Watch and Wait
image curtesy of Public Domain Review
by Lucy McBee
My name is Elizabeth Holmes.
But I’m not the one you’re thinking of.
I’m not a Stanford dropout.
I’ve never been on the cover of Fortune.
A former Secretary of State has never sided with me over his own grandson.
I can’t speak Mandarin.
I’ve only worn blood red lipstick once, to a Halloween party. I went as Elvira (and was mistaken for Morticia Addams, I suppose because I lacked the requisite cleavage), and used the remainder of the tube to write myself unattributed bathroom-mirror-mantras, steam curdling the exclamation points after a couple of showers: Do something that scares you every day!; Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right!; Let whatever you do today be enough!
At the present time, I do not own any black turtlenecks, and the greatest number I’ve owned at any one time is one.
I’m not tall, or willowy, or blonde. Nor do I have a fair complexion, or big blue eyes. And no one—as far as I know—has ever described my gaze as hypnotic.
But besides the name, there’s a nexus between us: blood.
#
Elizabeth Holmes (the one you’re thinking of) has made a big deal about being scared of needles. Well, duh. That doesn’t make you special, sweetheart. The day in 2018 when I had to give up 11 vials of blood (eleven!), I sure as hell wished her fanciful notion of phlebotomy by pinprick had been a real thing. Before I made it down to the lab, quite literally dumbstruck, the specialist my primary care doc had sent me to in order to “rule out anything concerning,” told me I probably had cancer.
Blahblahblah the anatomy of the diagnosis is depressingly non-unique, as I later found out when attending support groups and hearing my story come out of others’ mouths. Most people with blood cancers find out the same way: in the absence of any symptoms, routine bloodwork shows an unusually elevated white count. Blahblahblah. And then we’re sent to a specialist who does more blahwork, and that reveals—
Whatever. It’s all the same.
Big swaths of that first meeting with the hematologist/oncologist are nothing more than smoke and ash in my mind, but I remember him saying: “Most people freak out when they hear they probably have leukemia. . .”
I am one of those people! I wanted to yell. I am in the ‘most’!
“But if it’s chronic lymphocytic leukemia,” he went on—since I had, quite literally, been struck dumb and forced him to carry the convo—“it’s not a death sentence. Many patients won’t need treatment for years.”
“What happens in the meantime?” I finally managed to whisper, my voice a clutch of dry leaves.
“We watch. And wait.”
Like hunters in a blind. Or the prey who can smell them.
And as much as I appreciated his use of the plural pronoun, I knew his watching and waiting would feel nothing like mine.
#
Part of why I believe Silicon Valley Elizabeth Holmes deserves punishment for her crimes is because she exudes a stunning lack of remorse. After Theranos was shut down by the government, after the company’s valuation plunged from several billion-with-a-b to fucking nothing at all, after she was charged with federal crimes, Elizabeth should have retreated to a quiet private life and watched and waited for her time to perform in the theater of justice like a duly chastened CEO.
From her meteoric crash in 2018 till the trial three years later, she rode her life on a surf of champagne. She was flagrantly public. Hung out at Burning Man—how could she not see how disrespectful a symbol that was to the humans she’d scorched?—toured the wine country, danced at weddings, flashed toothy social media smiles, got engaged to a handsome hotelier eight years her junior, had a baby. She wasn’t waiting for anything. And she wasn’t watching a story anyone else would write for her.
Her greed and deception hurt people (I’m not talking about megarich investors; fuck them). Some patients thought they had cancer after getting a Theranos test. Or diabetes. Or that they weren’t having a healthy pregnancy when they were (imagine if that woman had aborted the fetus who is now her healthy daughter! That one really kept me up at night). And those are just a few of the wrong calls Elizabeth’s beautifully branded shit show yielded. Who cares if Betsy Devos was duped? It’s the patients who matter.
If karmic justice were a real thing, at least within the same lifetime, I wouldn’t have been the Elizabeth Holmes whose own blood turned against her.
#
Years ago, when I first heard my name on the news—“Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of healthcare startup Theranos, has just become the youngest self-made female billionaire”—I spun around to lock eyes with the TV screen, wondering if this was that parallel universe thing I’d read about and wondering if I was straddling both. Of course, at that time, in college to become a special ed middle school teacher, I knew I wasn’t that person in achievement nor income potential. But there’s power in a name, especially the one you’ve answered to all your life, and I was momentarily charged by the current of believing I was watching myself with part of my brain.
