The hunger hit me in the middle of the night after Naomi told me the truth, waking me from sleep just as nausea had in the spring. I found myself in fast-food restaurants and ice cream parlors, as surprised to be there as if I’d sleepwalked.
The press hadn’texaggeratedto sell magazines. They had lied, inventing a story to fit their narrative. Georgia hadn’t stayed in the hospital after I was born because she was detoxing; CPS never came to keep my parents from bringing me home.
“It’s confusing,” Edward says. “When the press prints a lie with as much authority as they would the truth.”
With the hunger came the purging. It led me to the bathrooms of gas stations and department stores, the sorts of places where Georgia had shot up back in the day, so unsanitary it was a wonder she hadn’t contracted tetanus on top of everything else. Now I was the one making a mess in public toilets, sticking dirty fingers down my throat, hands that still tasted of the grease and ketchup I’d been eating minutes earlier.
I lost so much weight, so rapidly, that Naomi agreed when I asked to come here. I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t hoping to be saved by yet another round of therapy and yoga and acupuncture and meal plans.
I came here to learn what I don’t know. Because I may know how many miles from our house to LAX and how many books I read last year and how many calories are in a strawberry, but I don’t know how Georgia turned out to be a better mother than I. She was able to give up her disease (addiction) for her child—a child she barely paid attention to, didn’t even seem to like—while I couldn’t give up my disease (anorexia) for mine, a child I desperately wanted, a baby I already loved.
That’s the real reason I came here. The help I need is the explanation buried in my mother’s file. Surely, this place’s experts (the best care money can buy) will have the answers that elude me, will be able to tell me which parts of her sober diary are true, and which are lies. Because if it’s alltrue, then how could she keep her sobriety—something she surely knew I’d hoped for my whole life—secret?
Did she know, all along, that she was going to fall off the wagon yet again?
A breeze wafts through the sliding glass door. I hear the pipes groan as the heat turns on, like there’s something inside the walls trying to get out. Edward moves to close the door, but I stop him. I prefer the sound of music coming from the third cabin to quiet.
“I met her last night,” I tell him. “She crashed into me on the path between our cottages.”
“Is she famous?” He doesn’t add,like us.
“I didn’t recognize her, but she seemed to think I should.”
“Could you tell what she was in here for?”
I shrug, recalling her fur coat, her bare legs. “She looked like the sort of person you’d expect to see at a place like this. A basket case.”
“It’s not nice to call people names. Didn’t you say that?”
I shove him affectionately, like he’s my annoying little brother. “I said it wasn’t nice to joke about a disability.”
“I have a disability.” Edward grins. I think it’s the closest he’s come to making a joke about his leg.
“So you should know better.”
“What’s the tattoo on your shoulder?” Edward asks, changing the subject. He must’ve seen it when I showed him my scars.
“SH,” I explain, saying it likeshhhh. “My dad’s initials. Scott Harris.”
“And the other one?”
He means the tiny white tattoo beneath my left breast, the one I destroyed in May.
“It was my mom’s initials.” Georgia was never as famous as my dad. More than once, someone identified me as the daughter of Scott Harris andwhat’s her name.
“Why did you ruin it?” Edward asks.
I close my eyes and hold my breath, recalling how it felt when I pressed a blade to my skin, the initial pain followed by sweet relief as my mother’s initials disappeared. People say bodies are temporary, but they’re not, notfor the people trapped inside them; for us, a body—its aches and pains, its scars and tattoos—is permanent. It’s only temporary for the people around it, the ones who outlive it.
Finally, I answer, “It felt better to ruin it.”
“Why?”
I don’t answer.
The truth is, I don’t know.
41Florence
