Little Black Lies (5 page)

T
ell me about my birth mother,” I say.

We are sitting in her room, Mom in her rocker and me on the corner of the bed, on her crumpled Amish quilt. The ever­green air freshener I bought last week is pumping its heart out to cover the competing smells. We have arranged it so she now has the luxury of a cramped private room, so we don't have to hear her roommate rambling on about “Nancy” anymore. Mom looks up from her magazine, which I notice with some distaste is the same magazine Sofia was reading. “What about her?” she asks.

“Just about her.” I stash my
Narcissism
book on her nightstand, next to a Gideon Bible. “Beth Winters,” I say, reminding her.

“Yes, Beth Winters, I know. But why are you so interested in her all of a sudden?”

Which is a fair question. Probably because I'm dreaming about the fire again. “I don't know.”

“Hmph,” she says, glancing back down at the magazine.

“I have this patient,” I tell her, “who's a sociopath. She killed her mother when she was, like, fourteen.”

She looks up abruptly. “That's terrible,” she says, smoothing the magazine cover with her palm. “We had a few patients like that when I was in social work. So sad, these troubled, troubled kids.” Her eyes take on a faraway glaze. “I remember one case in particular. This young boy who killed his whole…” She shivers. “Never mind. Just sad, so sad.” Then she lets out a chipper, unexpected laugh. “I can't remember what I had for breakfast, but I can still remember those kids.”

I wait for her to say more, but she doesn't. She just stares at the wall. I clear my throat, trying to sound casual. “So it got me thinking about my own mother, how she died. I just want to find out more about her.”

She nods, putting the magazine on the nightstand with only a hint of a sigh, as if she is sick of telling this story but will do it just one more time because I insist.

“Beth Winters,” I say again.

“Yes, that was her name,” she answers.

“And she was your best friend,” I say, jogging her memory.

“Beth was my best friend. You know the story, Zoe. She asked me, if anything ever happened to her, would I raise you, and I said yes.” She takes off her reading glasses, cleaning the lenses with her blanket. “Of course, when someone asks you this you never really think about it. You just say yes. No one ever thinks something will actually happen. If you really thought about it, you might say no.”

“True,” I say, considering this. There is a pause, my mom mindlessly rubbing her glasses. “And then?”

“And then she died in the fire, not six months after asking me.” She puts her glasses back on, though they are still dirty. Her rocker knocks against the rose-pink wall, smudging it with wood stain. “You know, I didn't think I would ever have children. We tried so hard, your father and I, for years we tried. Nearly divorced over it.”

If I were a cartoon, my mouth would be hanging open. She has never told me this about her and Dad before. She fumbles with the pilled lilac blanket on her lap. Then she starts to clean her glasses with the blanket again. I'm not sure if she forgot she just cleaned them or if she noticed they were still dirty. Then she drops them, silver rims glinting in the sunlight. I pick them up and hand them back to her.

“Then Beth died. And suddenly, I had a baby of my own.” She smiles at me. “A four-year-old baby.”

I smooth out a wrinkle in the quilt, pulling the plum diamond straight. “But I never understood something. Why didn't her family just take me in?”

She squints as if trying to remember the answer. “I think it was written in her will, so no one could contest it.” She throws me a defensive look, as though I might want to contest it.

“And my biological father?” I ask. “No one knew his whereabouts?”

She pauses. “Larry something, I think.”

She had told me before it was a one-night stand. “Did you ever try to find him?”

“I don't remember, honey. Maybe. Probably.”

“What about her parents?”

“What is this, twenty questions?” she asks with a nervous smile.

“No, I'm just trying to fill in some things.”

“Her parents were gone,” she says, then pauses, thinking.

“You told me they died of cancer when she was young,” I offer.

“Yes, that's right,” she says, relieved to get the answer. “Very sad.”

“No other family?”

She looks at the ceiling; the rocker thwacks the wall again. “A sister I think. She was into drugs, I want to say.”

“Heroin, you told me.”

“That's it then.”

I'm not sure why I'm asking her these questions when I'm the one providing all the answers. She lifts her glasses off her face and starts cleaning the lenses again. This time they are definitely clean, though, sparkling even.

“It was hard. Of course, your father and I were over the moon with you. But on the other hand”—she drops her glasses again, and I pick them up, as if we are in some bad vaudeville routine—“I lost my best friend. We were like sisters.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “But I had you. And six months later, I was pregnant with Scotty. After all that time thinking I couldn't have kids, I stopped worrying about it, and boom.” She laughs her deep, throaty laugh. “In a weird way, I always felt like that fire was meant to be, as awful as that sounds.”

