Little Black Lies (7 page)

“So how's the coffee business?” Mom asks Scotty, perhaps to verify that he is indeed still in the coffee business.

“Good,” he answers. “Got a few more Web-site clients, too,” he adds, to verify that he is not a complete fuck-up. Scotty has a stack of business cards at the cash register for his Web-site design business: Spyder Web Designs. You might think actual, responsible entrepreneurs would not want to put their entire Web presence in the hands of a flaky barista, but apparently I am wrong. The cards disappear quickly, and I must admit he puts together an eye-catching Web site on the cheap. My brother is probably the next Zuckerberg.

“So,” Scotty says, apropos of nothing, “guess what? Zoe wants to find out about her
real
mother.”

I glare at him.
Glare
is not a strong enough word.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Oh, she has this brilliant idea that she's going to be
hypnotized
by her psycho doctor.”

My mom looks at me blankly. “I don't think I understand.”

“Listen,” I say in my calmest voice, “this nightmare is very disturbing to me. And I think hypnosis might help me understand it a little better.”

Mom chews on one of her French-manicured fingernails. Most of the polish has worn off. My mother was never one to chew her nails BD. “Do you really think this is wise, Zoe?” she asks. “Don't you think sometimes it's better to leave well enough alone?”

“Maybe.” The robin darts to another bit of grass. “I don't know.”

“She wants to know if her real mom liked gardening or roller coasters,” Scotty adds.

A blast of cold air comes in behind us as the next visitors tromp in, unwrapping scarves and shaking off boots on the black rubber mat. The automatic door grinds shut again. “What do you want to know about Beth? I can tell you, honey. She
loved
roller coasters. In fact, she once dragged me on Montezuma's Revenge seven times in a row. I threw up in a garbage can, but she was still running to get into line again.”

I laugh at this image, as does Scotty, though this doesn't sound like a very sensitive friend. “Was Dad there?” I ask, having a hard time visualizing him anywhere near a roller coaster.

“Oh no, of course not,” she says. “And about gardening.” Mom pauses. “I don't remember her gardening much, but she was very young.”

Old enough to have kids, but too young to garden? Somehow this doesn't jibe with the disco-haired, doe-eyed picture of Beth Winters I had in my head. I have always pictured a small side garden with pink hollyhocks, deep purple salvia, and shades of red zinnias in the fall. I visualize this pathetic little garden charred by the fire, sopped from the heroic firefighters' efforts from the night before, still smoking days later. But I don't know if this is a true memory or not.

“I remember a garden, Mom, from after the fire. At least I think I do.”

“What fire?” she asks.

I shoot Scotty a glance.

“The fire,” he says. “You know. When Zoe's mom died.”

She smiles at him solicitously and chews on her fingernails again.

“The fire, Mom,” he continues. “Don't you remember the fire?”

“Oh, wait a second,” she says brightly, “the fire, of course!” She gives an unsure smile. “My memory's not what it used to be. What about the fire?”

“Nothing,” I say morosely. So now I know Beth Winters loved roller coasters and gardening, not so much.

“Honestly, honey, I don't remember that much about it anymore. I do remember the fire. Vaguely. Every day, I lose something else.” She looks down at her nails. “I can hardly even remember Beth's face anymore.
”

The bird is chirping now, his gray head wet and matted from the rain. He is yanking something from the ground with glee. A worm!

Mom puts her hands in her bathrobe pockets. “Oh,” she says with excitement, as if she just remembered, “you guys want to see something?” She pulls out a ratty Popsicle stick (or tongue depressor in my line of work) with bright feathers glued on it in a million directions. Fuzzy neon-pink, electric-blue, and lilac-purple feathers.

I examine it in my hands, and she waits for a pronouncement, like a child handing over a piece of artwork
in first grade. After identifying its wattle, I realize this is a turkey. A glam turkey, sort of stuck in the nineties, but a turkey nonetheless. A Thanksgiving craft.

“That's great, Mom,” I say, and Scotty murmurs his agreement. Mom smiles ear-to-ear and then reaches over and takes it back. We sit there awhile, watching the birds, a gaggle of them now, leaping from patch to patch of soggy grass while Mom smooths the turkey feathers in her hands as if she is holding on to a newborn.

The smell of buffalo dung hangs heavy in the air.

The rain has cleared into a cool, blue November evening, the light watercolor blue that comes before night falls in earnest, streaked with pink. I have decided to take Sam's advice and go for a run, taking my favorite route in Delaware Park. The park edges the zoo so, if you look over the fence, you can see the buffalo, or at least smell them. Buffalo in Buffalo, we know the art of self-parody.