A few years after that first mention, I discovered Google alerts. I plugged my name in, and voila, there were banners of flypaper strung in the cybersky, each mention of me/not me trapped by its feet and waiting for me to examine them. In addition to the Elizabeth Holmes mentions that were about her, the brash, bold, blood-driven one, everything about her life the flip side of mine, there were the ones with smaller footprints, the ones I felt closer to:
Elizabeth Holmes, 26, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was arrested after a domestic disturbance Friday. Her common-law husband, Vincent D’Amatto, 33, called police when he says she threw a crock pot at him. He was later arrested as well.
Eighth-grader Elizabeth Holmes garnered a spot for her school, Wheless Middle School of Lost Pines, Nevada at the state tournament when she won the county bee by correctly spelling mononucleosis.
Elizabeth Holmes, 92, of Parsippany, New Jersey, died at her home after a long illness. She is survived by 17 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren…
It felt dignified somehow, the mentions coming to me, or at least more dignified than psycho-googling yourself all the time. And once in a while (okay, once), it was you:
Elizabeth Holmes of Austin was one of hundreds lined up on election night at the Moody Theater to see Bonnie Raitt perform. “I’m nervous,” she admitted, glancing up at the iconic Willie Nelson statue as if for reassurance. “I keep checking the news, even though I know it’s too early.” Ms. Raitt has said she won’t allow cell phone use of any kind during the show. “I’m glad,” Holmes said about the rule. “The show’ll be a good distraction. And by the end of it we’ll have our first female president.” She crossed her fingers.
The reporter said I’d likely show up in the piece, so the mention wasn’t exactly a surprise. Although it was gratifying to see Google fetch the way I trained it, the election results were so horrifying, the gratification wasn’t anything to enjoy.
#
Later on that dumbstruck day of diagnosis, Google alerts offered up its version of life doesn’t only suck for you. The most famous Elizabeth Holmes was handed indictments for 11 federal crimes on the very same day this small-time Elizabeth Holmes, after having 11 vials of blood wrung out of her, was handed the leukemia card. But at least, I told myself, at least I’m not going through this alone. At least. Nick and I had been going out for 19 months and quite serious for at least 17 of those. And he was supportive for the first 14 days post-diagnosis, helping me take comfort in that numbers-driven at least, which felt big and not least at all.
On the 15th day after cancer officially found me, my thought-he-was true love gave to me a big fat see ya.
“Oh my God,” I said, “you’re just like Rush Limbaugh.”
“What are you talking about? I hate Rush Limbaugh.” He did. He’d told me a million times. Told me how the mango Mussolini never could’ve been president if not for Rush. He even did a goofy sock-footed dance when Rush died, spinning me ’round the kitchen. And Nick was not a dancer, goofy or otherwise.
“He left his wife when she got cancer,” I said.
Although I didn’t hear it, I saw him swallow at that coincidence (or character flaw), that big crazy Adam’s apple in that long skinny neck, the whole combination improbable but one I loved anyway. Pause. Deep breath. And then he said, “Last time I checked, we’re not married.”
That snatched the breath from my throat. I threw a Bat City coaster at him, hard, wishing I had a crock pot instead. It missed.
He picked the coaster up, sighing the sigh of a patient, beleaguered parent. He set it on an end table out of my reach. And started pacing. “Lizzie, it’s not the cancer.”
“Oh, so it’s me? You can’t be with me anymore, but you’re all good with the cancer?”
He raked his fingers down his face. I wished he had drawn blood. “You twist everything!”
“Tell me what I’m twisting, Nick. You’re literally Rushing me, and I’m supposed to offer you a neck massage and set you up with one of my friends?”
He stopped pacing and skewered me with his stare. “Can you honestly say you thought we were solid?”
“Yeah, I can honestly say that, motherfucker. We were talking about moving in together. How can you rewrite us like this?”
“I only talked about it because I knew it was what you wanted.”
“How fucking big of you. And how chivalrous that you pick the month I find out I have cancer to stop thinking about what I want.”
He went to the kitchen sink. Maybe to scrub the guilt off. He was absorbed in his task, or at least pretended to be. His long piano fingers. His knobby wrists. The bandanaed David Foster Wallace tattoo (that looks more like a melty Karate Kid) flexing and relaxing on his forearm. I still loved all of him. Even after he’d slashed me and left me to bleed. (A metaphoric slashing and bleed-out. Lest I be accused of twisting.)
I thought about launching into the litany of why-this-might-be-okay, how even though, true, it’s incurable, it’s not like other cancers that are super aggressive, that usually end up killing the patient. Actually, most people with CLL die with CLL not of CLL (but what that stat doesn’t tell you on its own is that many die of infections and/or secondary cancers). But I stopped myself. I didn’t need to sell myself like a slightly warped dresser at a garage sale. Let him fucking go. How could I ever count on him if things get bad? If he’s so outta here with a relatively unhorrific prognosis, what kind of person is he?
