“I mostly kept quiet.”
“You?” Andrew scoffs, and I give him a playful shove.
“It’s true!” I insist. “I never felt like Ibelongedthere.”
“No one feels like they belong in rehab. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Like, people denying they need to be there and all that? People thinking they’re the exception to the twelve steps; it’s okay for them to drink and get high and whatever else.”
I shake my head, seeing the shaggy platinum tips of my hair in my peripheral vision. “I don’t mean it like that.”
“So what do you mean?”
I take a breath, tasting the artificial flavors my mother would disapprove of if she were here:Tsk, tsk, tsk.I can smell Andrew, themalenessof him. I haven’t lived with a man since my husband. For so long, after he was gone, I didn’t want to wash anything. I liked walking into the bathroom and still smelling him: his cologne, some forgotten T-shirt on the floor, his sweat on the pillowcase. For years afterward, I wore the same cologne, used the same soap and shampoo he had, but it all smelled different on me.
“I mean, I never felt, you know,entitledto be there. Like everyone else there was a member of a club I hadn’t earned the right to join.”
“You say that as if youwantedto join.”
“I didn’t like how it felt to be left out. I felt like a fake or something. An imposter.” Just like I did at the fancy parties when our second album went gold, or when I went back to Yonkers to visit my mom, or walking down the aisle on my wedding day, or bringing my kid home from the hospital. I felt like this wasn’t meant for me, like there was someone else out there, some expert, who knew how to navigate the world better than I did. “I guess I’ve been an imposter all my life.”
Andrew cocks his head to the side like a puppy. “Sounds like a song.” He reaches one of his long arms out to grab my guitar from the chair where Evelyn sits during therapy. He strums it and croons, “Imposter all my life.”
“I was just talking,” I say. “Not writing.”
“You’re writing music every time you open your mouth.”
It’s been a long time since anyone spoke to me that way—like I’m an artist. Even fans, when I meet them now, they’re looking for a good time, not poetry.
I pull my notebook from the waistband of my leggings. I’ve gotten used to the feel of the spiral binding against my skin, like my waist is a hiding place for my darkest secret: I’m still trying, and failing, to write.
“I haven’t finished anything in a long time,” I confess. “See? All these beginnings, but no endings.”
“These are some good beginnings,” Andrew says, thumbing through the pages.
“I know,” I say, and Andrew grins, a lock of his tawny hair falling over his forehead. I don’t believe in false modesty or fishing for compliments.
“I know you know.” Andrew slides my notebook onto the kitchen counter and fits my guitar into my lap, the backs of his hands lingering against my thighs. He puts my left hand on the neck, and moves my right hand over the strings. He’s so much taller than I am, but his hands aren’t actually that much larger. My fingers are long, my palms wide.
Like a man’s,my husband used to say.Like Jimi Hendrix, like Jimmy Page.He made it sound good, like I was born to be a rock star.
“Sing it back to me.” Andrew speaks softly, like we’re lying in bed together. Goose bumps rise on my skin, and a pleasant shiver runs through me. “I’ve been an imposter all my life.”
“Imposter all my life,” I echo. I close my eyes. The fire in the fireplace is dying, burned down to embers, but still giving off heat. Or maybe the warmth I’m feeling isn’t from the fire at all but from this man, so close to me that I can feel his breath when he exhales.
In crowded rooms of celebration,
In circles of strangers’ consternation,
In the house where I grew up,
On the stage where I blew up,
Across the threshold where he carried me,
Alone with my baby.
You know I think that maybe
I won’t even belong in the grave where they’ll bury me.
