Here, they have a physical therapist called Bryce on call. He took me through my exercises first thing this morning—yesterday morning, I suppose—before breakfast. Bryce promised acupuncture treatments, an hour in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber every day, a cold plunge in an ice bath if I’m willing.
“We’ll get you on your feet again,” Bryce had said, then blanched at his choice of words.
In August, the official press release stated that there’d been an accident in the States and my leg had beendamaged. No further details were given regarding my condition. Was that Anne’s idea, or mine? Will she leak the truth someday, when she needs a story to appease the press? When she wants to punish me?
I toss the covers off. This mattress is too soft. I’ll tell Dr. Rush at breakfast so they can replace it with a firmer model.Whatever we can do to make you more comfortable,Dr. Rush will surely say.
The phone falls silent on the bed beside me, and now I notice a musical thump in the air, coming in through the windows so they’re practically pulsing in time with the beat.
I pull myself out of bed and move awkwardly toward the wall of windows. I don’t turn on the lights. I don’t want to see my reflection.
Even though we’re in the middle of nowhere—not a skyscraper or a signpost around to brighten the sky—it’s not that dark out. The moon and starlight reflect off the water, creating the illusion of dawn though it’s after midnight.
I can see two other structures from my bedroom, about ten yards away on either side, each a corner of an equilateral triangle. The one on the left is lit up. Through the glass, I make out a figure with a bleach-blond mop of hair, dancing.
I slide the terrace door open, hopping outside. The cold air feels thin, easier to breathe than the artificially warm air inside. The music is louder out here, though I can’t quite make out what song is playing. I clutch the railing for balance, the metal so cold against my palms that it feels sharp.
On my right, the third cabin is dark but for a tiny dot of light on the terrace. It takes me a second to recognize it as the tip of a cigarette. Finally, I make out the silhouette of a small person smoking.
Amelia Blue.
The girl I met because the driver saidSir, I’m afraid there’s been an accident.
Hasn’t anyone else noticed the absurdity of using the same word to refer to a missed train or spilled drink that we use to describe a fatal car crash, a broken limb? My birth—or at least my conception—was surely an accident. My parents can’t have possiblyintendedto have a second child so many years after Anne was born, particularly when they were on the verge of their inevitable divorce. They didn’t need another child, their duty long since done. (Before Anne was born, Dad arranged it so that his estate would be passed down to his eldest child regardless of gender, breaking centuries of tradition, garnering praise from the public. Theprogressive duke, the press said.)
The music must’ve woken Amelia Blue. Or perhaps she never fell asleep. If she’s here for coke or some such, there could be so many stimulants coursing through her system that she literally cannot close her eyes. I’ve heard that some people need to be sedated so the drugs they took recreationally have time to get out of their systems. In the car with her, I was too busy feigning sleep to notice whether her pupils were overlarge, the whites of her eyes bloodshot.
Before I can limp back to bed, there’s a light flashing in my eyes. I raise a hand as if I’m blocking the sun. Amelia Blue is holding up her phone, the flashlight pointing in my direction. I’m grateful that the railing around the deck is solid rather than slatted. It blocks my bottom half.
She’s waving at me.
Then she’s moving—across her terrace, down the metal stairs that lead into the courtyard between our cottages.
Good lord, is she cominghere?
Quick as I can, I make my way inside and ready myself, pulling on sweatpants and boots, shivering. I head back to the terrace and down the stairs, keeping my focus on the light from her phone, bouncing steadily with each step she takes. Her gait is short and quick, something of a shuffle as she doesn’t pick her feet high off the ground.
On the streets of the cities where I’ve lived—London, Manhattan—there are a million different kinds of walkers: businesspeople rushing from one appointment to the next; tourists taking up entire sidewalks as they inch along, enjoying their vacations; groups of students bent over their phones while they gossip, each and every one so sure of their steps that they don’t bother looking where they’re going. Even the dogs have particular strides: sure-footed Labradors and golden retrievers, tiny chihuahuas rushing to keep up with their humans’ long legs, puppies who haven’t yet learned to walk in a straight line.
I wish I could recall exactly how I walked before. I hope, at least, that the dim light conceals my limp enough that Amelia Blue won’t ask questions.
The metal handrail along the stairs has a thin coating of ice that cracks beneath my grip like glass. I wonder if Amelia Blue will be dressed more warmly tonight than she was when she arrived.
Someone could catch their death out here.
19Amelia Blue
Here’s something I learned only recently but that I know for sure: Brushing your teeth is an ineffective way to get the taste of vomit out of your mouth. The best way to get the taste out is to get another tastein, but eating something would defeat the purpose.
And so, when the purging started, so did the smoking. It’s absurd, I know. You’re supposed to start smoking in middle school, maybe high school or college, because you’re a nervous teenager and it gives you something to do with your hands when you’re alone at a party. Nearly thirty is the age to quit these kinds of self-destructive habits.
In between #proana posts and suggested reels of Georgia and my dad, I’ve also watched my former classmates commit to dry January, to daily exercise, to at last finishing the novel they started writing when they turned twenty-one. They’re getting married and making babies and scraping together down payments. Meanwhile, I’ve reverted to adolescence. (Although there’s growing evidence that women struggle with EDs into middle age and beyond, so maybe I’m right on schedule.)
I used to hear girls throwing up in the communal bathrooms of my boarding school, my college dorm. They would flush the toilet while I brushed my teeth at the sink below a spattered mirror, then come out and wash their hands. Once in a while, some girl would claim food poisoning and warn me against the egg salad in the cafeteria, but more often than not, they didn’t bother lying. Every so often, one of them might catch my eye in the mirror and smile like we were in on something together.
I stand beneath the terrace’s gas lamp, the flame casting shadows on my hands as it flickers above me. I note the other sources of light: the tip of my cigarette, moonlight reflecting off a thin layer of snow on the ground, squatlanterns planted beside the perfectly cleared paths that snake between my cabin and the next.
I take a long drag on my cigarette. EvenGeorgiadidn’t smoke.
