Chapter 8 Amelia Blue
Sitting next to Lord Edward is like being in the back seat with someone who isn’t quite real, a person designed in a lab or dreamed up in a fairy tale.
His light-brown hair falls across his forehead just so.
His gray-blue eyes are narrowed slightly so I can tell that despite his good manners he isn’t pleased to share his car with a stranger.
After a few minutes in the car with me, he pretends (I think he’s pretending) to sleep—exaggeratedly slumping his shoulders (otherwise, he has perfect posture) and trying to stretch his legs, his feet wedged awkwardly beneath the driver’s seat.
He looks more like a picture of a person than an actual human being.
I wonder, if I touched him, whether his skin would be warm and pliant, or rubbery and smooth like an oversize Ken doll.
If Georgia were here instead of me, she’d reach across the back seat to find out.
He didn’t seem to recognize me, though strangers usually don’t.
A good thing, according to Georgia. Not because she cared about preserving my privacy (she used to say privacy was overrated) but because people might recognize her old nose on my face, and then what would she do?
Didn’t I know that I was supposed to have inherited Dad’s cute little button nose? What did I think she’d married him for?
You married him for his nose?
I married him for your nose, Georgia corrected, as though a husband was no more than a series of features laid out for the picking. Because I didn’t want my daughter to have to do the things I did.
My body’s first failure, then: being born with the wrong nose.
I glance at Lord Edward, his eyes still closed.
Like me, he was famous at birth, but the progress of his life was recorded not in grainy pictures on D-list celebrity blogs but in posed official portraits.
I know about his parents’ affairs and subsequent divorce when he was probably still in diapers.
I know who designed his sister’s wedding dress (Georgia hated it) and which boarding school he was kicked out of and what he wore to his father’s second, and then third wedding.
If he cared enough to search the internet, he could see what I wore to my father’s funeral when I was five years old, to my mother’s when I was seventeen.
The Range Rover wends down a narrow, gated driveway, finally stopping in front of a modern, glassy house. The driver opens the door on my side of the car.
“Ms. Harris,” he prompts. I guess this is my stop.
“Well, bye,” I say awkwardly, and Lord Edward opens his eyes so quickly that I’m certain he wasn’t really asleep. “Thanks for the lift.”
“I didn’t do anything,” he points out, gesturing to the driver.
Right. Add that to the list of things I’ve done incorrectly today. I bet even Georgia thanked the right person when she got here.
Actually, she probably didn’t thank anyone. She wasn’t the sort of parent who singsonged about manners and saying the magic word.
A woman wearing black pants and a crisp white blouse with black hair plaited into dozens of braids is waiting for me just outside the glassy house’s enormous front door.
She rushes to open it for me, introducing herself as Dr. Mackenzie, my care manager.
The driver pulls away smoothly, barely disturbing the gravel beneath the car’s wheels, as though the car is hardly touching the ground.
“We’re so pleased to have you here at Rush’s,” Dr. Mackenzie says as she leads the way into my cottage.
I imagine my mother rolling her eyes at such a greeting when she arrived here ten years ago. She never thought there was anything the least bit pleasing about being sent to places like this.
Or maybe she was grateful to be here, relieved they had space to accommodate her. Maybe she arrived determined to do the work, exactly like you’re supposed to.
I try to picture my mother participating earnestly in therapy, but the images in my head are fuzzy, her voice muted as though even my imagination can’t make up what she might say.
I look around, hoping that being here will help to bring it—to bring her—into focus, but the pictures and sounds remain muddy.
Simply being here isn’t enough.