Little Black Lies (6 page)

M
oonlight is spattered on the tile floor.

A whirring noise buzzes next to me, vibrating in my head. I am curled up, so they can't see me.

“Zoe?” a voice calls out. “Where are you?”

I don't answer, curl myself tighter. The smell of smoke tickles my nose, and I hold my breath. My heart beats in my ears.

“Zoe? Come on out, honey!”

Footsteps track outside the door and I watch them, still holding my breath. My lungs are blowing up, aching. I cling to Po-Po. My hands are smeared with blood, seeping under the cuffs of my nightgown. I wonder if I'll get in trouble for staining it, the way I did when I spilled hot chocolate on my new pants and Dad got angry.

Shadows of tree branches sway on the floor, like snakes.

I can't hold my breath anymore, my heart is thumping out of my chest, and I gasp.

The footsteps stop as the door opens.

A muscular man in a yellow rubber coat stands in the doorway, blocking the light. He has a huge ax over his shoulder as if he might be chopping trees. “Zoe?” he asks.

“Yes?” I say, hesitant.

His face is stoic, serious, but then he smiles. At first it is a kind smile, but it changes into an eerie, spooky smile, and he pulls back the ax in slow motion, and the sharp silver edge shimmers as it flies right toward me.

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” I scream out, falling to the floor as he winds up for another swing.

“Hey!” Scotty shakes my shoulder. I leap away from him as if he is on fire, smacking my elbow against the wall. Shocks race down my arm.

“Zoe, what the fuck?” He stares at me across the bed. “Seriously. What's going on? Isn't your psycho doctor helping you out with this shit?” That's his pet name for Sam, and all of my previous psychiatrists: “psycho doctors.” And now I'm becoming one.

I shrug, my mouth too dry to speak, and I'm too shaky to trust my voice anyway. He stares at me another long second, and his eyebrows soften into a look akin to tenderness. I feel a flood of love for him and understand in a flash what all these women are seeing in my annoying little brother, more than just a cheap James Dean imitation.

“I'm fine,” I say, throat sore from screaming. “Go back to sleep.”

He doesn't get up from the bed. “Are you sure?”

“I'm sure. Really. Go to sleep.”

Scotty stands up, stretching, looks at me a last time, and turns around to pad off to his bedroom. Whereas,
I pad off to the bathroom, where my new stock of Xanax is patiently waiting to still my nerves. I do not yet have to ration my supply this month. Then I am in my bed, lying on my back and waiting for the Xanax to kick in, like a bride waiting for her spouse. Without realizing it, I am plunging into another dream.

A panicky dream of looking for something, but I don't even know what I'm looking for. I'm asking everyone if they know where it is. I ask Jason, Dr. A, my mom, Scotty. It's as if they are all in some kind of “Zoe's subconscious” cocktail party, and I'm weaving my way through them. They are talking, trying to tell me where I put this thing, but I cannot hear them. I just see mouths moving, which sends me into a deeper panic. They are all milling around, ignoring me and talking silently to one another. Finally, I reach Jean Luc. I ask him if he knows what I am looking for, and he opens up his beautiful mouth (I find it beautiful, even in the dream) and says,
“Que sera, ser
a.
”

“But that's not even French,” I point out, but he doesn't hear me.

A
nother day in paradise.

I'm running late because I couldn't find a parking spot in the resident lot, so I had to drive over to the overflow parking on the opposite side of the hospital. I slip into the seat between Jason and Dr. A, scalding my hand with coffee and simultaneously staining my new khaki pencil skirt (which lightened my credit card by fifty bucks last week), and last but not least, earning the unambiguous glare of Dr. Grant for being late.

This morning's Grand Rounds lecture is “The Theory of Memory,” given by Dr. Wong from the neuropsychiatry department. Neuropsychiatrists are geekier than either psychiatrists or neurologists, which is no easy feat. In the Olympic sport of Geekdom, neuropsychiatrists would win the gold medal hands down, psychiatry silver, and neurology a close bronze. Dr. Wong is no exception. He wears khakis and a short-sleeve yellow button-down shirt every single day, winter or summer, along with large, white sneakers you might see elderly folks wearing for laps through the mall, though Dr. Wong is in his forties. He surely invited his share of Kick Me signs in his time.

