Chapter 23 Amelia Blue
“What were you doing up so early?” Edward asks. He blows a bubble with a piece of my gum.
I shrug. “I always got up early.”
Back then, I woke with the sun to clean the detritus of Georgia’s previous night.
Naomi was an early riser, too (Ach, who can sleep late?
she’d say, as though her daughter, sleeping past noon, didn’t count), and we’d tidy (my grandmother’s favorite word, tidy) the house together.
I don’t think Georgia actually knew that we picked up after her, not because she was too selfish to notice, but because she usually couldn’t remember having made the mess to begin with.
I once asked Naomi why we didn’t have a housekeeper—the (rich) kids I went to school with all had at least one housekeeper—but my grandmother scoffed at the idea of a stranger arranging our clothes, folding our linens, touching our dishes.
Georgia’s messes, she firmly implied, should be kept in the family.
But Georgia didn’t see anything messy about the way she left the house. More than once, when I moved one of the many pieces of paper covered in her barely legible scrawl scattered around the house like dust, she complained that I’d disturbed her system.
When I was fourteen, I bought a doorknob for my bedroom that I could lock from either side.
I used a ruler to hang the posters on my wall perfectly straight.
I arranged the books on my shelves alphabetically, by theme and author.
Georgia said it was so clean it was like a hospital room.
(That, I know she meant as an insult. I took it as a compliment.)
“What do other people talk about?” Edward asks me.
“When?” I say, though I know what he means.
“When you ask someone else—someone normal—”
I pull a therapy face, silently admonishing him for using the word normal, the way every therapist I’ve ever had has done to me.
Edward rolls his eyes good-naturedly, then continues, “When you ask normal people about their childhoods, what do they talk about?”
I shrug like I don’t know the answer, even though I do.
Jonah told me he spent his childhood sledding in the park behind his suburban house in the winter and learning to swim at a lake upstate after his mother had slathered his skin with sunscreen in the summer.
If Jonah were here, he would call Edward’s and my stories surreal, a word one of my writing professors told me never to use.
(She also warned against using the word suddenly, or clichés including furrowed brows and bitten lips, even though people do both things.) Jonah traced my small scars with his lips as though he could kiss it better, the way attentive parents (the sort whose children aren’t found by police officers, crying in parking lots) do for skinned knees and scrapes.
I told Edward my reasons for being here are complicated, but maybe it’s quite simple. Maybe I’m here because I didn’t have a childhood like Jonah’s.
It’s cold enough to see our breath. I picture my wool coat hanging in the closet in Laurel Canyon, forgotten after having been shipped from my tiny West Village apartment last spring.
I skim icy fingers over my stomach. There’s a tiny stretch of softness around my waistband, a reminder of my body’s refusal to cooperate, its inability to do what it should, to work the way other people’s (normal people’s) bodies work.
“Let’s do something different tonight,” I say to Edward. I’m sick of walking in circles on the path between our cottages, circles that seem smaller and less productive with each revolution. If my mother used these paths, surely I’ve walked them enough by now to say I traced her footsteps.
“Bored with me already?” Edward limps slightly, almost as if he’s wearing the wrong-size shoes.
“I’m bored with this.” I gesture to the dirt-strewn yards between the three cottages, stretching out like an enormous, twisting Y.
Each day, I’ve done my yoga and stared at Dr. Mackenzie’s symmetrical face while she asks her questions, and they’ve kept the fridge filled with so much Greek yogurt it looks like the dairy section in a grocery store, along with foods I loved as a kid (Naomi must have sent them a list) : Rice Krispies and fresh milk, chicken cutlets, ready-cut slices of cheddar cheese, Golden Delicious apples.
And always, a plate of lemon shortbread that scratches my throat when I throw it up.
I look into the woods, imagining the hundred-year-old oaks, maples, and willows that were surely chopped down to make way for panoramic ocean views from the cottage windows.
The branches on the remaining trees curl over the angular buildings, closing in like they might crush the metal and glass boxes that took their siblings’ place.
Beyond the cottages, the woods are dense and dark, no solar-powered lamps stuck into the ground to lead the way.
Still, the moonlight is bright enough that I can make out a large structure in a clearing among the trees, as far as I can tell, the only building on the property other than the cottages.
“Where do you think they keep files for all their old patients?” I try to keep my voice casual. Maybe they have stacks of things people left behind: sweaters and socks and books they meant to read but never got around to, an elaborate lost and found.
“Guests,” Edward corrects with a wink. “And dunno. Gotta be around here somewhere, right?”
“Okay, but how can they really guarantee confidentiality if they have file after file on every celebrity and tycoon type who stayed here?”
“You saw the security cameras by the gate. Hell, you saw the gate when we got here.”
Edward was feigning sleep when we drove in, so he couldn’t have seen that beyond the locked gate, cleverly hidden between the trees, were tall wire fences, sharp barbs along the top.
“Yeah, but they probably keep their files on computers. What if they got hacked?”
I’m not tech savvy enough to break into a password-protected computer.
“They can’t,” Edward explains, shaking his head. “Anne looked into it. This place is strictly analog. They wouldn’t even set up the reservations over email. It all had to be over the phone. Landlines, even.”
There’s moisture in the air, and I can feel the ends of my hair curling.
I kick one of my boots against the ground.
I checked the forecast earlier: too cold for rain, not quite cold enough for snow.
