I ball my hands into fists.
“It’s all your fault, Georgia Blue.”
51Amelia Blue
Sonja Carrera.The name is familiar, an itch I can’t scratch. I reach my freezing fingers into my pocket, fumbling so that I nearly drop my phone. I open up Instagram and search for @sonjalovesgeorgia. The user who read the police report. The one who wasgoing dark.
I dig through her pictures. In her posts, her hair is black and long, not platinum and shaggy—but when I look closely, I can see that it’s her. Her clothes are nineties inspired, though not quite as literal as when I saw her the other night: the baby-doll nightgown, the enormous fur coat. I realize now, she was dressed like Georgia, cut and dyed her hair to match my mother’s. She wouldn’t be the first fan to do so.
Trippy,she said, seeing me here.
No wonder she assumed I’d recognized her.
She’d seemed desperate, almost feral. She never met Georgia, but in so many ways, she’s been better to my mother than I’ve ever been. Sonja’s spoken out against the conspiracy theories that Georgia is somehow to blame for my father’s death, against Shocking Pink touring without her, against the rock critics who insist that Georgia didn’t write her own songs. She shared what she found in the police report from Georgia’s last arrest. I barely told my grandmother about Georgia’s sober diary, let alone the world.
Sonja said,It won’t be another story.
She said it would bethetruththis time.
Sonja thinksthistime—Georgia’s tumble off the wagon at Rush’s Recovery—was different from all the times she drank and used drugs before. Sonja doesn’t know what I know, that Georgia never needed a reason to use, a catalyst, an inciting incident.
As much as I know anything, which is to say, not very much at all anymore.
The snow comes down hard now, and the ground beneath my feet is frozen, cold enough that the flakes don’t melt when they land, but I’m sweating beneath my clothes.
This timewasdifferent. This time, Georgia died.
At the edge of the property, I try the door of the Cape Cod–style house.
Locked.
I dig into my pockets, but my kit isn’t there.Crap.I must have left it in my room.
I fall to my knees, searching beneath the rapidly accumulating snow. All those years with Georgia, I had to get creative sometimes. I try a narrow stick, but it snaps into pieces in the lock.
Tonight is my only chance. I can’t let anything stop me.
So I pick up a rock from the ground and throw it at one of the narrow windows on either side of the front door. Luckily, the glass here isn’t like the state-of-the-art glass in our cottages—it shatters easily.
I slide my hand through, hardly even noticing when I nick my thumb, then my wrist. I manage to reach the doorknob, turn the lock, twist the knob.
I step inside. There’s a long, scratched wooden table and two overstuffed chairs set in front of an unlit fireplace. I pass a worn leather sofa. There’s a mess in the kitchen, and distressed rugs rest over the scratched hardwood floors. It doesn’t look like a place for hidden files, or difficult patients: There are no padded rooms, no towering cabinets. It looks like a home. Whoever lives here might be the groundskeeper, the one who trims the hedges into perfect circles, who wraps the boxwood in burlap for the winter. Maybe Edward was right, and I didn’t see what I thought I saw.
And yet, tonight, the floodlight didn’t turn on until I was nearly at the front door, so it must not have been Edward and me activating it from across the woods the other night like we thought. It had to have been someone just outside this house.
I use the flashlight on my phone to light the way as I tiptoe, peeking inside each door. I discover first a bathroom, then a closet. I don’t know why I’m bothering to be quiet. If anyone were home, the glass breaking surely would have gotten their attention. Whoever lives here (if anyone lives here) must be out, helping search for Sonja.
I try another doorknob and discover a room lined with bookshelves. There’s an enormous wooden desk in the center of the room. Even from the threshold, I can see that it’s stained with ink and water rings. There are stacks of papers on top of the desk: everything from bills to used tissues to magazine articles, so disorganized that it reminds me of Georgia.
I step inside. My breath catches in my throat, thick and cold as a milkshake. In the center of the desk is a bulging manila folder with my mother’s name on it.
Florence “Georgia Blue” Bloom.
The Driver
Until tonight, the driver has never actually seen a hitchhiker, despite her mother’s endless warnings after she got her license six months ago. The way her mother spoke, you’d have thought there was an epidemic of serial killers sticking out their thumbs across Shelter Island, hoping to get a ride from their next unsuspecting victim.
Her mother’s warnings aboutdangerous strangershad become only more dire after the recovery center opened.
