Chapter 24 Amelia Blue
I tiptoe past the treadmills and elliptical machines.
It feels, somehow, colder in this room than it does outside.
There’s a light switch by the door, but I rely on the thin stream of light coming from my phone.
I wonder if any patients have snuck into this building before, to work out in secret.
Some clinics forbid people like me from exercising. #Proana Twitter is full of workarounds.
Two sides of the room are made of glass: the sliding door we just walked through facing the woods, the back facing the pool.
I find myself thinking about the story of the three little pigs, imagining a big bad wolf huffing and puffing to blow this house down.
Would this building collapse like twigs and hay or hold fast like bricks?
Were the architects who designed all these glass structures confident their walls would never shatter, come hurricane or blizzard or cyclone?
One of the solid walls is covered by full-length mirrors. I catch sight of my reflection in the darkness: the body that isn’t the shape or size it should be, the wrong nose I was born with.
The opposite wall has two doors, one on each side. I take a deep breath and head toward the one to my left first.
“Amelia?” Edward asks hesitantly.
I take another step, then wrap my hands around the doorknob and twist it open. I hold my breath as I shine my phone’s light into the room on the other side.
A bathroom. Not at all what I was looking for.
I pull a piece of gum from my pocket and fill my mouth with oversweet fake watermelon, then close the door behind me and try the one on the right.
It’s locked.
I’m prepared for this. I reach into my pocket and take out my kit.
“What’s that?” Edward whispers.
Georgia used to lock herself out of the house all the time. She couldn’t be bothered with details like keys. It didn’t matter (she said) because she knew full well how to pick a lock. She taught me so that I could manage when she was too out of it.
When I hear the latch click into place, I think two words I’m not sure I’ve ever thought before: Thanks, Mom.
I turn the knob, feeling like a contestant on one of those old-fashioned game shows, hoping that whatever’s on the other side of the door will fulfill their wildest dreams. A new car, a million dollars, a romantic getaway.
A room whose walls are lined with cold metal file cabinets.
I step inside.
“Amelia, seriously, what are you doing?” Edward asks.
It takes all my willpower to turn away from the cabinets to face him.
“Why are you here, really?” I ask. My hands are so cold I can barely feel my fingertips. I cross my arms, tucking my hands against my chest.
“What?”
“You said you haven’t had a drink in months.”
Edward blinks. It’s dim in here, but in the light reflected from my phone, I can see his eyes are very bright.
“Like you said,” Edward answers finally, a hitch in his voice like he’s finding it difficult to breathe, “it’s complicated.”
“Consider this part of my complication,” I explain, gesturing to the file cabinets. I open up the drawer marked A–C.
“Are you working for someone?”
“Working for who?” I don’t look at him, keep my gaze focused on one name after another.
“Whom,” Edward says reflexively, like the habit was drilled into him as a child, then adds, “My girlfriend hated when I did that. Corrected her grammar.” He pauses. “My ex-girlfriend, I mean.” He sounds, for a moment, confused, as though he’s forgotten that I asked him a question.
“Whom do you think I might be working for?” I prompt him, ticking through the files with icy fingertips.
“A tabloid. The Star, the Sun, the Enquirer.” Now there’s suspicion in his voice. “Did they pay you to fake an eating disorder or something, like one of those actors who loses weight for a role, so you could dig up some celebrity’s file?”
“Who said I had an eating disorder?” I ask defensively. “Did you google me?”
“We promised not to.”
“Then did you get your care manager to tell you why I’m here?”
I run my fingers over the files, reading each name a second time, in case I missed the one I’m looking for.
“Of course not,” Edward snaps. “It’s just a guess. Anyway, my doctor wouldn’t tell me even if I asked.”
I slam the drawer shut.
“Since when do you have so much respect for the people who work here?”
“I don’t! But you have no right to look through other people’s files.”
“I’m not looking for just anyone’s file. I’m looking for my mother’s.”
I open the drawer marked H–J.
“Why?”
“Because this was the last place anyone ever saw her alive.”
Edward’s hand lands on my wrist, stopping my search. “Amelia, I had no idea.”
“I thought you knew.” This place may think it’s protecting itself by forgoing a website and relying on word of mouth for referrals, but it’s not exactly a well-kept secret. How can it be, when half the people who stay here are regularly stalked by the press? “Anyway, like I said, it’s complicated.”
“I get that, I really do.” Edward’s tone is gentle, like he doesn’t want to startle me. “But imagine how you’d feel if your family read the notes your doctor wrote about you.”
“My mother can’t feel anything.” I twist away from Edward’s grip. “She’s dead.”
Edward can’t understand what it’s like to discover something entirely new about a person after they’ve died, simultaneously getting to know them and coming up against the impossibility of knowing them any better than you did before.
Unless, that is, they spent the end of their life being observed by experts.
Maybe someone misfiled her. I go back to the D-G drawer that I skipped, then move on to K–M, and then the next, and the next.
I look for her stage name, the name she was born with, her married name.
I pass names I recognize—celebrities and politicians and the like.
Apparently, this place doesn’t conceal their patients’ identities with fake names, like when Georgia used to check in to hotels under the name Janis Cobain.
“Shit!” I shout, slamming the final drawer shut. “It’s not here.”
“Then let’s get out of here.” Edward doesn’t wait for me before he turns toward the door, like he thinks just being in here, in proximity to other people’s confidential information, is a violation.
I lag behind, shining my flashlight into corners and on top of the cabinets like Georgia’s file will magically appear.
My light lands on a bulletin board beside the door.
It’s mostly covered with mundane information: Lock Door Behind You; Turn Off Lights; Used Car for Sale!
But I notice a piece of newsprint with a headline that reads, Rush’s Recovery Opening Soon.
I pull the article off the wall. It’s from a local paper, the Shelter Island Reporter, dated December 2014, just over ten years ago.
It mentions the Manhattan decorator who designed the interiors of the cottages, the landscape architects who planned the gardens.
Whoever hung it here must not have noticed the subtle criticisms, like the suggestion that the Rushes paid off the local town council so they could convert property that had been a nature preserve into a rehab facility for the rich and famous.
Below the headline is a grainy picture of three people standing in front of one of the glass cottages.
The caption reads, The doctors Rush with their son on the property.
I suck on a papercut on my left pointer finger, my hands so cold that it doesn’t even hurt.
“Come on, Amelia,” Edward calls softly from the outer room.
I read the caption beneath the photo again. The article must have been written before the son got his PhD and joined the family business.
I’m determined not to leave this room empty-handed. So I tuck the article into my pocket alongside my lock-picking kit and follow Edward outside.