It’s supposed to start sleeting at 4:00 a.m. I’m wearing two sweaters, a knit hat, and fingerless gloves, but when the wind blows, I shiver.
“Check it out,” Edward says, picking something off the ground. Before I can stop him, he throws a piece of gravel at the windows of the third cottage.
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
“You said you were bored!”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?” Edward grins. He tosses another rock. The stone hits the glass with a dull thud that’s barely audible over the music coming from the cabin.
Edward says he’s seen the third patient from his window; it’s a woman, he thinks. Given her taste in music—my parents’ sort of music—I guess she must be middle-aged. (Edward said he couldn’t tell.)
“Gotta find a bigger rock,” Edward says. “No way she’ll be able to hear us otherwise.”
“You’ll break a window,” I protest. I can picture her now, a nameless, faceless basket case.
Getting high in the middle of the day, her children coming home to the smell of something burning, never certain if they were smelling the remains of burnt toast or a bong rip.
Georgia was creative when she had to be, chasing the dragon with the same aluminum foil Naomi used to wrap my sandwiches.
I try to remember the last time I saw a sign of Georgia’s drug use. Was it months, a year even, before she came here? It all feels terribly fuzzy, like my memories were printed on old-fashioned film that’s been damaged.
I circle my left wrist with the opposite hand’s fingers, trying to stay calm.
“You’re supposed to be here anonymously,” I remind Edward. “Anyone who plays music that loud isn’t interested in discretion. They could leak your presence to the press like that.” I snap my fingers like I have his best interests in mind.
“You didn’t,” Edward points out.
“Yeah, well, you got lucky with me. I already hate the press.”
Edward hesitates before tossing another rock.
“Come on.” I step off the path before he can change his mind, turning away from the ocean, tiptoeing past the lower-level rooms where our care managers, chefs, and housekeepers sleep and toward the building I saw in the woods.
I know I’m being insensitive, asking him to walk farther on his injured leg, but I can’t help it.
“How’s the PT going?” I try to sound nonchalant. He’s told me he has physical therapy every day.
“Fine,” Edward answers, though he sounds unconvinced. “They made me do a cold plunge today.”
“A cold plunge?” I echo.
“It’s exactly what it sounds like. You get into a tub filled with ice water.”
“You’re describing a literal form of torture.”
In fact, it sounds like a treatment from medieval times, like bloodletting or leeches.
I’ve considered telling Dr. Mackenzie that my treatment here isn’t all that different from the “rest cure” they used to prescribe to women in the 1800s.
It had three core elements: isolation, rest, and feeding, with massage to combat muscle atrophy—not dissimilar from my yoga and bodywork classes.
Patients were required to lie in bed for twenty-four hours a day, sometimes for months at a time, with a special nurse who would sleep in the room with them—just like Dr. Mackenzie living downstairs.
Visits from family and friends were forbidden.
The women were given “feedings,” and if they refused any part of the treatment, they were prescribed more rest.
Nowadays, we (allegedly) recognize the damage such treatments did. I wonder what they will say about places like this in 150 years.
Edward shrugs, like being forced into an ice bath is perfectly normal. “It’s supposed to have all kinds of benefits. Anti-inflammatory, accelerates healing, blah, blah.”
“So if it works, your fucked-up leg will get better, right?” That’s what he calls it, his fucked-up leg.
“Cured,” Edward answers wryly. He makes the word sound like a punchline.
“At least your leg isn’t alcoholism,” I say. “Like, there might actually be a cure for it. That’s the advantage of physical ailments over psychic ones, right?”
“Right,” Edward agrees. “Is this what American summer camps are like?” he asks as we crush dead leaves beneath our feet with each step. “At Choate, I had a couple of classmates who went on and on about sleepaway camp.”
“I wouldn’t know.” I rub my hands together. In between words, I count my steps, as though the numbers are breadcrumbs I’m leaving behind to find my way back. “The closest I came to sleepaway camp was spending July at a treatment center when I was fifteen.”
Edward laughs like I’ve made a joke. I join in as though I don’t remember how they punished patients with isolation if we didn’t drink our allotment of Ensure with each meal.
When they sent me home in August, I hated the new shape of my inner thighs, my breasts that were a size larger than they’d been before.
I fantasized about carving the new pounds off me like a butcher.
It’s less windy the farther we get from the water.
The mystery building in the moonlight turns out to be an oversize barn made of cedar shingles, with floor-to-ceiling windows like the cottages.
I can make out the silhouettes of an exercise bike and an elliptical machine, looking ghostly in the darkness.
I see a swimming pool on the other side of the building, covered up for the winter.
“At least they don’t make you do your cold plunge out there.” I shiver. I read once that when people remove the covers from their pools in the spring, they find creatures that slipped beneath the water in winter: mice and birds and rabbits; even, somehow, deer.
I reach for the handle on the sliding glass door, wincing as my hand makes contact with the metal latch.
I’m not surprised that it isn’t locked. I’ve spent enough time around wealthy people to know how careless they can be.
Once inside their gated communities, in their apartments guarded by doormen, they don’t bother with deadbolts, leave their jewelry strewn on countertops and hang priceless art in their bathrooms. This area—the Hamptons—is famous for waterfront mansions without alarm systems, unlocked Mercedes in grocery store parking lots, designer shoes left behind at the beach.
Spend enough time in rarefied air and you start to think the air itself is protecting you.
“What are you doing?” Edward hisses.
I don’t answer before stepping inside.