I wish I could say in the three years since that I’d met someone I liked—loved—more than Nick. I wish I could say that even though his abandoning me in the time I needed someone the most hurt like hell, it was now, in retrospect, the best thing that could’ve happened for me. I wish I could say I didn’t still think about him.
I wish I could say loneliness didn’t feel more malignant than cancer.
I wish.
#
If other people’s obituaries are engrossing, your own is unputdownable.
All other email previews on my phone screen blurred out of focus and only Elizabeth A. Holmes of Austin died unexpectedly at her home yesterday remained. I’d been standing at the counter waiting for the coffee to brew, and if a barstool hadn’t been behind me, I would’ve collapsed onto the floor.
That’s me, for godsakes: Elizabeth A. (for Ann) Holmes, of Austin. Holy shit. I could feel my veins go brittle, feel the blood turn to sleet. Reflexively, I pressed the back of my hand to the buttercup spot under my chin. The warmth was unmistakable. The faint throb. Reassured life was still mine (and really fucking grateful for it), I used a trembling finger to tap on the message and read the whole thing.
Elizabeth A. Holmes, 38, CEO of Austin’s We Are Blood, died unexpectedly at her home in Tarrytown. She is survived by her fiancé’, Jeffrey Ortega; her mother, Emily Holmes of Dubuque, Iowa; and a sister, Vanessa Hughes of Chicago. “Lisa was”—Lisa? What? Oh, that explains why I hadn’t gotten any alerts about her before now, the ‘Lisa’—“Lisa was a champion of emergency healthcare. She worked tirelessly to guarantee that anyone who needed an infusion would get one, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay,” said board president Danila Riccio. “We Are Blood won’t be the same without her, but her memory will be with us as we continue to save lives in central Texas.”
She thought about blood every waking moment. Me too.
She was 38. I’m 39. (And the Elizabeth Holmes on trial is 37.)
She died unexpectedly. Which means suddenly. Accident? Suicide? Heart attack? Homicide?
I found her Facebook profile. She was pretty, somewhere in the middle between Silicon Elizabeth and me in terms of height and complexion and hair color. She had laugh lines, and they looked adorable on her. She seemed to laugh a lot, at least when a camera was in the vicinity. She had a bloodhound named Riff Raff.
She had my name.
Jeffrey worked at WAB too. I wondered if that’s where they met. I hopped over to Jeffrey’s profile, where I learned he’s allergic to dogs. There were pics of him at the allergist’s, rolling up his sleeve and revealing an endearingly unbuffed arm, getting shots so she didn’t have to choose between her man and her dog. (Riff Raff stole my heart first, after all!)
The one thing I couldn’t get from my immersion in her out-facing life was how she died. No one alluded to it, no one posting tributes on her wall, no one sending Jeffrey strength to soldier on because that’s what Lisa would have wanted. There was a lot of talk about a life ended too soon, a flame extinguished when it was burning brightest, and (the most noxious of all) God calling one of his angels back to heaven because she was needed there (to do what, exactly? Drape herself at the foot of some throne?). Nothing that told me how my name doppelgänger died. Would that cause of death be more or less likely for the rest of us Elizabeth H’s?
So I decided to do something about it. And, the way blood cancer diagnoses are uncannily non-unique, so are human behaviors designed to get us from point A to point B when it turns out we have no business in point B.
I can sum it up in two words: I lied.
Lied to the receptionist at We Are Blood, telling him I was a friend of Lisa’s and there to express my condolences to Jeffrey. This after I tried to balance the karmic scales by donating blood, despite my fear of needles, but the disqualifier “hematologic malignancy” axed that before I made a pen mark on the donor form.
Fast forward to getting the green light to Jeffrey’s office. And me knocking at his door. And him saying “Come in.” He was more handsome in person, maybe because he wasn’t overshadowed by Lisa’s beauty. Even with bruise-colored smudges under his eyes and with his hair a mess and with his shirt collar bunched on one side. He stood up and came from behind his desk to greet me. Much to my surprise, he held out a hand. I had thought handshakes weren’t a thing anymore. But of course I reciprocated, because why else was I here but to make a connection? His hand was warm and dry. I wondered how mine felt to him. He wasn’t as tall as pics made him seem. Like me, he was bespectacled, but unlike me, he wasn’t masked. That should’ve made me feel squirrelly, but it hadn’t, too overjoyed over making it to point B was I.
“You’re a friend of Lisa’s?” he asked. The hope threaded in those words touched something deep in me.
“Yes, an old friend. From college.”
