I tiptoe into the bathroom and turn on the dim light over the mirror that’s not a mirror, my reflection soft and slightly blurry as though someone has smudged my edges. I wonder if they switched out the light bulbs just for me, from eighty watt to forty watt so I wouldn’t be able to study myself too closely.
I pull my shirt over my head, remove my bra, slide my leggings down to my ankles. I stand on my tiptoes. There are my tattoos—two of them, tiny, one in black ink and one in white. The white tattoo always looked like a scar, but even more so after what I did to it last spring.
My first morning here, when Dr. Mackenzie examined me, did she mistake it for a badly healed scratch like the ones on my inner thighs? There are others I don’t think she could see, the repeated paper cuts hidden among the places where the skin wrinkles around my joints, my ankles and elbows, even between my toes. Only Jonah ever noticed those.
I turn on the hot water. I never go to bed without washing my face, brushing my teeth. Even when I was in college, sleeping in someone else’s bed, I’d sneak into their bathroom and make do with whatever I couldfind—the makeup remover some ex-girlfriend left behind, toothpaste from a crusted tube. I would not be like my mother, her eyes raccooned by smudged eyeliner each morning, her teeth stained with the previous night’s red wine, her hair matted into angry knots.
I pick at the paper cut on my forefinger, more out of habit than a desire to draw blood. Why wasn’t Georgia’s file in the cabinets I searched tonight? There must be some other place where they keep the files of their difficult patients, the ones whose treatment failed spectacularly.
Not just their files. Is there some other place where they keep the difficult patients themselves?
In my mind’s eye, I see the Cape Cod–style building in the woods, two people struggling outside it. Edward says it was the light playing tricks on me, but he doesn’t know as much as I do about places like this. He’s never been sent to a treatment center where they force-feed you through a tube, tie you to a bed, isolate you in a padded room. Just because this place is shiny and luxurious doesn’t mean it’s really any different.
I asked Dr. Mackenzie how many patients this place could accommodate, but doctors lie to patients all the time, telling them that they’ve only gained two pounds when they really gained eight, as if a person can’t feel the difference.
I trace my hipbones, twisting my torso so they jut out like handles, then slide my hands over my bottom and down my thighs. Places like this love to tell their patients that they’re safe:This is asafe space, they say.You can reveal everything.
But if they knew why I’m really here, they might send me away before I find what I came for.
I close my eyes, seeing the dark house in the distance, the woman being restrained. Did I really imagine it? Could that building be perfectly innocuous? It could be empty, or used to store things as dull as outdoor furniture in the wintertime. Maybe I’m crazy to think it’s anything more. (OfcourseI’m crazy. No one comes to a place like this because they’re perfectly sane.)
Crazy or sane, there’s a chance my mother’s file is inside that building, which means I have to get inside, too.
Her file has to besomewhere.
28Lord Edward
I clench my jaw as Dr. Rush continues his lecture: the danger of walking alone in the dark, in the cold. What if I’d slipped? What if I’d fallen? What was I thinking?
Fortunately, he assumes I was alone.
Dr. Rush pauses between sentences as if he expects me to argue, but I won’t. It would only prolong this interaction, and all I want is for my doctor to go away so I can take a pill from my sock drawer. I decide that I won’t swallow it whole; tonight, I’ll chew it up, crunching it between my teeth like candy. I can already taste the bitter chalk of it in the back of my throat. I just need Dr. Rush to get the fuck on with it. Tell me he’s phoning Anne, they’re extending my stay, I can never leave. (What will I do when I run out of pills? That’s tomorrow’s problem; tonight I need only one.)
“I’m sorry,” I offer when Dr. Rush’s silence makes it clear he won’t speak again until I respond. I didn’t even apologize when I set fire to my school. “I needed some air.”
The doctor’s face softens. I’ve said something right even if I don’t know exactly what.
“I understand,” he says. “And if that’s what you need, I want to help you have it. All you have to do is push that button”—he gestures to the bedside table—“and I’ll be here. But you have to understand why we can’t have you out there by yourself.” He says it like we’re on the mean streets of some nameless, dangerous city rather than one of the most exclusive hamlets in the world.
“Understood.” I’m gritting my teeth so hard that I can barely get the word out.
“If anything happened to you—” Dr. Rush pauses, and the words he doesn’t say hang between us.
If anything happened to you, I could get into so much trouble; if anything happened to you, the center could be liable; if anything happened to you, there might be a lawsuit; if anything happened to you, the press might find out you’d been here in the first place.
If anything happened to you, there would be such a mess to tidy up.
I apologize again.
“I appreciate that.” There’s a hint of finality in Dr. Rush’s voice, and I think the lecture is over, that we’ll resume therapy in the morning and put this awful business behind us. Instead, he says, “I’m afraid that starting tomorrow, I’ll be securing the terrace door from the outside.”
It takes me a beat to realize what he means bysecuring. “You’re locking me in my room?”
“Of course not,” Dr. Rush says. “The door from your room to the rest of the house will be unlocked, and you’re welcome to move about the cottage freely. But every exterior door will be secured so that you can’t go outside alone. If you find you need some air again, simply press the button, and I’ll be happy to venture outdoors with you.”
Most buildings aren’t equipped with locks that trap their inhabitants within. This cottage was designed to be a cage.
“This is bullshit.”