I nod, and she reaches over to take my hand. Her nails have been freshly painted, a French manicure. This is one of the many offered activities in the nursing home, and something she never would have bothered with BD. My hands are ruddy and dry, in need of some lotion. We sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes. In her dementia, there are these odd, unexpected rewards, moments we are closer than we ever have been, or ever would have been.

“I wish I could remember my birth mom,” I say. “But I don't. Except for the picture.” My mom knows the picture I'm talking about. The only one I have of my “real” mom
,
a dog-eared photo of a woman with dark hair and brown eyes. Big, lovely, doe eyes with liquid brown eyeliner and permed frizzy black hair, as if she could have been on her way to a seventies disco. She is looking right at the camera in triumph and holding a fuzzy-headed, puffy-eyed baby: me. And on the back of the photo, in faded blue cursive, was my mom's writing: “Beth and Zoe—5 days old.”

“She was the real thing, your mom,” she
says. Her hands are fidgeting. I hand her back her magazine.

“By the way,” I ask, “who's Tanya?”

The magazine trembles in her hands. “Who?”

“You called me Tanya when I was leaving last time. I wondered who you were talking about.”

“I don't think I know a—”

A knock on the door interrupts us. “Med time!” the orderly calls out in her bright voice, poking her head in the room. Her name, I remember now, is Cherry. Cheery Cherry, I thought when I heard it, so now I don't forget it. Though Cherry is not a name you might forget easily anyway. My mom never remembers, but that's my mom. She throws back her pills, a pro by now, and Cheery Cherry gives her a thumbs-up of approval and pushes off to the next room.

“So you don't know who Tanya is then?”

“No, honey.” She sinks down farther in her rocker, her face tired and drawn. “I'm not so good with names anymore.”

I pat her arm, standing up from the bed. “That's okay. It doesn't matter.” I straighten the magazine, and the spindly plant that is fighting for its life. “I'm going to let you go.”

She nods. “Good night,” she says, though the sun is out.

“Good night,” I answer, remembering how the therapist told us to “meet her where she is at.” It took everything in me not to point out the dangling preposition, but then again, that's why I'm on Adderall.

Mom's eyes are closing. Maybe the meds are making her tired. Her Aricept just got increased. I'll have to remember to ask the neurologist about that when he comes back next week. The neurologist who can't explain why my mom suddenly needs a walker, and can't give her a diagnosis.

“Could be frontotemporal dementia, Lewy Body. Could be Alzheimer's.” He rubbed his hands together rapidly, as though there were a fire, not making eye contact. His blazer looked as if he'd slept in it. “Problem is, we never really know until autopsy.”

Problem is, the diagnosis is not really helpful at that point! I wanted to scream. Just about as helpful as the neurologist coming to check her eye movements, rotate her arms around, and ask her to remember three things (bread, church, twenty dollars, always the same three things that she never remembers), spending a total of five minutes in the room (possibly eight if I happen to be around) before writing a script for another pill that “may or may not help very much,” and then moving on, shall we say, to the next victim.

“Tits on a bull,” my brother said as the neurologist squirreled out of the room last time. My brother tightened his arms around his chest, fingers splaying his lightning-bolted biceps out of his sky-blue T-shirt. “Tits on a bull.”

And on this point, I must say, we most definitely agree.

I
can't believe this,” I say, skimming through Sofia Vallano's chart to catch up on anything from overnight.

Jason bites into an apple. “What?”

“You should not talk with the food in your mouth,” Dr. A scolds him.

“I really can't believe this,” I repeat.

“Again, what?” Jason asks, opening his mouth and sticking his apple-covered tongue out at Dr. A, who shakes his head in disgust. I have been working with these guys so much lately that sometimes I feel as if I have three brothers. A regular dysfunctional family, u
s
.

“He hasn't been listening to a word I've said,” I answer.

“I still don't know what in tarnation you're on about,” Jason says, in a Southern drawl he just made up.

Dr. A whips out his notebook. “And what would be a ‘tarnation'?”

Jason ignores him.

“I'm talking about my patient Sofia. Remember, the lady killer? Dr. Grant interviewed her yesterday. His note is completely wrong. It sounds like he was talking to a different patient.”

“Oh, that,” Jason says, bored, turning back to his patient chart and chomping into the apple again. “Grant hasn't listened to a word I've said since July. Don't feel so special.”

“Yeah, but the woman is insane, and he's talking about releasing her.”

“Dr. Goldman,” Jason says, “this
is
a psychiatric facility. If you wanted to work with sane people, you should have gone into internal medicine.”

“Act-tually,” Dr. A says, “I do not think this would be a safe bet.” “Safe bet” is probably one he has been practicing. I have noticed he has started peppering phrases with idioms. “There are plenty of crazy people in internal medicine.”