“I thought I knew all her friends.” His tone wasn’t suspicious, more like accepting that no matter how much you might love someone, part of them will always be a mystery to you. And that hope that told me he hadn’t had nearly enough time with her and so he was greedy for anything or anyone that could bring her to life in his mind in a fresh way—almost like getting more time with her—made me like him instantly, and infused me with the rightness of my being there. I stood taller, even though objectively, my tallest isn’t very tall at all.
“Well, I only recently moved to Austin, so we hadn’t set up a meeting yet. And with everything weird because of Covid…” I tried to steady my left eye so it wouldn’t twinge the way it does when I lie, though he wouldn’t have the context for that anyway.
“Of course. Please sit down.” He gestured toward a chair facing his desk. I sat. He sat too, behind his desk again. He sent a palm to his forehead. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I didn’t ask your name.”
“Elizabeth.” Hallelujah. A tick mark in the truth column.
“Hah,” he said, buoyed by the connection. “Did you know that was Lisa’s real name?”
I smiled benevolently, as if the order of Elizabeths requires it. “I did.” He smiled at me in return, and that made me want to say more. To give him more. “I was there when she decided to go by Lisa.”
His brow furrowed for a split second. Shit. What if she changed her prefer-to-be-called-by when the famous Elizabeth Holmes dominated all of us? Or what if she’d always been called Lisa? How could I step in it so soon?
I imagined my next words swift pink erasers. “I wanted to express deepest condolences, Jeffrey. I’m so sad for myself, that I can’t get to reconnect with her like I’d hoped, but I can’t imagine how devastated you are. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.” A pause squatted between the two words, making me think he wanted to say more. Or less.
I didn’t know what to say, because my head went strange. Light and airy, yet also full. Full of the bold absurdity of me being here, in flesh and blood, after all those Facebook glimpses where I imagined I knew him—and her, our nexus—while telling myself I’d never get the chance.
He seemed to be expecting me to say something. Say something, Liz. Say something.
“Can I take Riff Raff?” I blurted.
I didn’t know that was going to be the something I said until I heard me say it. But once I did, I liked it. And liked the image that came with it: me and the tall, droopy, black-and-tan dog loping along the banks of the Colorado River, and over the pedestrian bridge, slowing down through Butler Park near the fountains where the kids hang out and they’d ask shyly if they could pet him, and I’d say sure, he’s very friendly, he’d love that, but should you ask your mom or dad first, and they would, and the parents would say yes and occasionally wander over to chat and ask what it’s like to live with such a striking-looking dog and one that drools a lot and some would tell their children that that’s the same kind of dog that Sherlock Holmes had because he helped the detective solve mysteries and wouldn’t give up until he did, no matter how far he had to go when his superbly sensitive nose caught a scent trail, no matter how tired he got, no matter how inclement the weather, and some kids wouldn’t care about the trivia but would just be content to pet him and stroke his long soft ears and others would ask who’s Sherlock Holmes anyway and on sunny days when I had nowhere else to be I might share the funny coincidence that my last name is Holmes too, and so was the woman’s who adopted him first, so his last name must surely be Holmes, even though dogs aren’t born with last names the way people are.
Jeffrey shifted abruptly in his chair and it let out a weird shriek. “What? Why?”
“Well, because I love dogs, and you’re allergic.”
Jeffrey shook his head. “Lisa’s brother has him.”
“Oh. I see. Is that a temporary thing? Is he a burden for him?”
“The dog?” he said, gripping his WAB mug. “Is the dog a burden? Is that your question?”
The room tilted and grew fuzzy just then. From the neck up, I was clammy and floaty and disconnected, the same sensations that visited me during vials number five through eleven. From the neck down, I was all visceral white noise laced with static. What if I passed out right here? The plunk of the mug on the desk chased away the wooziness. I clasped my hands together and squeezed hard to sense the blood moving through my fingers.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m out of practice.”
“For what?”
“You know, conversation. I feel like I’m saying the wrong thing.” Your cue to chuckle understandingly and say we’re all out of practice, one of the hazards of the pandemic.
“What are you doing here, Elizabeth?”
His directness made me quiver. In a mostly bad way, but not all bad.
Quick, think of something empathic. Something that will connect you.
“It’s hard when you don’t get the chance to say goodbye,” I said.
“What’s that?” He’d been looking out the window but swiveled his gaze back to me.
“She died unexpectedly,” I said. “That’s what I heard.”
“So that’s what you heard.”
“Would you mind if I asked how?” Please, please tell me how. I need to know.
“Actually, I would.” He pressed his lips together in the universal sign for back the fuck off.
“Was it Covid?”
“I said I would mind.”
I let out a little involuntary gasp. “Oh, my god, she didn’t kill herself, did she?” If she did, would that mean there was some latent self-destructive element in Elizabeth Holmeses? The most famous E.H. is the cause of all her trouble for sure. My own blood is plotting to take me down. And if this Austin E.H. was the one who—
“How could you think to ask that?” His face was a mask of pain.
