. I'm always surprised to find him attractive. Not that I would date my psychiatrist, but you know.

“Let's give it some time,” he says. “If you keep having the nightmares, we can talk about possible therapies. Like dream rehearsal, did you ever try that one?”

“I don't think so.”

“Okay. We can always come back to that if we need to.” He looks down at his notes. “How is your mother doing?”

“She has her good and bad days.” I tinker with the metal puzzle. “It's weird. We'll have this almost normal conversation, and then she doesn't even remember she's in Buffalo.”

“Not unusual. Social graces can stay intact for quite a while.”

“I guess.” I put the puzzle down. “Sometimes I wonder if we did the right thing though. Moving her there.

“It's natural to feel guilty, Zoe. But you want her to be safe.”

“Yeah, but it was Scotty's idea, really. I never thought she was
that
bad.”

Sam gives me a questioning look. “Didn't you say she almost burned the house down?”

“Well, yes, that one time,” I admit, “when she forgot she was cooking.” And then there was the time the police found her wandering down Elmwood in the middle of the night. Which is when we finally decided to move her. “I just hate seeing her in there.”

He nods. “It's hard.”

I nod, too, because it is. Sam speaks the obvious sometimes, but he means well.

“And Jean Luc?”

“No change there,” I answer. “Holding pattern. Still taking a break.” “Taking a break” being a euphemism for “breaking up,” kind of.

“How's the Adderall working for you?”

“Pretty good,” I answer. “Not perfect, though.”

“Any palpitations?”

“No.”

“Appetite?”

“Fine.” Unfortunately, stimulants never did curb my appetite. “My focus isn't great. I just wish it could do a bit more.”

Sam checks his computer, leaning his face into the screen. “You're on a fairly high dose already. Are you using any other measures to control your symptoms? Nonpharmacological methods?”

“A bit,” I hedge.

“Such as?”

“Running, some. Though I haven't been doing it much lately. In college, I used to row. That helped a lot, even more than running.”

“There's a rowing club in Buffalo,” he offers.

“I know,” I answer. “Maybe in the spring.”

He smiles. “Get back to running, Zoe. You need to find a way to keep things in check for yourself when the meds aren't working for you.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Sam glances unobtrusively at the large pewter clock above my head. Looking at your watch in psychiatry is a big no-no, so most psychiatrists go for the big-clock-above-the-couch technique. He opens the drawer with a squeak and pulls out a script pad. This is where we say good-bye.

“Adderall?” he asks, scribbling.

“Yup.” So I keep my mouth shut most of the time.

“Lexapro?”

“Yup.” So I don't jump off the Peace Bridge.

“And Xanax.”

“Yup.” So I can sleep. “Can I have a few more pills this time? Just in case I have the nightmare again?”

There is a pause. Patient asking for more controlled substances, huge red flag. He raises his eyebrows just a milli­m
ete
r. If my psychiatrist reads me, I read him right back. “Okay,” he says.

His okay speaks volumes as he tears off a script.

“Want to take a ride, Mom?” I ask.

Her room, replete with family pictures covering every flat surface, a spindly, yellowing plant Scotty never remembers to water, and a roommate who keeps calling out “Nancy” is starting to feel claustrophobic.

“Okay,” she agrees with some relief. I roll her wheelchair out of the carpeted doorway onto the shiny, pink-tile floor and feel as if we are making an escape. We wheel around for a while, killing time, making the usual rounds and the usual hellos, folks my mother will not remember tomorrow and vice versa.

We pass by the rose-pink walls, topped with a creamy border with wild burgundy roses. The nursing home has taken the rose-pink theme to a new level. If Sam's office looks like a ship, this place looks like a huge Victorian tearoom: dark mauve carpets, mauve Formica, mauve toile window treatments with happy mauve peasants playing flutes and toiling in fields.

“How's the weather up there?” one of the patients croaks out with a smile. I give my best, beatific smile, as if I've never heard that one before.

“She's like a giraffe, isn't she?” my mom says, as though she, too, has just discovered my height and finds it as laughable as I do.

“Thanks a lot, Mom,” I say, when we run into the orderly, and I mean literally.

“Mrs. Goldman!” she says in a peppy voice, avoiding our wheelchair. This woman is perpetually cheery, and given her work and her pay, this attitude borders on delusional. “I've got something for you,” she says, cooing.

“What do you have?” my mother asks, distrustful. She has never been distrustful, my mother. This is new in her dementia. But I understand it. When you can't trust your mind, what can you trust?

“Your meds, silly!” The woman pulls out a tray with my mother's room number on it and pours the full bounty into a small, white, ruffled paper cup. Ten pills. For my mother, who bragged she was never sick a day in her life. My mother takes the cup in her hands and looks up at me, unsure.
Should I take them?
I have become my mother's mother, but I'm used to this. “Go ahead.”

She glances up at me, as if she just remembered something. “Zoe, did you take your pills today?”

“Yes,” I answer, laughing at this little nugget from the recesses of her temporal lobe. A question she has asked me a million times over my schooling. I went through a trough of meds for my ADHD, though sometimes I think they didn't help because I was just a natural pain in the ass. The orderly laughs, too, and moves on to her next lucky customer. We roll past the Impressionist prints with muted mauve frames, and past the nurses' station with holiday decorations and reminders of the date.

Smiley turkeys are posted up on one side of the wall and, on the other, happy pilgrims and Indians are joined hand in hand, all future squabbles (smallpox-infested blankets, massacres, etc.) glossed over. Halloween was quite a sight last month: witches, goblins, and ghosts, and spooky orange spider­web cotton laced across the nurses' station. Scary enough if you weren't already hallucinating.

“How's your father doing?” Mom asks.

“Dad died a while ago, Mom. Remember?”

“Oh right, right, I knew that.” Sometimes she remembers this, sometimes she doesn't. Lately, more often than not, she doesn't.

“Car accident,” I add, fending off her next question.

My father died when I was a freshman in high school and my brother, Scotty, was in fifth grade. It confirmed my nagging suspicion that Forrest Gump was right. Life
is
like a box of chocolates. But someon
e
already ate all of the caramels.

“That's right,” she says. “Now I remember.” She is silent for a while, fumbling with her hands while I wheel her around. The smell of soiled sheets wafts out from one of the rooms, mixing with the smell of apple-pie air freshener by the nurses' station, an unpleasant juxtaposition. I'm used to hospital smells, but I've never liked them. We roll back to her room, where her roommate is carrying on to herself about an injustice that happened thirty years ago. Or yesterday, hard to know.

“Let's go outside?” I ask, and my mom nods. I wrap a fluffy lilac afghan around her shoulders. It is a blanket my mom knitted herself, “BD” as Scotty likes to say, “Before Dementia.” Or as my mom used to say, “In my current state,” to differentiate this from her former state of intelligence, independence. She doesn't say this anymore. Now she doesn't know what state she's in. Or even which city, according to the Mini-Mental-Status-Ex
am
. Her afghan is pilled now, with some stains, but she loves that blanket, and I'm afraid a round in the washing machine might just do in the thing.

It is bright out, a rarity in Buffalo this time of year. Leaves are just past changing, bright, garish reds turning brown. We roll down the narrow pavement path with dried orange leaves skittering past us in the wind. I wrap the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

“So how's your work?” my mother asks, by way of conversation, and because she does not remember what I do.

“I'm a doctor, Mom.”

“I know that!” she says, offended. “You're a plastic surgeon.”

“Close, psychiatrist.”