Little Black Lies Read online

  “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 dental 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 milli­meter. 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.

  Today is Thursday.

  The date is the 5th.

  The month is November.

  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 someone 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-Exam. 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.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  I shrug; this is possible. “Pretty good.” We park her chair by the flowering crab tree, water beading on the red berries like jewels. “Actually, to be honest, things aren’t so terrific right now.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “You want the list?” I laugh. “Or just the top three?”

  She laughs with me. “Let’s go for the top three.”

  “Okay. One”—I lift my finger to count off—“my attending is a jerk who hates me for some reason. Two, I miss Jean Luc. And three, I’m living with my brother.”

  “Jean Luc?” she asks. “Who’s that?”

  “You remember,” I say. “The chemist, from Yale.”

  She looks blank.

  “The Frenchman?” I remind her.

  “Oh,” she says with delight. “The Frenchman!” I told my mom about Jean Luc when she was still on this side of lucidity enough to be her old, wisecracking self. She usually teases me about him ten times per visit. Mom takes my hand. Despite the cold, her hand is warm. A young hand, I realize, not arthritic or knotty. Smooth, too young for this newly old mind. “Things will get better,” she says.

  I squeeze her hand in response, then she lets it go. My mom, despite her lapsing mind, knows how to empathize. It comes naturally to her, more than it does to me with my patients. She empathizes with the nursing-home residents, too. I catch her counseling them, advising them about some problem or another, though neither usually remembers the conversation the next day. Maybe it’s her social work training from all those years ago kicking in.

  “My coworkers are nice,” I add, to make her feel better.

  “Now that’s something,” she encourages, smiling. My mom always did look on the bright side of things.

  I move to sit down next to her on the cold iron bench, sick of towering over her chair. The wind kicks up the leaves again and starts the wind chime tinkling in fits, spinning on the branch of the little tree. I recognize that wind chime as a creation from Craft Wednesday a few weeks ago. My mom was quite proud of hers.

  “Scotty told me you and the Frenchman were getting married in Paris.”

  “Nope. He’s pulling your leg.”

  Now she laughs, her low, rumbling, Lauren Bacall laugh. I have seen men fall in love with this laugh. “My son is funny, isn’t he?”

  “Hilarious.” I hug my sweater against the breeze. The wind chime twirls and twirls, tinkling out its song in mad spasms. “So I had my nightmare again.”

&n
bsp; She turns her head to me. “What nightmare?”

  “The fire.”

  “Oh,” she says, pulling her blanket in closer. “I thought you were over that.”

  “Yeah, so did I.”

  Mom stares ahead at the tree, the wind chime still going.

  “Sam thinks it’s because I’m back in Buffalo.”

  “Who’s Sam?”

  “Sam, my psychiatrist.”

  “I thought Dr. Lowry was your psychiatrist.”

  “Yeah, when I was, like, ten. I’ve been through a few now, remember, Mom?”

  She nods. “I guess.”

  “I’ve been seeing Sam since I’ve been back home. I like him.”

  She rubs her arms. “I’m getting cold, honey. Ready to go back in?”

  “Sure,” I say, fighting a yawn. I have to get home to study anyway. So we wind our way back into the Victorian palace, past the disinfectant smells, the nurses laughing at their station, back to Mom’s small, rose-pink-carpeted room, with her roommate mercifully gone.

  “Home,” I say, depositing her in her favorite corner rocker. I smooth the blanket around her and gather up my things.

  “See you later, Mom. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Tanya,” she answers, her eyes closing.

  I stare at her a moment as she descends right into sleep, her breath evening into a soft snore. Tanya? I jiggle my car keys, debating, but don’t have the heart to wake her. And the whole drive home the name burrows itself in my head: Tanya. Who the hell is Tanya?

  * * *

  “No, I don’t know any Tanya,” Scotty says, clearing up dishes from the next table. “It’s probably just someone from her past. She’s not exactly all there, Zoe, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Yeah, I guess not,” I answer, handing him another plate, but he’s already charging off to the register to take an order. I pick up my coffee cup, and the bronze foam leaf twirls around in a circle. The baristas do make an artistic cup of java here. The first sip is heavenly, though I smear the leaf and end up with a milk mustache. Raindrops squiggle down the window, racing each other. The weather has gone from blue skies to gray, foggy drizzle in a couple of hours. The smell of nutmeg rises from the mug, and I take another warm, foamy sip.