“Jeffrey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be insens—”
He was out of his chair, fast. Across the room, fast. To the door I’d come in, fast. On the doorknob, his hand waited.
“Hold on,” he said. “How’d you know about my allergy if you hadn’t spoken to Lisa?”
Ah, there it is. The plot hole I hadn’t anticipated in the story I was selling. “We traded emails,” I stammered.
His fingers had slid off the doorknob by now. I knew because I was watching his hands. Because I couldn’t look into his face just then. “No way. She would’ve told me if she reconnected with a friend from college.”
“Maybe she forgot?”
“It was Facebook, wasn’t it?” He said it as if Facebook was everything that was wrong with the world. Which maybe it is.
I scratched my head. Then discreetly dug my nails into my scalp in an effort to remember not to lose consciousness. “Uh, I may have looked her up on Facebook first, but then we emailed, and I suggested—”
“I can check, you know.” He pointed at his laptop. “Her emails.”
“Jesus,” I muttered, not meaning to let that escape.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
He opened the door and any chance I had to make him see me as friend scampered out of the room with that inside-out whoosh. “I need you to leave now, Elizabeth. If that’s even the truth.”
Somehow, my feet carried me to where I was supposed to go. Jeffrey’s face was closed. Of course it would be, grief closes a person. He wasn’t looking at me but at the floor where he expected my feet to go next. I couldn’t help it, call it temporary insanity brought on by the primal need to do one little thing satisfactorily, I reached up to unbunch his collar. His arm flung out and batted mine away. With more force than necessary. It hurt, true, but you can’t take mere instinct personally. Maybe, however, I should’ve taken the “don’t fucking touch me” personally.
“It’s okay,” I said. “My name is Elizabeth Holmes.”
“Are you for real?”
I yanked my mask down so he could see my for real. My eyes wide. My gaze unflinching.
“It’s true, Jeffrey.” I dug in my bag for my wallet. “I’ll show you my driver’s license.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I thought it would help.”
“Help who?”
“You,” I whispered. “Of course.”
That was the last thing I said to him without a judge in the room.
#
I was drawing the eleventh X on my Austin Humane Society wall calendar when I thought I heard a knock on my apartment door. I capped the Sharpie and listened. Spoon was playing. Specifically, “Knock Knock Knock” from They Want My Soul. So naturally, because I wasn’t expecting anyone (understatement), I assumed I was catching a sound effect I’d missed at a lower volume. I went back to the marked up calendar that, as far as incubation periods go, told me I was surely out of the woods by now. Maybe because the three-dose vaxxx conferred more protection on my recalcitrant immune system than expected, or maybe because there’s a god after all, Covid hadn’t shown up in me. . .despite my reckless face-streak in Jeffrey’s office.
The song ended, and in the space before the next one started, I heard the metal on metal of the little clapper thingie on the door. Oops.
“Oh, sorry, I’ll turn it down!” I called out. I quit teaching early in the pandemic and now write middle school social studies and language arts curricula. I work better with the music loud, but I could wear headphones.
“Ms. Holmes, open up, please. It’s the Sheriff’s department.”
“Huh? What? For me?” Jeffrey filed a temporary order of protection against me, and the hearing to turn the TPO to a PO wasn’t for another two weeks. My lawyer friend Janell was trying to convince me to skip it. It’s just a formality, she told me, because the protective order would be granted anyway. And I hadn’t committed a crime. But I insisted I wanted to clear my name. “Honey,” she said, “that’s not really a thing. Sorry.”
I debated calling her before I opened the door (the law is at my door. . .whaddo I do?), but my curiosity won out. A man and a woman in uniform stood on the threshold, both well-masked, which reminded me that I wasn’t. I grabbed mine from the key hook and covered my surprise—sand my mucous membranes—with it.
They stepped in (after asking if it was okay), I froze the music, and they got right to the reason for their “visit.” A canine was missing and I was suspected of being in possession of it.
“A canine?” I repeated, stupidly.
“A dog,” the man said.
“I know, but what dog and why—”
“Hang on.” The female sheriff pulled out a phone and pulled up a picture. “Have you seen this dog?”
“Riff Raff!” I cried out. The dude cop scribbled something on a little pad. “I’ve only seen him in pics.”
“Mind if we take a look around?” she asked, search lighting her gaze.
“Go ahead.” I didn’t need to do the not-without-a-warrant swagger because I wasn’t harboring a stolen dog.
