I have to get moving if I’m going to make it to the building in the woods before Dr. Mackenzie’s next bed check.
33Florence
Even with a fire in the fireplace, even with my guitar in my lap and my fur coat across my shoulders, even with the heat turned up to seventy-seven on the glowing Nest thermostat—I’m still cold, and I’m never cold. It’s these stupid glass walls. They’re supposed to be high-end and luxurious, but I know the truth: It’s just another way for them to control me, to keep me from being truly comfortable while I’m here. The rooms here may have doors, but there’s no privacy, only exposure. I imagine paparazzi prowling the property with their high-powered cameras, enormous lenses and flashes capturing everything. They would climb the trees for a better shot, dangling from the branches like perverse Christmas ornaments.
“It’s fucking freezing in here.”
“I’ll turn up the heat,” Andrew offers, but in my mind I hear my husband’s voice.Bloody freezing,he’d have said, if he were here. He wasn’t British—the man was born in Nebraska—but he traveled a lot. All over the world, for work. He picked up words and phrases the way other people picked up magnets and snow globes. His souvenirs made their way into everyday conversation. I used to make fun of him for it, but he never minded. My jokes made him laugh.
I look out the window. It’s past midnight, but it’s not entirely dark outside. A flurry of tiny white snowflakes is falling, not enough to stick. All that white should call to mind cleanliness, purity, virginity. Snow White with her pale pale skin. I grab my notebook and scribble:
Even the princess, trapped in her tower,
Ever white, ever pure,
Is she aware of her power?
The sort of beauty that makes men battle dragons, take up arms,
Did she wonder,“Where do I belong?”
Was the tower her prison, or the wide world outside?
Was the prince her rescuer
Or another… another… another…
My thoughts are like a record skipping over the same line again and again. I throw my notebook across the room.
“It shouldn’t be this hard to rhyme the wordoutside.”
Andrew crosses the room and picks my notebook off the floor, sets it on the coffee table in front of me, then sits beside me on the white couch.
“Of course it should,” Andrew says.
“Huh?”
“Of course it should be hard.” Andrew runs his palm over his cheeks and chin, brushing up against his stubble. “If it was easy, anyone could do it.”
I nod like I agree with him, but I think he’s got it backward. Itiseasy.
Or anyway, it used to be. It was easy for years. It was so easy that it felt like I was cheating, getting away with something.
My first couple albums, I wrote them drunk and high, late at night and early in the morning. Some songs took me twenty minutes and others twenty hours, but none of it washard. I gave away lyrics and melodies to other musicians—I figured I could always come up with more. I used to think my career was an elaborate hoax, and all those people who admired me just hadn’t tried doing it themselves and discovered how easy it was.
Until it became impossible.
“C’mon.” Andrew pulls me up to stand, lacing his fingers through mine. Somehow, his hands are warm. He leans over and turns on the Bose speaker, still tuned to the nineties station. Miraculously, they’re actually playing one of my songs.
Andrew starts crooning the words, closing his eyes. People used to do that at our shows: I’d look out into the crowd and see people screaming the words with their eyes squeezed shut, like they hadn’t come toseeme—they couldfeelme.
Andrew spins me around and pulls me close. I can smell his minty soap. I turn up the volume, until my voice through the speakers is so loud I’m surprised the glass walls don’t shatter.
God, I sound so fearless. Iwasfearless, back in the days before a single social media post could take you down. Before my husband and I had barely gone on our first date, before Joni Jewell had ever picked up a guitar.
Evelyn said this place was a retreat. What if I want to retreat further, to my heyday, crowds screaming my name? Or more, to when my husband and I hadn’t even met and my kid hadn’t been born, and the only person I’d ever disappointed was my mother, and I was too disappointed inherto care?
What would I have done, at that age, in a place like this?
