Chapter 9 Amelia Blue
Dr. Mackenzie shows me the kitchen and introduces me to Maurice, who will be my personal chef during my stay, and Izabela, the housekeeper.
Maurice’s hair is cropped close, military-style, and Izabela’s dark hair is held tightly in place with one of those clips that looks like a claw.
They’re both wearing uniforms that look like a set of jet-black scrubs.
Dr. Mackenzie promises they’ll work out of sight but are available to me any time I need them.
(When does anyone need a private chef or housekeeper?)
The kitchen is open to the living room (how exactly will Maurice do his work out of sight?), bisected by a long marble island that runs almost the full width of the house.
Behind the island is a Viking range with six gas burners and a double oven and an enormous copper sink.
The dishwasher and Sub-Zero refrigerator are gleaming stainless steel.
The cabinets are painted dark, dark blue, almost black.
In the living room, there’s a comfortable-looking white sectional facing a fireplace, inside of which is a roaring wood-burning fire.
On top of the mantel is a row of candles, lit cheerfully and filling the room with the scent of lavender and mint.
Hanging above the candles is one of those mirrors that’s really a television in disguise.
“Do you give this tour to every patient?” I ask Dr. Mackenzie.
“We want each of our guests to be comfortable with their environment,” she answers, subtly correcting my use of the word patient.
I wonder, but don’t ask, about the patients who arrive strung out. There were days when Georgia was too high to know which way was up, let alone to appreciate a Nest thermostat.
Dr. Mackenzie gestures cheerfully to a large glass bowl of lemons on the kitchen island, the lone pop of color in the room. “Your grandmother told us you like lemon.”
I always have. Maybe that should have been a warning sign. What kind of toddler is drawn to such a sour, bitter taste?
On cue, Maurice offers up a plate of lemon-scented shortbread. (Has he been holding the platter behind his back since I walked in?)
Over the years, doctors and therapists have tried to tempt me with “favorite” foods.
When that (inevitably) didn’t work, they switched tactics, forcing me to drink cans of Ensure to meet the weight they designate as healthy.
They sent me home with meal plans that Grandma Naomi studied like maps, but I always lost my way, like Little Red Riding Hood straying from the path to meet the wolf.
I swallow a sigh. I bet other patients (guests) are offered exclusively healthy foods: organic, local, clean. I bet some people come here expressly to lose weight, abstaining from white flour, sugar, dairy. In another body, my eating habits would be praised, not pathologized.
The cookies are very, very pale yellow. Almost white.
If I concentrate, I can picture the flour that must have gone into them.
I can see flecks of lemon zest sprinkled throughout.
I imagine Maurice running a lemon over a Microplane.
Perhaps he was careless, looking away, and accidentally scratched his knuckle, so that a tiny droplet of his blood dripped into the dough before he baked it.
“I’m not great with gluten,” I offer finally.
“Our apologies,” Dr. Mackenzie says quickly. I don’t know, and don’t ask, whether Dr. Mackenzie is her last name or her first, like she’s a talk-show therapist. “There wasn’t anything in your medical records about a gluten intolerance.”
Her polite apology isn’t an apology at all but a challenge.
It doesn’t matter how expensive this place is, how pristine the setting, how white the couch, how warm the fire. All these places have the same MO: Get patients to hit a goal weight, then send them home.
Slowly, I reach for a piece of shortbread, its angles sharp and precise. I break off a corner and place it on my tongue.
My mouth floods with sweetness. Then the sharpness of the lemon, the granulated sugar crunching like sprinkles between my teeth.
It tastes like the cookies my grandmother used to make.
No, they are those cookies exactly. Naomi must have shared the recipe with Maurice.
As I chew, the texture of the cookie turns sticky as glue. It’s difficult to swallow.
Did some chef offer Georgia a personalized snack, too? Did Naomi send another one of her secret recipes? (Then again, Georgia never liked Naomi’s cooking.)
“Mmm,” I say finally, meeting the doctor’s eyes. “Thank you, Maurice.” The chef beams like he’s already fixed me.
Georgia called anorexia a gateway diagnosis, like smoking pot before shooting up.
(That had been her route of choice.) The first time I went to treatment, she said, Maybe they’ll find out what’s really wrong with you.
After all, her daughter—Scott Harris’s daughter—couldn’t possibly be defeated by something as soft-core as a diet gone awry.
Anorexia was too clean, too neat and organized for her taste.
I never had a chance to explain that there’s nothing clean about teeth going rotten and breath that stinks because, without any food to digest, the acid from your stomach bubbles into the throat.
Nothing clean about fingernails that are ragged and bowel movements that feel like you’re coming apart at the seams, about hair growing thinner, more feathers than fur.
This disease could kill me as messily and horrifically as the drugs and accidents that killed the celebrities she worshipped.
Maybe if she knew that eating disorders are the second deadliest of mental illnesses, she would’ve been impressed.
(Or maybe not, since opioid overdoses are number one.)
I picture her now, sitting cross-legged on the big round chair in the living room, facing away from the view of Laurel Canyon.
Apparently, Dad was the one who cared about views.
Georgia complained that he picked out the house, a bungalow in the hills, like he’d made music in the 1970s instead of the 1990s.
Georgia always called it your father’s house. Once, when I told her I liked the house, she said, You’re your father’s daughter. I wasn’t sure—I still don’t know—whether she meant it as a compliment or an insult.
In my mind’s eye, Georgia’s wearing one of her cotton nightgowns, the sort that looks like it belongs on a five-year-old.
The skirt is hiked up so you can see the scar on her knee from the time she fell down the stairs rolling on E, too high to feel pain.
Her hair is bleached blond but her roots are showing, mouse brown and streaked with gray.
She’s waiting for her phone to ring, waiting for some expert to call and say her daughter was misdiagnosed all those years ago.
Here’s what’s really wrong with Amelia Blue.
Now, as Dr. Mackenzie continues to tour from one room to the next, the delicate cookie crumbles in my hands. Surely they don’t expect me to eat crumbs. I leave the remains of the cookie on a bathroom counter.
“Would you like us to provide you with a coat?” the doctor asks.
“What?” I say dumbly.
Dr. Mackenzie smiles patiently, a teacher explaining arithmetic to a child.
“I noticed you arrived wearing only a sweater. Perhaps you didn’t think you’d need anything warmer, since our work together can be done indoors.
But I’d be happy to walk the property with you.
Some people prefer to practice therapy while walking through nature. Do you think you might like that?”
I imagine myself wearing a puffy black coat with the words Rush’s Recovery (perhaps simply RR) embroidered across my chest like a scar.
The truth is, I would like a coat. It’s freezing out, and I’m not planning on spending all my time here within the walls of the cottage. But I’m also not planning on being outside with a doctor by my side.
“No thanks,” I answer. “I don’t need a coat.”
When I return to use the toilet a few minutes later, the cookie crumbs are gone, no doubt silently and secretly removed by Izabela, as if she were a mouse rather than a human being, like I’m Cinderella at the start of her story—birds and mice her only companions before the prince comes to rescue her.
But Cinderella was so good. She wanted to be rescued.
She deserved to be rescued.