They went ahead and I was glad I’d made my bed that morning, and they didn’t find anything (even in the bedroom closet) and they asked if this was my only residence and I said yes, yes it was, and they left a card with me and instructed me to call should I happen to see the dog, and I swallowed my outrage at being fashioned a suspect, seeing as how I had come right out and asked for the sweet beast.
On the way out, the male cop spotted my calendar and paused. I thought he’d ask about the parade of X’s. Instead, he said, “You like animals?” as if it was a sickness. When I nodded, he asked, “But you don’t have any pets?” in a tone that said I was textbook FBI sociopath.
“I had a cat. She died last year. She was 20.” All true.
“She died?” the lady sheriff repeated suspiciously. She. Was. 20. Jesus.
“Yes. Like everyone will.” Like you will, I thought, but didn’t say, since that could sound like a threat to armed officers of the law. And like I will. And all the people and animals we’ve ever cared about. Either we’re gonna end up leaving them alone, or they’re gonna leave us alone. Only one letter separates love and lose.
If I hadn’t called the number on the card to check up on the case, I wouldn’t have known that Riff Raff was later found waiting by the backdoor of Elizabeth’s house—his real home—eight miles from her brother’s place.
#
“Let me understand what you’re trying to tell me,” the judge said. Judge Lively. He had wispy threads of white cotton candy hair spun at the crown of his head. His face drooped behind his plexiglas fortress, his glasses sending back an extra glare. My oncology nurse is Kathy Friendly. I decided there were two too many adjectival surnames in my life. “Because I really do want to understand what your defense is.”
“Thank you, your honor,” I said. Janell may have failed to convince me to sit this hearing out, but she did succeed in impressing upon me the need to bring a surfeit of your honors.
I tried to catch Jeffrey’s eye—especially when I said yes when the judge asked if I’d like to apologize to him, and I said oh yes please and I apologized, not that lame kind of it’s not me, it’s your candy-ass sensitivity non-apology that goes ‘I’m sorry if you were offended by anything I did,’ no, not that kind, I said I am really sorry, so so sorry, I never meant to hurt you, and I’m sorry that I did—but he made sure to keep his gaze uncaught.
“You’re saying that because you and Mr. Ortega’s late fiancée happen to have the same name, you had a right to invade his place of employment and blindside him with personal questions and demands for his dog?”
“I didn’t demand his dog, and I knocked first. Your honor.”
“Coincidences literally mean nothing. And they certainly don’t trump an individual’s right to privacy,” Judge Lively said with the most liveliness I’d seen in him so far, leaning over his bench and gesticulating. I cringed. That word, even in verb form, was ruined for me in 2016.
Someone in the rows behind me softly hummed the melody to “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.” Someone else laughed. The judge stop-signed a hand to quiet the gallery.
“I’m waiting for you to explain yourself, Ms. Holmes.”
“I have a blood cancer, your honor, and she worked at a blood bank, and we have the same name, and we’re almost the same age, and I just thought . . .”
“I’m sorry about your cancer,” he said, without a trace of sorry. Even though pity made me itch, I longed for some now. “But many people have cancer.”
“One in four women and one in two men. At some point in their lifetime. Your honor.”
“You know, when I sit on this bench deciding whether or not to grant a protective order, I look for evidence of violence. And despite the allegation that you did lay a hand on Mr. Ortega, I don’t think you fit the profile for physical violence, Ms. Holmes. However, I believe that posing as a friend of the departed and the ensuing manipulative intrusion into the personal world of this man’s grief is a type of violence.”
I wanted to be the type of person to snarkily point out that Jeffrey’s shirt collar was the only victim of physical force here, but, from a whole hellofalotta nowhere, I started to cry. Shit. Piss. Fuck. I hoped it wasn’t showing. I wasn’t sobbing, but the tears wouldn’t stop. My fresh KF94 mask would be wrecked. I remembered the warnings on the box: Not to use if wet becomes. Effective lost when moistness comes here.
I wasn’t even sure what I was crying about. I didn’t think it was Elizabeth, or Riff Raff (maybe part of it was Riff Raff, actually), or Nick, or Jeffrey, or even the Elizabeth Holmes that is me. My mother was in my head, my father was in my head, both of them dead before I turned 19, both dead of cancer. My father’s was a blood cancer too, though a different type from mine. I cried for my brother, too, who isn’t dead but who lives in Thailand, and I cried for how easy it was to convince him that he didn’t need to move back to the States after my diagnosis, that I could do this on my own. When clearly I didn’t believe that at all.
The judge cleared his throat. “Are you expecting me to feel sorry for you?”
I guess that meant he could tell I was crying. “No, your honor.” (But you can if you want to?)
As if I’d answered in the affirmative, the judge said, “The law doesn’t recognize pity as a defense, Ms. Holmes. You pried into Mr. Ortega’s life, you pressed him to tell you the manner of his fiancée’s death, and you did it under false pretenses.”
