Chapter 2 #5
“There are conditions that cause galactorrhea,” she agrees. “A pituitary or endocrine disorder, for example. Leaking breast milk can be an effect of antipsychotics, too.”
“That must be it, then,” I say, seizing this explanation with relief.
“Or,” she continues, “it could be the result of recently giving birth.” Her gaze pins mine. “But you said you don’t have children.”
My heart rabbits in my chest. Maybe I am having a heart attack. Maybe I will pass out. I do not know what made me think I could fool anyone. I can’t even fool myself.
Dr. Gruner leans forward. “Do you have a baby, Georgia?”
Without the voice in my head to censor the words, they leach out of me. “I had a baby,” I admit, and then the tears come—-a deluge.
“Where is that baby now?” the psychiatrist asks.
In the city, I think. Is Molly an orphan now? Did her father die on Tuesday, too? If anyone was supposed to die that day, it should have been me. I am the one who deserves it. I still do.
I am crying so hard now that Dr. Gruner puts her hands on mine. She tells me to breathe when she breathes, and I mimic her, until I am a quivering, spent mess. “Georgia,” she says gently, “did you lose your baby?”
I nod.
Because you can lose something and still know exactly where it is. You can have a leg amputated and still feel a phantom limb. You can be dead to someone and still go through the motions of existing.
I lost my daughter and I lost my husband and I lost myself.
Then Dr. Gruner says, “Before you left Boston, was anyone helping you with your grief?”
I blink as I realize what conclusion she has jumped to. Grief.
I’m seized by the wrongness of this—-the pretense that Molly is dead, when it’s Eloise Ambrose who is the casualty. Yet Molly must be dead to me if Georgia Gilligan is going to exist.
“Losing an infant is an incredibly traumatic experience—-one that could certainly trigger psychosis, and a suicide attempt. Now I can focus your therapy on grief counseling and baby loss groups,” the doctor says. “Was it a miscarriage?”
I hesitate. “She was two months old.” With five words, I bury my child.
Adam’s courtship of me continued from there.
His knee brushing mine under the table at the diner as Evie told a story about her day; his hand sliding along my arm as he took my coat at a frat party; a stolen kiss when we were listening to a band at a club and Evie was at the bar getting a drink.
But then, I started lying in earnest. I told Evie I was going to study in the library—-except I went to Wriston Quad and lay on the floor of Adam’s room, my head in his lap as I read a biography of Basquiat.
I said I couldn’t go thrift shopping with Evie because I had a seminar, when I was actually in the back of a dark theater kissing Adam.
At the end of April, Evie went to New York City on a field trip with her theater architecture class. As a result, Adam and I had two full, glorious days to ourselves. He told me to meet him at Meehan Auditorium after my last class.
I knew where the skating rink was, of course—-Evie and I’d been to his games. When I opened the door, Adam was waiting with a pair of skates that he held out to me.
He sat me down on a little bench and took off my shoes, sliding an extra pair of socks over my own and then lacing up the skates.
He skated the way he did everything else—-easily, fluidly, as if he’d been born to it. Adam held my hands, shifting his hips to move backward, pulling me along. My legs wobbled like a colt’s and my ankles kept folding in. “Use your edges,” he said. “That’s what’s anchoring you.”
What was anchoring me was Adam. He coached gently and carefully, even though I fell a hundred times. “Will you still like me if I can’t skate?” I asked.
His whisper fell into my ear. “I whizzed past like a long time ago, Ellie.”
Before I could respond, Adam grabbed my hands again and began skating backward. I focused on him as the rink flew by. I was no longer shivering. I was so hot I thought my hands might blister his.
I imitated him, shifting weight from my right foot to my left and back, the subtlest of dances.
“See? You’re doing it,” he said, grinning so that the dimple in his cheek popped. “Skating is just about finding a rhythm. It’s like sex—-”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than my skates slipped out from underneath me. I landed hard on my back, yanking Adam down on top of me. “I know even less about that than I do about skating,” I said.
We lay sprawled at center ice. He tugged at the ribbon on my braid, then kissed me. His lips were cool and firm and his leg fell between mine. My body answered in a language I didn’t know I could speak. “Adam,” I whispered. “Can you teach me?”
He drew back. “How to skate?”
I shook my head.
When we got back to his room, he closed the door and led me to sit on the bed. I let my head roll back as his lips chased down the column of my throat. I became a drop of ink dissolving in the sea of him.
Can I . . . ?
Is this . . . ?
All right . . . ?
