Chapter 6 Amelia Blue
If I’d gotten off at the wrong station because I hadn’t been paying attention, that would’ve been bad enough.
But this is so much worse because I was paying attention.
Someone else might have rented a car at the airport, driven themselves to Shelter Island, but not me—I don’t drive.
I was the only teenager in LA who didn’t cherish her learner’s permit, beg for her own car the instant she passed the driving test.
I stopped reading my book at Westhampton, knowing that after that came Hampton Bays, then Southampton, then Bridgehampton (where I was supposed to get off).
I stood up, bag in hand, as the train slowed.
But somehow I still missed the announcement that I was supposed to be in one of the first four cars to exit.
(I was in the fifth car.) So now I’m shivering in the cold, waiting for someone to pick me up from the wrong station.
Toddlers can count to four, but not me. Add it to the list of things I can’t do, the list of ways my body doesn’t work like it’s supposed to.
I imagine dividing myself into pieces and packing them into boxes like I’m nothing but doll parts.
I would send everything back to where it came from, the way you do with a dress that doesn’t fit or jeans that won’t button.
I stand firmly beneath the station’s lone streetlamp. Everywhere else is pitch-dark: no other streetlamps, no oncoming headlights from down the street. I shudder as the light flickers, the fluorescent bulb buzzing as though it’s filled not with chemicals but a swarm of bees.
The center promised that someone will be here as soon as possible.
I press my headphones to my ears, listening to the sort of music my mother would hate: Taylor Swift, the National, Bon Iver, music whose lyrics will make you cry if you listen too closely.
Georgia used to say music stopped being worthwhile in the nineties, an era she never stopped trying to recapture: She kept wearing baby-doll dresses with Doc Martens and shooting up heroin well into the 2000s.
As the former lead singer of the grunge band Shocking Pink (though mostly famous for being famous long before the Kardashians perfected that particular art), Georgia disdained squeaky-clean pop stars, stylists and makeup artists, sobriety coaches and promise rings and bare midriffs over low-rise designer jeans.
My phone buzzes with a fresh text, and I force my eyes open.
If I don’t hear from you, I’m going to reach out to your grandmother. Just to make sure you’re okay.
If Jonah contacted Naomi, I’d have to make up some version of events to explain why a stranger (to her, he would be a stranger) is asking after her granddaughter’s well-being.
How would he even reach Naomi? I never gave him her number.
Then again, he always found a way to do everything he said he was going to do, like every word out of his mouth was a promise that couldn’t be broken.
I blow on my hands until they’re warm enough to write back: I’m okay. I just need some space.
I exhale when a black Range Rover pulls up in front of me, its windows tinted so that all I can see when I try to peer inside is my own reflection, my pale skin and frizzy hair, my chin jutting sharply. When the driver holds open the door for me, I practically dive into the light of the back seat.
It feels like I’ve been waiting a very long time—so much longer than a few minutes here at the station, a few hours on the plane, a few weeks while Naomi made the arrangements—to make it to Rush’s Recovery.
I wonder whether Georgia felt that way when she arrived there.