The law may not recognize pity, but juries tend to. I was bracing myself for Elizabeth’s jury to take pity on her, the white, pretty new mom, and let her off, and Sunny’s jury to throw the book at him. The brown dude is always the one left holding the bag.
“You are to have no further contact with Mr. Ortega, in any way. Not in writing, not over the telephone, and certainly not in person.”
Stupidly, I raised my hand.
“What is it?”
“What if we’re both in the same place?” I asked. “Coincidentally? Like I see him when we’re in line at Franklin’s? Or paddle boarding on Town Lake?”
Judge Lively leveled his gavel toward me. “Then you, Ms. Holmes, get the hell out of there.”
#
Let whatever you do today be enough.
Easier said than not-done.
Is waiting a doing? Can that be enough, just waiting for something to come that you have no say in? The meditation teachers tell us that breathing is enough sometimes. Just breathing. But I have no choice in breathing. Are we really counting autonomic function now? Isn’t that a stretch?
Watch and wait.
The second part of that equation implies that I’m waiting for something, the malignancy’s advancement, the time where it will upset my body’s functioning to such a degree that I will require medical intervention. And besides a white cell count that’s doubling every few months, what am I waiting for and not hoping for? (Which equates to watch and dread.) Grotesquely chunky lymph nodes I can feel with my fingers (and sometimes even see without palpating). Night sweats. Extreme fatigue. The debilitating kind. Unexplained weight loss. Enlarged spleen crowding the stomach and making me feel full after a few bites.
“Time is on your side,” the oncologist told me. “They’re developing new targeted therapies all the time. So the longer you can wait till you need treatment, the better for you.” While I know all the time is an imprecise, inaccurate term meant to comfort, I appreciated it just the same.
In the weeks after my humiliating 17 minutes before the judge, I am inundated by Google alerts that are me and aren’t me. I learn that my protective order hearing won’t show up online since I wasn’t arrested. It’s all Silicon Elizabeth in my inbox, never me. A few other rando Elizabeth Holmeses thrown in, but I barely glance at them because look what a mess I ended up in last time. Perhaps someone with a fuller life would disable Google alerts altogether (or replace the name with a phrase you can convince yourself is critical, yet also comfortably impersonal, like “climate change” or “voting rights”), but somewhere in those weeks I convince myself that I can’t start—or end—my own story until I know how that Elizabeth Holmes’s story ends.
So I watch the trial (as much as one can “watch” a non-televised trial; I watch it through the word pictures reporters draw). Active surveillance. Watch and fucking wait. I follow every podcast, read every article, read and reread Bad Blood, even though the title feels like an indictment on my own body.
I try to accept that another Elizabeth Holmes, a non-fraudster, never disgraced Elizabeth Holmes had been alive here, right in Austin. Maybe we had been in queue together, daydreaming migas tacos, at a Veracruz All Natural truck. Maybe we had been choosing produce from the same stand at the Republic Square farmer’s market one Saturday morning, our purses bumping as we bagged tomatoes and cukes. Maybe we had been under the South Congress bridge on the same dewy summer evening, waiting for the bats to flood the dusk with their silly chaotic flight, watching the staccato synchronicity of it all and marveling that things like this can happen. I’ll never get the chance to marvel at the coincidence of us/not us with her. And since I can’t know what/who killed her, I’m back to my own story, and it’s just me in here, and it’s too much, and it’s not nearly enough.
If the right Elizabeth Holmes is locked up, maybe I can let myself go free.
#
The state rests. The defense rests. The state rebuts. The jury dives into deliberating. The wait is maddening. Finally, a Google alert announces something other than some version of: “Elizabeth Holmes jury returns for another day of deliberation.” But it’s even more frustrating and less satisfying than those: The jury is deadlocked on three of the eleven counts. The judge tells them to try harder, reads them the Allen charge. No answers to what everybody wants to know: which counts? What are the verdicts on the other eight?
Hours pass in which I pace, eat, try to work on my Travis County 8th grade social studies curriculum project—What does it mean to be civic-minded? Write an essay describing what you can do in your community. Use specific details (and have fun!)—pace, eat, turn my phone off, turn it back on again, write something new on my mirror with the last nub of I’d Bleed 4 U red —Just fucking breathe—the lack of punctuation somehow more comforting than the message.
The jury sends a note to the judge—how adorably antiquated, a note—saying they tried again and no way no how can they agree on that trio of sticky counts. They’re deadlocked, and I don’t know what that means for Elizabeth-her or Elizabeth-me.