He took me out of my head and into my body—-everything was pulse and flesh and breath. I didn’t notice when my shirt came off. When his hand slid between my thighs, I imagined the aperture of a camera opening to capture a world of light and color.
Adam’s hand slipped out of my underwear. His fingertips shone with me. I wanted to taste it. “I need you to tell me exactly what you want,” he said.
“More,” I gasped. “You.”
He rose to his knees and pulled off his shirt.
I was an artist. I knew anatomy. I could tell you how the trapezius and the deltoid and the pectoralis major intertwined; I could even sketch them. But the interplay of muscles on Adam’s torso was a masterpiece I’d never quite capture.
Then his hands went to the buckle of his belt.
As if he had flipped a switch, my body no longer belonged to him. I jackknifed, bucking him off my hips. I curled on my side, trying to become as small as possible. My heart raced for all the wrong reasons.
I was not at Brown. I was in an Evangelical church, in front of a congregation, being whipped for my carnal sins.
Adam got off the bed. Knelt beside it. “Eloise? What the hell?”
Slowly, I forced myself to face him. Shame flushed my cheeks. “I’m sorry,” I said, awkwardly sitting up. “I don’t know what happened.”
“It’s okay.” Adam frowned. “Ellie, did someone . . . hurt you?”
My eyes flew to his. “Not like you’re thinking.”
I didn’t want Adam’s pity. I wanted to rewind the night by two minutes, and continue where we had been, before my past got in the way.
“You know I’d never do anything like that to you, right?”
I nodded.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
My gaze slid to the floor, to our clothes, already mated in a heap. “No,” I managed.
Adam sat beside me again, his bare shoulder bumping mine. “So . . . just not a fan of belts, then.”
A laugh bubbled out of me. “Not really.”
“I could wear sweats from now on.” He kissed my wrist, the crook of my elbow, my shoulder. “Like old ladies in nursing homes.”
“Leggings,” I suggested, my lips twitching.
He smiled. “If that’s what it takes.”
Then his mouth was on mine and I was lying on the bed again with his weight pressing down on me.
If he removed his belt, it was so quiet I didn’t hear it.
I didn’t pay much attention when he tore open the packet of a condom and rolled it onto himself.
I just felt: the scratch of hair on his thighs and the heat of his fingers and finally the blunt notch of him against me. Adam caught my hands in his. “Yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
It burned. Although Evie had told me the first time hurt, this wasn’t what I had expected. Sex felt uncomfortable and oddly fiery. Adam peppered my face with kisses, and every time he shifted, there was a little more stretch and singe, until finally our hips were touching.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Is that . . . it?”
That dimple. “No,” Adam said, “not quite.”
He drew back, and the scald became a shudder. He pushed forward, and sparks singed.
For the first time, I understood why intimacy had been taboo in our church. This was the face of God. How could religion ever compete?
After, Adam cleaned me up and pulled the covers over us.
We slept naked, twined to fit the narrow mattress.
Twice during the night I woke—-once when I felt him hard against my bottom, and once when he trailed kisses down my belly and between my legs.
By the time the sun came up, my eyes were scratchy with lack of sleep, I had soreness in muscles that I hadn’t known existed, and I would not have traded any of it for the world.
We decided to go to Ruby’s for breakfast. I pulled on my shirt and Adam pulled it back off just as fast, and our departure kept getting delayed by sly smiles that turned into sighs. Finally, when my stomach growled, Adam let me button the last button and fasten the last zipper.
He opened the door of his dorm room, and on my way out I nearly tripped over Evie.
She sat in the hallway, blinking sleep from her eyes as if she’d been waiting for a while. Long enough, I realized, to hear us. “Well,” Evie said flatly. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Evie had tossed all my clothes out the window of our dorm room, and they bloomed like giant flowers in the courtyard as other students picked their way through the detritus of our argument. Adam gathered my clothing into a trash bag while I went to my room to get the rest of my things.
“Evie,” I said, when I was standing in front of her. “We didn’t mean to—-”
“We,” she repeated.
“It just . . . happened.”
“Which would have been bad enough, but you lied to me. And then you kept lying to me.”
She was right. Sleeping with Adam was breaking a promise, but worse than that, I had hid the truth from her. Had I thought it would be kinder that way? Had the secrecy made our relationship even more intense? I didn’t know. So I offered the only justification I could. “I love him, Evie.”
She scoffed. “You and me against the world, huh? Fuck you, Eloise.” Then she stormed out of the room.