“And how did that make you feel? He belittled the impact your mother’s absence may have had on you.”
I shake my head. I mean to be shaking my head. Am I shaking my head? I stand, wobbly, but Dr. Rush doesn’t question it. It’d be more suspicious if I were steady, all things considered. I go back to my room, into the bathroom, and run the water, splashing my face.
How did it make me feel? How do you fuckingthink, Doctor? My mother left and I wasn’t allowed to act as though it meantanythingto me.
I pull a pill from my pocket. I place it on the bathroom counter, white on white on white. I take the tumbler that’s meant to be filled with water for brushing my teeth and crush the pill into powder. I’ve never done thisbefore, but it seems simple enough. I bend over, pressing one nostril shut. I inhale so quickly that it makes me cough.
Holy shit. Why haven’t I been doing this all along?
“You all right in there?” Dr. Rush calls from the other side of the door.
“Be right out,” I shout back, hurrying to brush the remaining powder into my hand, into my mouth. I run the water, wipe my nose, blink my eyes open and shut.
I limp back into the living room and pat my belly. “Something must’ve disagreed with me.” So polite, so genteel. I sit down, my posture stick straight. One may slouchonlywhen one is leaning in to share a secret. Then, curl one’s body into a C so the other person will know they’re being confided in.
It makes them feel special,Anne told me once. When she cut the deal with Harper’s parents, she rounded her back like a snake, her voice lowered to a whisper.
He’ll go to rehab as soon as he’s strong enough to travel.Tears in her eyes, silently reminding them that their daughter wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt; her tortured, troubled little brother was suffering, too.
Eventually, the Steeles were convinced that Anne deeply cared about getting mehelp. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Anne promised them more for keeping quiet than a judge would award them if they’d sued me publicly in civil court. Privately, Anne rolled her eyes at their naivete. She’d played into the Steeles’ Americanness, their puritan certainty that I needed rehab rather than a stiff drink and a good kick in the head.
I don’t think he’d survive a trial,Anne said mournfully.He’s already lost so much.
My father likes to say that Anne will make an excellent duchess. Each time he says it, I know that he isn’t talking about Anne at all, but about Mum, about me—how we’d failed by comparison.
What does it matter,Dad said, when Anne announced the terms of her deal with the Steeles.It’s not as though you could havemarriedthat girl.
I couldn’t have married her because I’m meant to marry an appropriate woman and play respectful in the public eye.
Appropriateis code for wealthy, like something out of another century.Myappropriatemarriage will help finance our estates, since our income is no longer enough to maintain our properties. I picture the house in Scotland, the wallpaper peeling from the walls, the pots and pans the servants put out to protect the carpets when it rains.
“That sounds like an enormous responsibility to place on your shoulders,” Dr. Rush says, all sympathy, like he’s not working for Anne, like he isn’t counting on my family to write an enormous check at the end of my stay.
What does Dr. Rush know? No, really: What does he know? I must have said something out loud, but I already can’t remember what. My tongue feels like it weighs a million pounds.
Even if I brought in a million pounds, Anne and Dad would demand more.
“Good work today,” Dr. Rush says.
The Dog Walker
For months, she’s been waking early, rising before the sun, before the dog has a chance to nudge her feet with his nose and beg to be taken outside.
Absurd, she knows, to walk on the beach in the dead of winter, the breeze off the ocean so stiff and so cold. But it’s been like this ever since her husband passed. Not a tragedy, they said; he’d been old, he’d been ill. Expected, they said, like that should cushion the blow.
They’d been married for more than fifty years. They had no children: It was the two of them and their collection of dogs. They’d moved to Shelter Island years ago, declaring that they didn’t need a bustling city, they didn’t need people and places and things—they needed only each other.
What did they think, she wonders now as the cold air snakes its way beneath her layers, goose bumps blossoming on her skin, that they would die at the exact same time, neither leaving the other alone? For good measure, did they think their last dog would die on schedule as well, and they’d leave nothing behind but a kitchen full of chipped pots and pans, a collection of books and letters and clothes, all of it trash for strangers to clear out?
Well, it hadn’t happened that way, and now she’s alone. She walks their dog for miles every day, the last dog that will ever belong to both of them, the last creature, she’s decided, with whom she will share a home, a bed, a life. When they reach the beach, she unclips his harness, and he runs ahead. In the warmer months, he heads straight for the water, but he knows better when it’s this cold.
She should be more careful with him, she thinks. If something happens to him, what would she do?
Suddenly panicked, she calls the dog’s name. Normally, he comes right back to her side, but this morning—this cold, gray morning—he keeps moving, his nose in the air, like he’s smelled something more interesting than she could ever possibly be. She runs after him, her aging bones movingslowly over the sand, calling his name over and over, her voice growing more high-pitched with each step.
By the time she reaches the dunes, she’s crawling on her hands and knees up the incline. Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, she could scramble up the sand like a wild animal, but now she is out of breath.
The dog stands motionless now, but he still won’t come when she calls. He lets out a whine, then paws at the ground.