I re-consume podcasts I consumed months ago. Something said by one of Elizabeth’s Houston high school classmates strikes me differently this time. Elizabeth was on the long distance track team, and she often finished last, but she always finished. Even when it made more sense to slow to a walk, cut across the grass and towel off while laughing it off, she finished. With a seriousness. A somberness. And her teammates noticed that, and respected it. I like that. I like it even though I don’t know what to do with it.
Finally, finally, I get an alert on my phone that the jury has returned a verdict.
Please please please guilty. Let something make sense. Let me see the headlines: ELIZABETH HOLMES GUILTY, as disorienting as that may be since how could that not feel like me for at least one, two throbs of my pulse?
But I don’t have the pleasure of unwrapping it and savoring it for myself, because before I can get the details, Janell texts me: Booyah! Blood charlatan is guilty, baby!
Guilty on four counts, not guilty on four, and those three deadlocked ones up in the air.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
I wish I were with Nick right now; I’d spin him around the kitchen.
It feels like an un-indictment of me somehow, until it doesn’t. Until specifics trickle out and I learn that the not-guiltys are for defrauding patients. She was only convicted of defrauding investors. Patients don’t matter? What if it had been me? What if I got a result that showed a normal WBC and I went off to live the next few years blissfully unaware of the defective cells my bone marrow were churning out?
Oh, right. I’d be better off now. I wouldn’t be scared of every fucking thing. Of every scrap of air outside my apartment. I’d be living life on my terms. Yes, perhaps putting my fishnet immune system at risk (I miss teaching so much), but from where I sit now, in my fortress of PPE and Purell, living obliviously feels like a dream. And it’s not just Covid. Anything could get me really sick: the flu, the common cold, sushi.
The journalists in the courtroom report that she shows zero emotion when she hears the first guilty. I fixate on the drawing by the courtroom sketch artist of Elizabeth’s father kissing her forehead immediately after the verdict. I pull it up over and over, keep going back to it even as I try to convince myself to move on. Even though they’re both masked in the sketch, so I can’t know for sure he’s kissing her, I know for sure. I feel a stab of pity for him. And for her.
I don’t know where to put that.
I imagine he said something to her just then. Something different than the “We’ll appeal,” that must’ve come out of the lawyers’ masked mouths. Something reserved for family. Something that can only be true within a family.
Maybe he said, before or after she leaned her forehead into his mask, “You are my blood.”
Maybe he made it more elemental than that, maybe he drained his comment of any separation between them, excised the second-person pronoun from the body of his support. Maybe he said, “We are blood.”
#
A few weeks after the verdict, the judge sets the sentencing date for eight months into the future. Pundits theorize he did that to give Elizabeth more time to bond with her infant son. And even when she’s sentenced, there’s no guarantee she’ll have to start serving her time (there’s gotta be time, right?). If her appeal is chunking along, she may be allowed to remain “free.”
Should I watch and wait till the first photo appears of her turning herself in to punch the sentence clock? That day might be years away. Can I watch and wait that long? I’m so tired.
#
Her name is Elizabeth Holmes.
Her name is my name too!
My name is Elizabeth Holmes.
Whenever we go out, the people always shout:
I have not been convicted of federal wire fraud.
Call them Elizabeth Holmes times two!
She does not have blood cancer (as far as I know).
Da da da da da dada
I am not afraid to die.
She doesn’t seem afraid of anything.
#
My name is Elizabeth Holmes, and maybe now I am the one you’re thinking of.
She is watching the world watch her.
I am watching myself look for meaning where maybe there is none.
Her name is my name too!
She is watching the world close over the trial, her wound.
I am watching me wait.
Whenever we go out, the people always shout:
She is waiting for the judge to sentence her.
I am waiting for my bone marrow to judge me.
Call us mortals who deny mortality!
She is waiting to serve her time.
I am waiting to stop wasting the time I have.
#
I dream that Nick calls and I hang up on him.
I’m calling that progress.
#
I wake up tired. Not the report-the-symptom tired, the more ordinary kind.
I’m tired of propping up my own life with hers. I’m tired of fighting the uncoupling of Elizabeth Holmes from Elizabeth Holmes. I’m tired of waiting for justice to come full circle, as if someone being dragged off to the punishment they’ve brought on can undo the injustice of the bad luck of bad blood. Or soothe the sting of being shut out of the life of a namesake I had no right trying to enter. I’m so fucking tired of trying to turn coincidence into cause.
I suck in my breath.
Are you sure you want to turn off the Google alert you have set for: ELIZABETH HOLMES? Click confirm to proceed.
Click.
I’m it.
Lucy McBee is a copywriter and ghostwriter living in Austin, Texas. Her (non-ghostwritten) work has appeared in Indiana Review, New Letters, and is forthcoming in The Pinch.
