Chapter 53 Amelia Blue
I pick up the file gently, moving slowly, like it’s made of glass.
Why is it here, on this desk, away from all the others in the room beside the gym?
Inside, there are pages of neatly typed doctor’s notes.
After all this time, I can hardly believe I’m about to read exactly what Georgia’s care manager wrote.
Did they call her narcissistic, addicted, emotionally immature?
Did Georgia share stories she never told me—why she and Naomi never got along; how she met my father and what it was like when they were in love; her thoughts when she found out she was pregnant?
But my eyes pass over the doctor’s words and land on a medium-size spiral notebook beneath the file.
Months ago, when I went through Georgia’s things, the sober diary wasn’t the only notebook stacked in Naomi’s many bins.
In fact, there were dozens of them, going back years, some filled with doodles, poems, a couple of the songs from her first albums. My mother was never, not once, without a notebook.
Even when she was high, even (according to stories) in the delivery room before I was born—my mother always kept a pad of paper to scribble potential lyrics into.
The tattoos that snaked up and down her arms and legs were lyrics she’d etched into her skin for all the world to see.
I went to school for poetry, but I never particularly cared about it. I studied writing because it’s what my parents did, like I was going into the family business, the result of a failure to imagine that I might be capable of something else.
I can smell my mother on this notebook now, her particular combination of hair dye and patchouli, sweat and ink. She must have brought this here, began writing in it after filling the one I found. How could I have thought that one was her final notebook? Of course she brought another one to rehab.
A lump swells in my throat as I learn something I didn’t know, a fact I hadn’t been looking for but can no longer deny: I miss my mother.
I lay my phone on the cabinet in front of me, the light facing up. My hands shake as I lean over the pages, eager to see what my mother left behind.
Before I can read a single syllable, a hand lands on my wrist, hot and dry, gripping hard like a handcuff.