My pink sneakers slap the pavement, and immediately I feel my brain relaxing, as if it's a muscle that's been tense. I run into the wind, the cold numbing my cheeks, my phone strapped to my arm like a gun holster in case a
Dum-dum-dum-dah
should ring out and I might, God forbid, miss it.
This is the exact reason I swore I'd never fall in love, so as not to be one of those women waiting by the phone, or strapping it to my arm in this case
.

I never understood the illness of romantic love. I had seen friends devolve into this delusional, schizophrenic, love-stricken state, one after another, and I just didn't get it. I didn't get holing yourself in your room and texting for hours. I didn't get the crushed depression that followed when so-and-so stopped calling/texting and was seen tonguing someone else at someone else's soiree. The whole thing seemed ridiculous.

It's not that I didn't
want
to fall in love, I had just given up on the whole concept. I didn't think it would happen to me. If love was going to hit anywhere, I figured it would be medical school with its intense relationships forged by hours together, reeking of formaldehyde, cheek to cheek over a corpse, sleeping two hours in the same call room before blared awake by pagers. (Friendships that in fact evaporate like smoke when all the medical students fly off to their new residencies, turning into internists, orthopedic surgeons, neurologists, or maybe even psychiatrists.)

It was December of my last year of medical school when I found out I was not immune to such madness. I met Jean Luc and saw that love wasn't a choice but a foregone conclusion.

Perhaps it was the romance of the setting I couldn't withstand. We were staying at my friend Eva's ski lodge in Vermont for winter break with Karen (ophthalmologist), Allison (pediatrician), Eva (plastic surgery, probably owns a yacht by now), and her distant cousin Jean Luc, a postdoc in chemistry. Karen was engaged, Allison a lesbian, and Eva not interested in dating her cousin, so that meant my odds were decent, and I fell hard for him.

We were the best skiers in our group and shrugged off the others with politic haste, mapping out baroque ski plans, weaving through Mistletoe and Whoopsie-Daisy, Jean Luc with his ruddy cheeks, snow melting in his eyelashes. The first night we all went in the hot tub, and Jean Luc and I stayed in talking long after the others had gone back inside the lodge. The snow drifted in lazy flakes, steam misting my vision, and I sat with my head back, dark green pines all around, snow tumbling down at me as if in a 3-D movie. And right then, I got it: the delusional, psychotic, blissed-out state of love.

That night I lay beside him in bed, wide awake, wired to the gills, watching his chest rise and fall and the rust-colored stubble on his chin. The foolish rush of dopamine, the tingling of every Pacinian corpuscle in my dermatome. And the next morning we were walking together, and I was admiring his bootprints in the snow, rows of squares like a waffle iron. And I felt an odd sort of terror, because I was admiring his footprints. Who does that? And I realized, yes, this is love, and I am not immune.

A man in dark blue spandex runs by me and smiles. His dog, a huge, furry black thing, is plowing on next to him like a small gorilla on a leash. The puddles glow pink in the sky's reflection, and I wipe the sweat off my forehead with my rough sleeve. My phone pings a text, and for an instant my heart jumps, but then I realize it's not his text tone. I swing my arm around to look at the screen.

Coffee sometime? Found ur number, not giving up!

It takes a moment for this to register.

P.S. in case u forgot. This is Mike, a.k.a. obnoxious ER resident.

I smile. It is a good feeling, being wanted. But my heart isn't doing a dance.

S
ofia's pencil scratches against the paper like a rat burrowing in the trash.

She faces the window, her hand a blur of motion, and I notice a tattoo on her arm. I have spotted it before but never really looked at it closely. The tattoo is an intricate Gothic design, in grays, like her charcoals. A black skeleton knight on a silver-white steed, holding up a flag with the symbol of a shield, with a flower and the Roman numeral VIII. I have seen the image before, though I can't place it.

It is a dark, sinister tattoo.

“Like it?” she asks, extending her arm.

I lift my eyebrows in answer.
Like
is a strong word. “When did you get it?” I ask, trying to work that one out. She's been institutionalized since fourteen, and I doubt anyone would have inked her before that.

“I was eighteen.” She looks up from her drawing for a moment, gazing off dreamily. “Me and some girls from UMCH earned a trip to the ice cream parlor for good behavior. With a chaperone, of course,” she adds. “So we convinced the chaperone to get lost for a couple of hours and went looking for some real fun.”

I am picturing the Pink Ladies in
Grease
out for a night on the town and wondering how exactly the convincing of the chaperone took place.

“And we found it, right next to the ice cream parlor. The tattoo parlor. Cool Licks Ice Cream and Bad to the Bone Tattoos.” Her fingers cradle the charcoal, hand streaking across the page again. “So me and my girls got ice cream
and
tattoos.”