“Yeah, you're right. Radiology then. Lots of sane people in radiology,” Jason says. “And I'd be making a shitload more money when I got out. Remind me why I didn't go in to radiology again? Oh yeah, dark rooms, not good, kept falling asleep.”

I read out loud to them: “‘Patient voices regret over her past actions. States she would like to visit Children's Hospital or become a Big Sister to help other children. Her dream is to become an elementary school teacher or social worker to help troubled kids, as she feels she was not helped.' Is that not unbelievable? She's acting like Mother Teresa, and he's falling for it, hook, line, and sinker.”

“It's a fishing metaphor,” Jason says as an aside to Dr. A, who is already writing.

“It's bizarre. It's like she's gaslighting me,” I say.

Jason holds up his hand. “Old movie reference, don't write it down.” Dr. A pauses with his pen above his notebook. Jason pitches the apple core into the wastebasket five feet away with a flourish and misses, earning some miffed stares from the nurses in the station.

“I'm not cleaning that shit up,” says one of said nurses.

Jason ambles over and scoops it up, shooting again and missing again. “Yeah, I was in the drama club,” he explains, picking it up and dropping it in directly above the can.

“I was, too!” says Dr. A, a bright smile bursting onto his chubby face. “Which plays did you perform? Although we did mainly Thai theater.”

“Would you people listen to me?” I say.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jason says. “We heard the big news. Your patient is crazy. Not your issue, girl. It's going to be Dr. Grant's problem if something happens.”

“Like, you mean if she
kills
someone?” I shake my head. “That is completely fucked-up.”

“Hmmph,” Jason says. “What's not?”

“Ah, this is true,” agrees Dr. A, as if we have just uncovered one of the world's great truths. “What is not?”

Sofia is facing the window, sketching with her charcoals, when I walk in. Stepping closer, I see she is drawing a branch from the maple tree in the window, all the knots and whorls, the naked twigs. She stops when she hears my footsteps, holds the charcoal still for a few seconds, then starts up again.

“Looks good,” I offer.

“Hmm,” she responds. Even she has learned the “Hmm.”

I sit down, pulling open her chart on my lap. “Any more thoughts about what I said?”

“About what?” she asks.

“About talking about your mom.”

“Not really,” she says, her arm swaying in strokes. The room smells flowery, sweet. Like jasmine.

“Are you wearing perfume?” I ask.

She scratches out more detail in the bark. “It's my body lotion. You like it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It's nice.”

Sofia turns around from her drawing and smiles at me. It is an all-knowing, mocking smile. Then she turns her head again and goes back to her drawing. Her smile unsettles me, but then again, I might have imagined it.

“Everything okay in group therapy?”

“Yeah,” she says, noncommittal.

“How about the food?” I ask, half in jest.

“The food sucks. That's nothing new.”

“Do you have visitors bring you anything from the gift shop?”

Here she lets out a withering laugh. “What visitors?”

I have no answer for this. You kill your mom, and you don't get a lot of visitors. I decide to circle back to my original question. “You know, Sofia,” I say, jotting down my note on the lined hospital paper, which looks much the same as yesterday's note, “we're going to have to talk about it eventually. If you ever want the chance to tell your side of things.”

“Hmm,” she says again, to the window, still drawing.

I pause, toying with a paper clip from the chart. “I noticed, from looking at the notes, that you seem to open up more with other members of the team.”

She looks up from her sketch. “You mean Dr. Grant?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she says, scratching into the paper, “I just tell him what he wants to hear.”

The paper clip squeezes lines into my index finger. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs, dotting the page with her charcoal. “It's not like I just started playing this game, Dr. Goldman. I've been doing this for twenty years now. He's just like everyone else I've ever met in this kind of place. He loves to talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk, words, words, words, words. So I'm just giving him what he wants.”

I pause. “You mean you're lying to him?”

“I didn't say that,” she amends. “No one said the word ‘lying.' It's not like what I'm telling him is untrue.” She is grinding the charcoal on the page now, and dark knots spring up on the bark. “I
would
like to become a teacher or be a Big Sister for some underprivileged kids. It's never going to happen, I know that. But talking about it doesn't hurt anyone.”

Now she's talking in circles. “But you just said you were only saying what you thought Dr. Grant wanted to hear.”

Sofia gazes at me with pity in her eyes. “It's complex, Dr. Goldman. Maybe I'm saying what we both want to hear.”

“Okay,” I say, realizing we are not any closer to the truth. I close the chart and stand up. Therapy dispensed, on to the next victim. “See you tomorrow then.”

“Yup, see you tomorrow.”

I walk out, the scent of jasmine lotion trailing into the hallway.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and my heart leaps like a gazelle. It has been over a week since Jean Luc's last text, not that I'm counting. The number is unlisted, which means he's probably at work at the new government job.