“Ahhhhm, there are many theories of memory, starting back in 1896 with Sir William Osle
r
,” Dr. Wong drones. His voice is more powerful than Xanax. I may doze off despite the third-degree burn on my hand.

“He gave this lecture last year in medical school,” Jason whispers to me. “Brutal.”

Dr. A, meanwhile, is sitting on the edge of his seat, eyes wide open, as if it's the last inning of the World Series.

“Ahhhhm, then, in the early 1900s was the empiricist theory of the association by contiguity.”

“Brutal” is being kind. I am fighting the urge to check my e-mail with every fiber in my soul, knowing if I do, Dr. Grant might leap out of his chair to throttle me.

“John Locke and John Stuart Mill, ahhhhm, are prime examples of philosophers of empiricis
m
.” His voice carries on in its monotonous tone for another ten minutes. Jason has started a tally sheet on his “ahhhms” and even Dr. A's eyes are a touch glazed now. Dr. Grant is checking his e-mail on the sly.

I slump back in the chair and allow my brain to wander, an activity that's a true pleasure for me, as I've been working on coping skills since birth to keep my brain 100 percent focused. Every once in a while, a dog likes to be off his leash.

My mind instantly fastens on to last night's dream. Of course, the kindly volunteer fireman turns out to be homicidal. I am probably the only person who could use dream rehearsal to make a nightmare worse. At this point, I have to face the fact that the nightmare is not a fluke, but a recurring problem. And if inserting a fireman won't work (in fact, I dread ever seeing his face again), I have to try something else. The best way to quiet this beast, to steal it out of my subconscious and kill it dead in the light of day, is to solve it. I open my iPad, pull up a note, and start writing.

1. age in nightmare: four years old
   Meaning: my age when fire occurred
   
2. hands bleeding
   Meaning: sliced by metal from the house
   
3. the smell of smoke
   Meaning: obvious, from fire
   
4. moonlight
   Meaning: also obvious, fire at night
   
5. one-eyed blue teddy bear, Po-Po
   Meaning: useless detail
   
6. a whirring sound
   Meaning: no idea what this is
   
7. hiding
   Meaning: unknown, why am I hiding from the fire? oxygen deprivation?
   
8. someone calling my name
   Meaning:
   

I pause but do not fill this one in. This is the question that taunts me at three in the morning when I'm out of Xanax and the clock is glowing a malicious blue. Meaning: Did my mother die because she was trying to get me and I wouldn't come out?

“Ahhhm, another more recent movement in memory has been the repressed memory phenomenon.”

Now my ears perk up. Repressed memory.

I know a bit about this subject. In medical school, I did a research paper on women with suppressed childhood memories from some type of trauma, mainly incest and rape. One woman I interviewed recovered a memory of her father killing her best friend. The child was three years old at the time, and she remembered his burying her friend six feet deep in the sandbox and warning her never to tell anyone, or she would end up there, too. Twenty years later, her own three-year-old started crying and throwing a tantrum in a sandbox at the local park, and the memory came hurtling back. The authorities thought she was crazy until they dug up the sandbox at her parents' old address and found a young girl's skeleton.

“One of the major methods to uncover these so-called lost memories, ahhhm, has been hypnosis.”

Hypnosis.

A lightbulb clicks on. Hypnosis, of course. The way to remember what your brain doesn't want you to remember. That could be the answer to my nightmares! If the mind can bury a memory so deeply in its own sandbox—a child's skeleton, a mother dying in a fire—maybe I just need a shovel to dig it up.

“Ahhhhm, though, due to many false memories obtained by this therapy, this theory has largely been debunked,” Dr. Wong continues.

But I am no longer listening; my brain is off to the races with endless potential. I have read about hypnosis before but never went so far as to pursue it. Then again, I wasn't having the nightmares. I wasn't waking up with the feel of blood on my
hands, shellacked by the guilt of hiding from the woman who was trying to save me. Hypnosis: how to wrest a memory from your truculent, uncooperative subconscious.