“What kind of ice cream?”

Sofia's eyes dart off the page and look at me like blue marbles. “No one's ever asked me that one before,” she says with a half smile. She twirls the charcoal in her fingers like a minibaton. “Rocky Road. It was delicious. Haven't had it since.” She looks down at her arm, rubbing the tattoo as if she just got a flu shot. “I got in some severe fucking trouble for that one,” she drawls with a laugh.

“Yeah, I bet,” I answer, forcing a laugh myself. Ah, those halcyon days, getting grim reaper tattoos with my pals from the insane asylum. “Where'd you get the money?” I ask, just thinking of it. “For a tattoo. Those things aren't cheap.”

She shrugs. “I have my ways.”

Of this I have no doubt. She doesn't expound any further, so we sit, staring at each other in silence that grows uncomfortable. Sofia puts her picture down on her bed. “The thing about what happened,” she says as if we were just talking about it, “is that I really don't remember it.”

I put the chart down next to me, mirroring, I guess. “What do you mean?” A surge of excitement runs through me. Is she finally going to talk about it?

“When you asked me why I killed my mother.”

“Yes.”

“The truth is, I don't remember any of it.”

A voice booms out over the intercom: “Jenny in room one? Jenny, IV change needed in room one.”

Sofia looks up at the intercom above the bed. “Does that all day,” she says. “Drives me crazy.”

The word
crazy
hangs in the air.

“You're saying you don't remember anything?” I repeat.

“Very little,” she says. “Just patches of things, here and there.”

“Like what?”

“It's hard to explain. It's like pieces of memories.”

“Hmm,” I say, for lack of something better to say. I did read this in her ol
d
records. This has been her party line all along from UMHC: “Patient claims she does not recall event. Fugue state suspected.” And I can't rule out her denial completely. It is possible, the fugue state, under dissociative disorders in the DSM V: “A state lasting hours, days, or longer with amnesia for the events during that time frame, usually provoked by severe stress.” It's not impossible, but it's exceedingly rare, usually emerging as a bullshit insanity defense.

“Was there any stressor you know of around that time? Any physical abuse, for instance?” I pause. “Sexual abuse?”

Her upper lip twitches. “No, there really wasn't. They went through all this at the old place,” Sofia says with some annoyance. “And I told them the same thing: I don't remember. I wish I could, but I don't.” She taps her charcoal on the arm of her chair. I can see smudges on the wood from where she tapped it before.

I glance up at the clock, an industrial behemoth with a cage around the face, and realize I have three more patients to see before rounds. “Okay then. I guess I'll see you tomorrow.”

“I'll be here,” she answers and turns back to her drawing.

I
've made my decision,” I announce. “I want to do it.”

Sam does not look surprised. “Let's just go over this one more time. You understand that it may not even work.”

“Yes. I'm aware of that.”

“And that if I do get you into a state of hypnosis, the memories may not be valid.”

I nod. “I'm aware of that, too.”

“But you still definitely, absolutely want to do it.”

“Definitely, absolutely.”

“Okay,” Sam says, resigned. “I'm willing to give it a try. But let's go over some ground rules.” He lifts his glasses off his face and rubs the bridge of his nose.

“Fine.”

“First things first. What we're going to do today is to see whether you're susceptible to hypnosis. Not everyone is. If we find you are susceptible, then we will go further into it.”

“Susceptible? I don't get it.”

Sam cleans his glasses with the sleeve of his navy blazer and puts them back on. The brass buttons from his sleeve shine in the sun. “Some people aren't able to get into a relaxed enough state to go into hypnosis. That's what we have to find out.”

“Oh, okay,” I say, trying not to give away my disappointment. Given my oft-skeptical and utterly unrelaxed nature, I have a snowball's chance in hel
l
of being “susceptible.” I'm the one always saying, “That would never happen in real life” during a movie. Suspending my disbelief, another weakness of mine. But I can only try.

“Another important thing is that this is an extremely vulnerable state for a person. So you need to keep my voice with you at all times, even when we're going in deep. I will be there as your support and your guide. I'm not willing to let you do this alone. If you don't follow my prompts, we'll have to abort therapy.”

“Abort therapy” sounds like a space mission. “So you're like my shaman,” I say.

“Sure,” Sam says, looking a little worried about what he got himself into. “So, remember, throughout the sessions, I'll be keeping close tabs on you. Wherever you are in the process, you need to keep checking in with me.”

“Yes, I get it.”

“And another thing: If things get difficult, we may need to come up with a safe word. Something you or I can say if you need to get out of a situation, and I can pull you back immediately.”

“A safe word.”

“Yes. The truth is, I don't usually start out with a safe word because then people tend to use it as a crutch. I first try to work through what may be uncomfortable without resorting to a safe word. But we can always create one if we need to.”

