Chapter 27 Amelia Blue
I kick off my shoes, toss my sweater and scarf to the floor, and dive into bed, pulling the covers up to my cold cold ears. I shut my eyes and hold still like this is a game of hide-and-seek and Dr. Mackenzie’s just shouted, Ready or not here I come!
I hear the door open, then Dr. Mackenzie’s satisfied sigh when she sees me lying in bed.
Maybe I’m too still. Do most patients murmur and roll over when the doctor opens the door, their unconscious bodies sensing the presence of another person?
But if I move, will Dr. Mackenzie come closer?
Will she hear that my heart is still pounding from racing up the stairs, sense that my fingertips are still chilled from the January air?
Don’t be ridiculous, I tell myself. Even if she stood directly over me, Dr. Mackenzie wouldn’t be able to hear my heart or feel the cold radiating from my body.
She’s a human being, not a witch. So I keep still, muscles clenched, until I hear the door closing.
Even then, I wait until the sound of her footsteps fades away.
She shuffles like she’s wearing slippers.
Had I opened my eyes, I probably would have seen my therapist in her pajamas. The thought is oddly intimate.
I roll over and stare at the ceiling. There’s enough moonlight streaming in the windows that I can make out the modern light fixture hanging down from the vaulted ceiling, a series of metal bars crisscrossing over one another, a tiny black ball on the end of each.
It looks like something out of a spy movie, a cross between a weapon and a cage.
What if it is something from a spy movie? Not literally, but—what if there are cameras concealed in those metal bars, giving my doctor a 360-degree view of the room and everything going on inside it? I stand on the bed and stretch my arms overhead, but the light is out of reach.
I shake my head and drop my arms. If these rooms were equipped with hidden cameras, Dr. Mackenzie wouldn’t check on me in the middle of the night. They don’t need cameras to keep watch.
I sigh. Jonah isn’t that far away. If I asked, he would get into his car and drive until he got here, despite what I did. It should be unforgivable, but he forgave me. He doesn’t even blame me. He doesn’t think it’s my fault.
Jonah would show up at dawn and bang on the gate, scale the barbed wire fence, rescue me like a princess locked in a tower.
If I asked, he’d spring Edward, too, and he wouldn’t even be jealous that I’d been spending late nights with a man who’s regularly featured as one of People magazine’s sexiest men alive.
Jonah would be happy I made a friend. He wouldn’t think I was awful for leaving Edward behind to run up the stairs tonight, too concerned about saving my own skin to slow down in solidarity.
Jonah would offer to help. He’d hold my hand through the dark of the woods, refusing to leave my side until I found what I’m looking for.
Even after everything that happened, Jonah doesn’t understand that I’m the ogre under the bridge, the evil villain who killed the innocent princess.
I tiptoe into the bathroom and turn on the dim light over the mirror that’s not a mirror, my reflection soft and slightly blurry as though someone has smudged my edges.
I wonder if they switched out the light bulbs just for me, from eighty watt to forty watt so I wouldn’t be able to study myself too closely.
I pull my shirt over my head, remove my bra, slide my leggings down to my ankles. I stand on my tiptoes. There are my tattoos—two of them, tiny, one in black ink and one in white. The white tattoo always looked like a scar, but even more so after what I did to it last spring.
My first morning here, when Dr. Mackenzie examined me, did she mistake it for a badly healed scratch like the ones on my inner thighs?
There are others I don’t think she could see, the repeated paper cuts hidden among the places where the skin wrinkles around my joints, my ankles and elbows, even between my toes. Only Jonah ever noticed those.
I turn on the hot water. I never go to bed without washing my face, brushing my teeth.
Even when I was in college, sleeping in someone else’s bed, I’d sneak into their bathroom and make do with whatever I could find—the makeup remover some ex-girlfriend left behind, toothpaste from a crusted tube.
I would not be like my mother, her eyes raccooned by smudged eyeliner each morning, her teeth stained with the previous night’s red wine, her hair matted into angry knots.
I pick at the paper cut on my forefinger, more out of habit than a desire to draw blood. Why wasn’t Georgia’s file in the cabinets I searched tonight? There must be some other place where they keep the files of their difficult patients, the ones whose treatment failed spectacularly.
Not just their files. Is there some other place where they keep the difficult patients themselves?
In my mind’s eye, I see the Cape Cod–style building in the woods, two people struggling outside it.
Edward says it was the light playing tricks on me, but he doesn’t know as much as I do about places like this.
He’s never been sent to a treatment center where they force-feed you through a tube, tie you to a bed, isolate you in a padded room.
Just because this place is shiny and luxurious doesn’t mean it’s really any different.
I asked Dr. Mackenzie how many patients this place could accommodate, but doctors lie to patients all the time, telling them that they’ve only gained two pounds when they really gained eight, as if a person can’t feel the difference.
I trace my hipbones, twisting my torso so they jut out like handles, then slide my hands over my bottom and down my thighs. Places like this love to tell their patients that they’re safe: This is a safe space, they say. You can reveal everything.
But if they knew why I’m really here, they might send me away before I find what I came for.
I close my eyes, seeing the dark house in the distance, the woman being restrained.
Did I really imagine it? Could that building be perfectly innocuous?
It could be empty, or used to store things as dull as outdoor furniture in the wintertime.
Maybe I’m crazy to think it’s anything more.
(Of course I’m crazy. No one comes to a place like this because they’re perfectly sane.)
Crazy or sane, there’s a chance my mother’s file is inside that building, which means I have to get inside, too.
Her file has to be somewhere.