“Hello,” I say in my sexiest, “Happy birthday, Mr. President” voice.

“Dr. Goldman?”

“Yes,” I answer, confused, realizing this is not my little kumquat.

“Dr. Grant here. You just have the two patients, right?”

“Yes,” I say, my heart slowing to the pace of a geriatric gazelle.

“There's someone in the ER, needs to be seen for a consult. Delirium versus new onset schizophrenia.”

I am taking this all down. “Okay?”

“Elderly female, bed eight. Just do the consult, and we can all see her later after we round on the floor patients.”

“Okay, is she—” I ask, but he has already disconnected with his typical social grace. Looping my stethoscope over my neck, I head off to the ER.

The place is packed as usual. Patient beds overflow in lines up and down the hall. Snatches of conversations float around the room.

“Can we get an NG in room eight?”

“So I'm like, ‘Don't tell me he did that because I am not about to hear that…”

“Nurse, nurse, please! I'm in agony over here!”

I sidle up to bed eight, ignoring stares as I walk by. You would think the man vomiting blood in room ten would be more interesting than a six-foot-something female in a lab coat, but apparently this is not the case.

“How's the weather up there?” a nurse asks me with a cutesy smile as I enter and she exits the room. I smile until my teeth hurt.

As I leaf through the chart of kind old Mrs. Rosenberg, aka Bed Eight, an ER resident strides into the room and looks me up and down. “Hey,” he says by way of greeting. “You the psych resident?”

“That'd be me.”

“Mike,” he says, and I shake his hand.

“Zoe.”

Mike is cute. He's tall with an athletic build verging on gym rat from working out against the bloat of night work and all the crappy snacks at the nurses' station.

“So what's going on with this one?” I ask.

The patient is looking at me warily. “I'm not going to answer any questions, so don't even ask,” she says. Her voice is querulous and shaky. “My husband put you up to this, didn't he?”

I stare at her, startled by the charge.

“Don't lie to me, I know he did,” she continues, getting angrier.

“It's okay, Mrs. Rosenberg,” I say in as soothing a voice as possible. I can have a soothing voice when I try; I've been practicing. I don't touch her hand because I can tell that would set her off.

Mike puts his hands on his hips, revealing impressive biceps from under his scrubs. This may have been the purpose of putting his hands on his hips. “Her husband went to the cafeteria,” he says. “But over the last few weeks, he says she's been acting odd. Accusing him of poisoning her, saying he's having affairs.” He shrugs. “He's eighty, so that would be pretty impressive.”

Mrs. Rosenberg's eyes veer back and forth, as if she's watching a tennis match. She turns to Mike. “She's in on it,” she says, pointing to me. “I know she's one of his hussies.”

Mike laughs and raises his eyebrows at me. “Now, now, Mrs. Rosenberg.”

“‘Now, now' nothing,” she crows. “I know what I know.”

The room curtain clinks open. “Hello?” an elderly voice calls out. “Can I come in?”

It is Mr. Rosenberg. He looks kindly enough, in his navy V-neck and khakis, carrying coffee for his wife. He doesn't look as if he's poisoning anyone, much less having an affair with me.

“And her labs are?” I ask.

“One hundred percent normal. Little hypertension, nothing else. She just got back from CT, so we're waiting on an official read, but I didn't see anything. No big stroke or bleed anyway.”

So this could actually be elderly onset paranoid schizophrenia and not a completely bullshit ER consult after all.

“Wanna take a peek at the CT?” Mike asks.

We duck through the checkered peach curtain to a Stone Age computer in the center of the room and scroll through the images. No bleed, no stroke. Mike is standing close to me, close enough for me to smell his aftershave. Pine something.

He clears his throat. “Hey, I know you're kind of involved with Mr. Rosenberg and all, but if that doesn't work out for you, would you ever want to grab some coffee or something?”

I stare at him for an uncomfortable four seconds, ascertaining that he is in fact serious. “Mike, you seem like a nice guy—”

Here he winces melodramatically and says, “But…”

“But…I'm kind of seeing someone already.” As I say this, I wonder if this is true. My pseudoboyfriend, who is five hundred miles away, whose
last text was over a week ago, in tersely written French I had to look up. I'm starting to wonder if “broken up” means broken up. “Someone not married to my patient,” I add.

He laughs and crosses his arms, biceps poking out through his sleeves again. “Oh well, the best ones always are. I had to try,” he says. “Maybe I could get your number, just in case.”

I grab the patient's chart, ready to head back to her room and be pummeled by a woman scorned. Hell hath no fury.
“If you really want me,” I say, flirting I suppose, but not quite ready to give up my digits, “just ask for a psych consult.”