Forget dream rehearsal, I don't need a fireman to save me.

I
forgot my Adderall this morning and my brain is on spin cycle, with my foot tapping just as fast.

I am waiting, which is generally what you do in a waiting room. And while waiting is just this side of annoying for most people, it is torture for us ADHD-ers, especially those off their meds. Sam's waiting room reminds me of a nicely appointed bus station, dark gray walls and seats, with strangers sitting side by side, avoiding eye contact. The room is hot, inducing stupor in minutes, so you're just hitting REM sleep when the secretary comes to get you. Glossy, black-framed prints of silver and gold abstract figures hang on the wall, each one about three millimeters crooked. The stereo plays country music in the background, an odd choice for a psychiatry office. I mean, why choose the one genre that could depress even the sunniest disposition?

The man across from me coughs, and everybody looks at him as if on high alert, then just as quickly looks back down at books, magazines, various personal electronic devices. I can tell why he's here by the way he keeps smoothing out his magazine so the pages are exactly symmetrical: OCD. The three-millimeter-off pictures must be driving him to distraction. I have to stop myself from playing Guess That Diagnosis every time the bell rings with a new patient walking in, letting some fresh air into the Hansel-and-Gretel oven of a waiting room. The surly teenager to my right wearing a black T-shirt saying “I love my authority problem”: definite oppositional defiant disorder. And his poor, beaten-down mother sitting beside him: bad mom haircut, bad mom jeans, worn-out face.

That kid right there is the reason I will never have children. The whole thing is such a crapshoot. You roll the dice and hope for the best, but you could give birth to the punk to my right, or to Sofia Vallano, for that matter.

I spent my entire month of pediatrics in medical school wanting to stick a fork in my eye. They say doctors who go into psychiatry need their heads examined. I say ditto for pediatrics. Dress in cartoon scrubs and Mickey ties, hand out stickers, and take care of runny noses all day? Kill me. One trip to a restaurant on “kids eat free” night should convince you, with those animals fighting over crayons and which balloon is theirs. Kids are one big, gratuitous, expensive time suck. Jean Luc laughed outright when I explained my reasoning on this one, but he didn't disagree. He is a chemist, after all, and I am empirically correct.

“Hello, little lady,” the secretary says, heading my way. This is our private joke. I am nobody's definition of a “little lady.” I stand up and everybody looks up, then immediately back down. This is one place where no one stares at me.

When I enter his office, Sam stands in greeting and then sits as I arrange my coat, scarf, purse, phone, and iPad next to me. I have too much crap. “It's hot as hell in there, you know.”

“I know, I'm sorry. There's some problem with the heater.” He pauses a second, reading me. “So how are you today?”

This is a loaded question at a psychiatrist's office. No one expects you to say “Fine.”

“I want to do hypnosis,” I say. Nothing like jumping right in. I find small talk especially annoying when off Adderall.

Sam raises his eyebrows, looking at me doubtfully. “Hypnosis?”

“Yup.”

He scratches his beard. There is a fingerprint on his tortoiseshell lenses. “You know that's controversial, right?”

“Right. But I still want to try it.” I notice my foot tapping and stop it.

“Do you mind if I ask what brings this up, Zoe?”

I shift on the stiff couch. “Grand Rounds.”

“Okay. How's that?”

“The topic yesterday was memory. And they talked about the memory recovery process. So hypnosis came up as part of that.”

“I see,” he says. “Did they talk about the problems with hypnosis?”

“Yes,” I admit.

“False memory syndrome, for instance?”

“Yes,” I repeat. “They did. Actually, I learned about it in medical school, too. I did some research on recovered memories.”

“So you know that it's really grown out of favor recently. And there's a good reason for that. Many women went through this process and ended up ‘remembering' things that weren't eve
n
true. Sexual abuse, for instance, that never actually occurred.”

“I have heard about that.”

“You can imagine this was quite disruptive in their lives.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I say. “I know all this. I know it's controversial. I know it doesn't always work. I'm well aware of all of the potential pitfalls. But I still want to try it.”

