The idea that I could see her in a few hours sends a rush of joy through me. Harper would come if I asked.
My hands tremble such that I nearly drop the phone. I prop myself upright against the bed’s headboard. I imagine Harper’s head on my shoulder, just like it used to be, but so much is different now. I reach down and undo the fastening that secures my prosthetic.
I hear Anne’s voice, loud and clear:You wouldn’t have wanted Harper to be acaretakerfor the rest of her life, would you?
She made acaretakersound like a terrible word. Certainly, she made it sound like I’d never be able to take care of myself again. What reason had I to disbelieve her? I’d never taken care of myselfbefore.
I hang up.
67Amelia Blue
“Wake up, missus.” The words sound thick, far away. “It’s breakfast time.”
I open my eyes groggily and find myself face-to-face with a pair of thick-rimmed wraparound yellow glasses.
I blink until I’m able to focus on the little boy behind the lenses. He looks about three or four, and when he smiles, I can see some of his chewed-up breakfast in his mouth. He holds out a piece of dry cereal from a plastic bowl in his hands, his face open and expectant. I part my lips, and he slides the cereal into my mouth.
He feeds me another piece, humming along to a made-up tune, “Breakfast time.”
“Sorry ’bout that,” Dr. Mackenzie says. I stand and see her in the kitchen. She’s dressed in sweats, her braids loose down her back. The crisp white blouses and cashmere wraps she wore at the center, I understand now, were a uniform, just like the black scrubs Maurice and Izabella wore. “My wife left for work a while ago, but our day-care center’s closed because of the weather. I wanted to let you sleep in, but Milo had other ideas.”
“Milo’s a smart kid,” I say. Before I can fold the blanket and sheets on the couch, Milo climbs into the warm space my body left behind. He turns on the TV and expertly findsSesame Street. The sound of sweet, silly music fills the room. He leaves his cereal bowl, its contents half-eaten, on the coffee table, as though he’s forgotten about it completely.
I recall what Dr. Mackenzie said, that children of narcissists don’t know there’s a place in between, a middle ground between selfishness and self-erasure. I never understood that hunger, too, has a middle ground.
My former doctor gestures for me to sit at the kitchen table across from her. “How’d you sleep?”
“Better than I expected.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened last night?”
I’m filled with gratitude that she didn’t ask me hours ago, simply brought me here without insisting on an explanation.
“You’re not my therapist anymore, you know.”
Dr. Mackenzie takes a sip of coffee and smiles. “Old habits.”
I press my hands against my empty belly, no food, no baby to fill it. I begin to wrap two fingers from my left hand around my right wrist, noticing the scratches from shattered glass turning into scabs. I drop my hands abruptly.
“Can I tell you something?” I ask. Dr. Mackenzie nods. “I always blamed my mother for my eating disorder. I thought anorexia was a reaction to her, like I was trying to make order out of her chaos.”
Mommy issues,Andrew said last night.
“You don’t think that now?”
“Now I think—if that’s true, then why didn’t it get better after she died?”
“Some ED researchers believe people with anorexia long to stay small because they’re phobic not about fat but about adulthood.”
Hasn’t that theory been debunked by now? “You think my anorexia is just a bad case of Peter Pan syndrome?” I ask drily. “My childhood wasn’t exactly easy. I hardly think I would’ve tried to prolong it.”
“Maybe not. Or maybe you were desperate to be parented, and part of you believed you could give your mother infinite chances to try again. Maybe you even imagined that if you made yourself small enough, you could become the little girl who’d had both her parents.”
“That’d be quite a feat of magical thinking—believing that if I could transcend the fact that both my parents are dead.”
“One could argue that believing you could live without nutrients is quite a feat of magical thinking.”
I think of the lullaby on my dad’s last album, the song Georgia insisted they wrote together. I never believed her, because it was about a desperately desired child, the words of a parent who had so many plans.