I nod again, though I think he's laying it on pretty thick here. It's not as if he's about to perform brain surgery.

“Again,” he repeats. He puts his hands up to his mouth, like he's praying. “You are totally sure.”

“Without a doubt.”

Sam pauses a beat, then stands. “Okay then, let's give it a try.” He heads over to his bookcase and pulls a worn, gray, thick text. He flips through, settles on a page with a corner turned over, returns to his desk, and sits back down. “Do you have a quarter?”

“A quarter?” I reach down and scrounge around in my purse. “What for?”

“You'll see.” He is rifling through his top drawer to find one, too. “I may have one if you don't.”

“No, I got it,” I say, retrieving one from the bottom of my purse. The quarter is cool in my hand.

“All right. Go ahead and lie down.”

“Okay.” I move my coat to the floor and lie down on the couch. My knees tremble for just an instant, and I work on relaxing.

“How are you doing?”

“Couldn't be better,” I answer, squeezing my quarter, which is warming up.

“This first part, as I said, is to see if you are susceptible to hypnosis or not. Listen closely. I am going to ask you to drop the quarter during the session. Try not to drop it.”

“
Not
to drop it?”

“That's right. If you are able to disobey this command and keep holding on to the quarter, we'll know this is not going to work for you. You will not be suggestible enough to get into the necessary state. If you do drop the quarter, however, as I tell you, then we know it will work.”

“Okay.” I doubt to hell I'm going to drop that quarter.

“I want you to listen to my voice,” Sam says. “Listen to my words and follow everything I am saying.” His speech is low and melodious, honey in my ears. “We are taking a journey together.”

I am trying to focus on his voice, but it is not easy. Hyperactivity and hypnosis do not appear to be good bedfellows.

“I am your guide on this journey, and you will follow everything I tell you to do.” His voice is strong and deep, resonating. Not the voice I have been talking to every session. “I am going to count to fifty, and you will take a deep breath with every count. I will start now. One…two…three…four…
”

My shoulders relax, though I hadn't realized they were tense. He is counting, I am breathing. My neck is wobbly, my hands tingling. Hyperventilation? Hypoxia? My brain interjects but is quieted. Stop, focus, don't try to figure it out, just listen. “Thirty-one…thirty-two…thirty-three…” The tingling travels down my legs, settling in my knees, rubbery. The sensation is like Xanax. I am still holding on to my quarter. “Fifty.…”

My brain disengages.

“You are in a forest, a
huge forest, bigger than you have ever seen.” Walls of dark green rise up around me. Birds scream in different pitches.

“You are walking to the river. There is a boat there for you. It has your name on it.” Pine needles crunch under my feet, and I am at the opening of the river. Blue water sings around me. The boat is small with a fresh coat of red paint. “Zoe” is written in black script on the corner. I step in and it rocks a second, then steadies. I sit on the warm wooden bench inside and pick up an oar, which is smoothly sanded, made for my hand. I start rowing. Has he told me to row? I'm not sure, but I am aware of myself lying on the couch and at the same time perched in the boat. The oar dips into the dark blue water, drags, and lifts. Drops jet off the bottom of the oar, in perfect parabolas, then slip back into the water. Dip and lift. Dip and lift, again, and again, and again. The sun shimmers on the water.

Where am I going?

Calm suffuses my body into the rhythm of rowing. It is different from the feeling I had rowing at Yale, when every nerve ending was on fire, pulsing in time with the coxswain's screams, and every thigh muscle begged me to stop but I refused. Jean Luc flashed by on the sidelines, a cheering pink blob, but I did not break my rhythm, sweat leaking into my eyes. I could hear my breathing like someone else's, scratchy, huffy, and I kept rowing. Because the fast thoughts in my head finally shut up and slowed down. And it was the best way I had ever found to do this, better than running, even better than Adderall.

But this is completely different.

We are not fighting, my body and me, my brain and me. We are in perfect alignment. My water, my boat, my arm, my oar, my brain. Calm, at one, we are all in this together.

“Zoe?” I hear Sam's voice, deep, sonorous.

“Yes.” I feel my lips move, my voice sounds as if it is underwater.

“Do you feel the quarter?”

“Yes.”

“It is heavy. It is getting heavier and
heavier in your hand. It is weighing down your hand. It is weighing down the boat.”

“No,” I say, gripping the quarter.

“Yes, Zoe. It is heavy. You can't hold it anymore. Drop the quarter now, Zoe. Drop the quarter.”

“No,” I mumble, and I try with all my might to hold on to it, feeling the ridges digging into my skin, but it is too heavy.

And the quarter rolls out of my hand.