Sam twiddles his thumbs. “Why? What are you hoping to achieve?”

I tug up my black leather boots. My legs don't know what to do with themselves. “I had the nightmare again.”

He nods. “Okay. Did you try the dream rehearsal like we talked about?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I tried it. No go. Bust. Complete and utter failure.”

“Tell me more.”

“It didn't work,” I say, throwing up my hands. “The fireman was a maniac.”

“Okay,” he says. I could swear he is fighting off a smile.

“Seriously, he had an ax. He swung it at me. Twice.”

“That's…” He bites his lip. He is definitely trying not to laugh. “That is unfortunate.”

“Yeah. I would say. But it doesn't matter. Because I think I figured it out.”

“The nightmare?”

“Yes, kind of. The reason I'm having the nightmare at least. Why it's resurfaced.”

“And what did you figure out?”

My foot thwaps against the carpet, catching on some threads. “It
does
have to do with my mom.”

“How is that?”

“So my mom is demented, right?”

“Right,” he agrees.

“And I feel like I'm losing her.”

“Okay, I can see that.”

“That's why I'm having the nightmare. I'm losing one mother so, somewhere, deep in my subconscious maybe, I want to find out about my other mother, my birth mother.”

“I don't see how that follows entirely.”

“Don't you? All my life I've wondered about her. My mom would tell me this and that, little things. But I've always felt like a piece was missing. But I guess I also felt guilty that, if I told my mom, she would feel bad, like she wasn't a good enough mother for me. But now I have my chance. I can't hurt my mother by finding out—she won't even know.”

Sam stares out the window, nodding. Burnt-yellow leaves are scattered around the base of the tree like litter.

“I think I'm ready to find out about her now. And maybe the nightmare is like a clue. Or a message.”

“The nightmare is a memory, Zoe.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” I scoot forward on the couch to quiet my legs. “But it's more than that. It's also my last memory of her. My real mother.” I feel a spike of guilt for my real, real mother—the one who raised me—sitting on a rocker with a dilapidated blanket and a dilapidated brain. But mixed with the guilt, a surge of freedom. “I want you to hypnotize me back to that night.”

Sam puts his hands up like brakes. “Hypnosis can be very disruptive, as I said. You're dismantling protective mechanisms.” He looks right in my eyes. “Zoe, sometimes there are good reasons we forget things.”

“I know,” I say. And I do know. Freud was right about a lot, and my subconscious is probably a hell of a lot smarter than my flitting, ADHD-riddled conscious ever will be. But I still want to try it.

“How about we give dream rehearsal one more try?” Sam asks. “Before we abandon it completely.”

The fireman's ax jumps into my mind. “I don't think that's such a good idea.”

“We could practice it together,” Sam offers.

“Let me ask you,” I say, ignoring the suggestion. “Have you ever done hypnosis before?”

Sam clutches the front of his dark, glossy desk, the captain of his ship. “I have carried out hypnosis before,” he says, as if he is admitting he used to inject heroin.

“And how did it go?” I ask, trying not to betray the excitement bubbling in me.

“I've had cases where it went very well, and others where it was not at all successful. More than not successful, harmful.” So he's injected more than once. He grips the desk, staring out the window. In a word, deciding.

“I'm not asking for a miracle,” I say. “If it works, and I remember more about that night, even a glimmer of my mom, I'll consider it a success. If it doesn't, and I'm hounded by that nightmare every night of my life, at least I can say we tried.”

Sam keeps staring, weighing my words. I see him reflected in a mirror on the wall, a large, dark wooden circle that looks vaguely like a ship's wheel. “I've tried dream rehearsal. It didn't work. And you yourself said there are no good therapies out there,” I continue.

He nods absentmindedly, then looks down at his notes. “So how is your mom doing?” he asks, changing the subject none too subtly.

“Not great,” I say. “She called me ‘Tanya' a couple weeks ago.”

“Oh? Tell me more.”

