Chapter 40 Amelia Blue
Last night was so familiar: getting someone else out of bed, forcing fingers down another person’s throat. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know what to do.
Forcing Georgia to purge didn’t only teach me how to make someone else throw up. It taught me how to make myself vomit as well. #Promia social media is well and good, but I didn’t need tips from strangers to master that particular trick.
I flush the toilet, then pull myself up to sit on top of it.
“I thought—” Edward begins, then pauses.
He looks so sad and surprised that I want to slap him.
Or hug him. I don’t know which, any more than I know whether I want to keep throwing up or force thousands more calories down my throat.
If I start making a list of the things I don’t know instead of the things I do, I’ll never stop.
Finally, Edward says, “I didn’t know you were doing that to yourself.”
“I didn’t always.” I used to be so much better at starving.
“What happened?”
First, Jonah happened. The goofy boy from my writing workshop, the one I hadn’t intended to sleep with, the one who called me Abby like we’d known each other so long we had secret names for each other.
Licks from his ice cream cones, bites of his pizza.
My body was changing, but for the first time in my life, I wasn’t keeping track.
Then, late April, I was fast asleep when a wave of nausea woke me, so powerful that I barely made it to the bathroom in time. Jonah heard and came to sit beside me on the bathroom floor.
Food poisoning, we figured. I was eating then, but mostly off Jonah’s plate, still unsure how to fill my own. We both pretended not to notice when he served himself portions large enough for two.
I crawled back to bed. The next day, I felt better.
Two days later, I was sick again.
I thought maybe, after all those years of denial, my body didn’t know how to digest a normal number of calories. Maybe my stomach had shrunk so much that there simply wasn’t enough space, like someone who’d had gastric bypass surgery.
I bought the test on a whim. For years, anorexia had made my period erratic.
And then, there it was, the little pink line.
I was older than Georgia had been when she had me.
I’ll inherit my trust when I turn thirty, and the house in Laurel Canyon is in my name, bought and paid for.
My child would grow up thinking that Naomi was her grandmother.
Georgia would be a strange, absent woman we hardly spoke about.
Jonah would move to LA with me. We’d give our baby everything my parents hadn’t.
I pretended not to notice when I began eating less all over again.
Then I told myself I was simply being healthy: I needed to take it slow, give my body time to adjust. I read that plenty of women had such severe morning sickness that they actually lost weight in their first trimester and still had perfectly healthy pregnancies and nobody accused them of having eating disorders.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was being gentle on myself, being careful by letting myself be just a little bit (I told myself it was only a little bit) anorexic.
I started bleeding one day in May, so much I couldn’t believe it. Then, a mad dash to the emergency room. Waiting to hear a heartbeat as the technician moved the sonogram wand. The doctor’s mouth, set in a straight line. Jonah’s voice, telling me it would be okay.
“Amelia?” Edward asks gently.
“I lost it.” The words feel sharp in my mouth, like knives. I hate that phrase, I lost the baby, as though it were something I misplaced.
No, my baby fled. It knew I wasn’t a safe place, my body with the wrong nose, the wrong hair, the stomach that’s nearly flat instead of round with life, the brain that can’t count train cars.
Jonah brought me soup. He lay beside me and held me. He kissed the top of my head. He told me he loved me no matter what.
It’s remarkable to think how many human beings are the result of an accident, thoughtlessness, carelessness.
I certainly hadn’t been planned; my mother’s pregnancy, like my own, was a surprise.
I know this not because she told me, but because she was pregnant when they got married and no one actually plans to have a shotgun wedding.
(Also, when did Georgia plan anything?) Jonah would have married me, if I’d wanted, but I didn’t want to use our child to tether him to me like I suspected Georgia did with Dad.
Maybe it was the only reason she had me at all.
I thought I was better than that. Better than her.
But she got to keep her baby, and I lost mine.
It’s not your fault, the doctor said. These things happen.
Jonah believed it, but I know better.
So I left. I packed up my things and flew home without saying goodbye. I moved back to the house in Laurel Canyon and searched the boxes and bins where Naomi stored Georgia’s belongings years ago, making a mess even Georgia would have approved of.
I was determined to find something that would explain why I survived in her body longer than my baby survived in mine. I thought there might be some clue, some hint, in her unpaid parking tickets and baby-doll dresses and unreplied-to fan mail. Instead, I found the sober diary.
November 3, 2014. The last time I was sober this long was when I was pregnant. Not so much as a sip of wine.
