“I’m always hungry,” I answer, and Andrew grins like it’s a good thing. I can’t remember the last time anyone looked at me like anything about me was any good.
Mom said that as a baby, I sucked her dry, till her nipples cracked and bled. They made me feed my daughter formula; for the first few days of her life, I was too sick to feed her myself. By the time I was well, she’d gotten used to the bottle, refused to latch onto me.
I walk to the stereo and find the grunge station again, landing on more Nirvana.
Maybe the real reason Kurt killed himself was because he knew, deep down, that he wouldn’t be able to keep writing music as good as what he’d written before.
I take a deep breath. I can still smell Andrew’s shampoo in the air.
23Amelia Blue
My Paul McCartney story gives way to the story of how drunk Edward got at Will and Kate’s wedding, when he was only twelve years old. I one-up the tale of the handsome celebrity who poured Edward a drink at Harry and Meghan’s wedding with the morning in 2003 when I found two stunning A-listers tiptoeing out of my mother’s bedroom before dawn.
“What were you doing up so early?” Edward asks. He blows a bubble with a piece of my gum.
I shrug. “I always got up early.”
Back then, I woke with the sun to clean the detritus of Georgia’s previous night. Naomi was an early riser, too (Ach, who can sleep late?she’d say, as though her daughter, sleeping past noon, didn’t count), and we’d tidy (my grandmother’s favorite word,tidy) the house together. I don’t think Georgia actually knew that we picked up after her, not because she was too selfish to notice, but because she usually couldn’t remember having made the mess to begin with. I once asked Naomi why we didn’t have a housekeeper—the (rich) kids I went to school with all had at least one housekeeper—but my grandmother scoffed at the idea of a stranger arranging our clothes, folding our linens, touching our dishes. Georgia’s messes, she firmly implied, should be kept in the family.
But Georgia didn’t see anything messy about the way she left the house. More than once, when I moved one of the many pieces of paper covered in her barely legible scrawl scattered around the house like dust, she complained that I’d disturbed hersystem.
When I was fourteen, I bought a doorknob for my bedroom that I could lock from either side. I used a ruler to hang the posters on my wall perfectly straight. I arranged the books on my shelves alphabetically, by theme and author. Georgia said it was so clean it was like a hospital room. (That, I know she meant as an insult. I took it as a compliment.)
“What do other people talk about?” Edward asks me.
“When?” I say, though I know what he means.
“When you ask someone else—someone normal—”
I pull a therapy face, silently admonishing him for using the wordnormal, the way every therapist I’ve ever had has done to me.
Edward rolls his eyes good-naturedly, then continues, “When you ask normal people about their childhoods, what do they talk about?”
I shrug like I don’t know the answer, even though I do. Jonah told me he spent his childhood sledding in the park behind his suburban house in the winter and learning to swim at a lake upstate after his mother had slathered his skin with sunscreen in the summer. If Jonah were here, he would call Edward’s and my storiessurreal, a word one of my writing professors told me never to use. (She also warned against using the wordsuddenly, or clichés includingfurrowed browsandbitten lips, even though people do both things.) Jonah traced my small scars with his lips as though he couldkiss it better, the way attentive parents (the sort whose children aren’t found by police officers, crying in parking lots) do for skinned knees and scrapes.
I told Edward my reasons for being here are complicated, but maybe it’s quite simple. Maybe I’m here because I didn’t have a childhood like Jonah’s.
It’s cold enough to see our breath. I picture my wool coat hanging in the closet in Laurel Canyon, forgotten after having been shipped from my tiny West Village apartment last spring. I skim icy fingers over my stomach. There’s a tiny stretch of softness around my waistband, a reminder of my body’s refusal to cooperate, its inability to do what it should, to work the way other people’s (normalpeople’s) bodies work.
“Let’s do something different tonight,” I say to Edward. I’m sick of walking in circles on the path between our cottages, circles that seem smaller and less productive with each revolution. If my mother used these paths, surely I’ve walked them enough by now to say I traced her footsteps.
“Bored with me already?” Edward limps slightly, almost as if he’s wearing the wrong-size shoes.
“I’m bored withthis.” I gesture to the dirt-strewn yards between the three cottages, stretching out like an enormous, twisting Y.
Each day, I’ve done my yoga and stared at Dr. Mackenzie’s symmetrical face while she asks her questions, and they’ve kept the fridge filled with so much Greek yogurt it looks like the dairy section in a grocery store, along with foods I loved as a kid (Naomi must have sent them a list) : Rice Krispies and fresh milk, chicken cutlets, ready-cut slices of cheddar cheese, Golden Delicious apples. And always, a plate of lemon shortbread that scratches my throat when I throw it up.
I look into the woods, imagining the hundred-year-old oaks, maples, and willows that were surely chopped down to make way for panoramic ocean views from the cottage windows. The branches on the remaining trees curl over the angular buildings, closing in like they might crush the metal and glass boxes that took their siblings’ place. Beyond the cottages, the woods are dense and dark, no solar-powered lamps stuck into the ground to lead the way. Still, the moonlight is bright enough that I can make out a large structure in a clearing among the trees, as far as I can tell, the only building on the property other than the cottages.
“Where do you think they keep files for all their old patients?” I try to keep my voice casual. Maybe they have stacks of things people left behind: sweaters and socks and books they meant to read but never got around to, an elaborate lost and found.
“Guests,”Edward corrects with a wink. “And dunno. Gotta be around here somewhere, right?”
“Okay, but how can they really guarantee confidentiality if they have file after file on every celebrity and tycoon type who stayed here?”
“You saw the security cameras by the gate. Hell, you saw thegatewhen we got here.”
Edward was feigning sleep when we drove in, so he couldn’t have seen that beyond the locked gate, cleverly hidden between the trees, were tall wire fences, sharp barbs along the top.