“There's not much to tell.” I lean back on the most uncomfortable couch ever made. “She's losing it is all, like Scotty says. But it's sad, because sometimes she's so with it.”

“Who's Tanya?” he asks.

“Probably some old friend of hers. I don't really know any Tanyas. But it's familiar somehow.”

“It's tough,” Sam says, shaking his head. Then he pushes his chair back, which is the sign. The pewter clock has announced my departure. “I need to think about this, Zoe, and you need to think about it. Take some time.”

I nod vigorously.

“Think about the fact that if you uncover painful memories of the fire, of your birth mother, you may go back to a very scary, very raw place. A place where you may not be able to function very well, especially during residency.”

I nod again, more vigorously. I must look like a monkey.

“If you still want to do it next week, I will consider it.”

“Okay,” I say, pretending I will contemplate every angle. But I already know my answer, and hope swells in my chest as he pulls out his pad.

“You seem a little jittery today. Any problems with the Adderall?”

“Only problem being I forgot it this morning,” I say.

“Ah,” he answers with a smile. “That explains a lot.”

I wonder what the hell that means but manage to hold my tongue, even without Adderall.

“Remember the nonpharmacological things we discussed to help the ADHD,” Sam says.

“Yeah, I know,” I mumble. “I really have to get back to running.”

“Yes, you do,” he says as he scribbles off my litany of medications.

“That is completely fucked-up,” Scotty says as we enter the nursing home. Scolding elderly glances, murmurs, and tut-tuts are thrown our way. “Hypnosis?”

“It is not at all fucked-up, actually,” I answer in a whisper to avoid murmurs and tut-tuts. “It's something I really need to do right now. For the nightmare.”

He laughs, a scoff more than a laugh. “What does it have to do with the nightmare?” he asks, pulling off his hat and shaking out his hair. “I thought you were into that dream rehearsal shit.”

“Yeah, it didn't go so well.” I unbutton my coat, which I just notice is missing the middle black plastic button. “And I'm trying to remember some things about my mother.”

“Why don't you just ask Mom? They were best friends.”

“Believe me, Scotty, I
have
been asking her…my whole life. She's never told me much. And now, I'm not even sure she could if she wanted to.”

We are standing just inside the lobby. The automatic outside door keeps grinding open and closed, blasting us with cold, rainy air.

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

“I don't know.
Anything. Did she like gardening, for instance, or roller coasters?” I have no idea where I came up with that one.

“Yeah, right. Very important things like gardening and roller coasters. What about your real
father
, Zoe? Don't you want to find out about him? How about your real third cousin once removed? Maybe he liked roller coasters.”

“Listen, Scotty. My father didn't raise me for four years. He was basically a sperm donor.” This last part comes out a bit louder than intended, and a mother steers her young daughter away from us as they walk by. I move farther into the lobby toward the vast expanse of mauve, determined both to end the conversation and to get out of the freezing doorway.

Scotty follows me, wiping his wet, grassy sneakers on the black rubber mat. “You are seriously fucked-up, you know that? I always thought you were a little fucked-up, but you are majorly, royally fucked-up.”

“‘Majorly, royally,' huh? What are you, twelve?”

We have finally cleared the doorway when Mom comes heading our way, swooping in to break up her squabbling children as always. Cheery Cherry is pushing her wheelchair.

“Hi,” Mom says, beaming at us. Every time she looks at me this way, I feel guilty for not visiting more often.

“Hi yourself,” I say, hugging her, and Scotty moves in for a hug, too. One big happy family.

“You okay, honey-doll?” asks Cheery Cherry, releasing Mom with some trepidation to her obviously less-qualified children.

“Yes, thank you,” my mom answers, turning to us. “Let's sit here today,” she says, pointing to the dark cherry table in the lobby. The idea of us all in her square of a room, with Scotty and me about to throttle each other, does seem ill advised. I sit down by the table in a formal chair, with upholstered swirling blue and mauve, and Scotty takes a similarly floral seat next to Mom. Outside, a robin picks at a patch of grass, swiveling its head around to look out for any competition. I'm wondering when he flies down south. Do robins fly down south? I really need to take my Adderall.