“The press said I was born addicted to heroin,” I tell Edward.
He shrugs. “When I was born, they said my parents were happily married.” Edward knows better than to believe the things the press says.
But I believed it. My whole life, my birth story was part of how I understood myself, understood Georgia.
“It turns out, my mom almost died giving birth to me,” I tell Edward now.
After I read the November 3rd entry, I confronted Naomi.
She looked surprised that I wanted to know the details of my birth.
She’d told me, she said, that the press exaggerated to sell papers, didn’t I remember?
But this time, I pressed for details. Georgia, she said, developed a condition called preeclampsia.
They wheeled her in for an emergency C-section so quickly that the epidural hadn’t even taken effect by the time they started to slice her open.
When I asked why she hadn’t told me all this sooner, Naomi answered that she could hardly tell this story to a child; she hadn’t wanted to frighten me.
The hunger hit me in the middle of the night after Naomi told me the truth, waking me from sleep just as nausea had in the spring. I found myself in fast-food restaurants and ice cream parlors, as surprised to be there as if I’d sleepwalked.
The press hadn’t exaggerated to sell magazines. They had lied, inventing a story to fit their narrative. Georgia hadn’t stayed in the hospital after I was born because she was detoxing; CPS never came to keep my parents from bringing me home.
“It’s confusing,” Edward says. “When the press prints a lie with as much authority as they would the truth.”
With the hunger came the purging. It led me to the bathrooms of gas stations and department stores, the sorts of places where Georgia had shot up back in the day, so unsanitary it was a wonder she hadn’t contracted tetanus on top of everything else.
Now I was the one making a mess in public toilets, sticking dirty fingers down my throat, hands that still tasted of the grease and ketchup I’d been eating minutes earlier.
I lost so much weight, so rapidly, that Naomi agreed when I asked to come here. I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t hoping to be saved by yet another round of therapy and yoga and acupuncture and meal plans.
I came here to learn what I don’t know. Because I may know how many miles from our house to LAX and how many books I read last year and how many calories are in a strawberry, but I don’t know how Georgia turned out to be a better mother than I.
She was able to give up her disease (addiction) for her child—a child she barely paid attention to, didn’t even seem to like—while I couldn’t give up my disease (anorexia) for mine, a child I desperately wanted, a baby I already loved.
That’s the real reason I came here. The help I need is the explanation buried in my mother’s file.
Surely, this place’s experts (the best care money can buy) will have the answers that elude me, will be able to tell me which parts of her sober diary are true, and which are lies.
Because if it’s all true, then how could she keep her sobriety—something she surely knew I’d hoped for my whole life—secret?
Did she know, all along, that she was going to fall off the wagon yet again?
A breeze wafts through the sliding glass door. I hear the pipes groan as the heat turns on, like there’s something inside the walls trying to get out. Edward moves to close the door, but I stop him. I prefer the sound of music coming from the third cabin to quiet.
“I met her last night,” I tell him. “She crashed into me on the path between our cottages.”
“Is she famous?” He doesn’t add, like us.
“I didn’t recognize her, but she seemed to think I should.”
“Could you tell what she was in here for?”
I shrug, recalling her fur coat, her bare legs. “She looked like the sort of person you’d expect to see at a place like this. A basket case.”
“It’s not nice to call people names. Didn’t you say that?”
I shove him affectionately, like he’s my annoying little brother. “I said it wasn’t nice to joke about a disability.”
“I have a disability.” Edward grins. I think it’s the closest he’s come to making a joke about his leg.
“So you should know better.”
“What’s the tattoo on your shoulder?” Edward asks, changing the subject. He must’ve seen it when I showed him my scars.
“SH,” I explain, saying it like shhhh. “My dad’s initials. Scott Harris.”
“And the other one?”
He means the tiny white tattoo beneath my left breast, the one I destroyed in May.
“It was my mom’s initials.” Georgia was never as famous as my dad. More than once, someone identified me as the daughter of Scott Harris and what’s her name.
“Why did you ruin it?” Edward asks.
I close my eyes and hold my breath, recalling how it felt when I pressed a blade to my skin, the initial pain followed by sweet relief as my mother’s initials disappeared.
People say bodies are temporary, but they’re not, not for the people trapped inside them; for us, a body—its aches and pains, its scars and tattoos—is permanent.
It’s only temporary for the people around it, the ones who outlive it.
Finally, I answer, “It felt better to ruin it.”
“Why?”
I don’t answer.
The truth is, I don’t know.