Reconstructing Amelia

by Kimberly McCreight

  Kate opened and quickly closed two more of the gRaCeFULLY files. One had another dig about Sylvia—something about her being on the Pill—and there was no question why the last gRaCeFULLY had been saved.

  Amelia Baron has arrived, ladies and gentleman. That’s right, as of two nights ago, she’s officially a woman. So for all of you out there who’d hoped to hook that brass ring, too bad so sad—somebody beat you to the punch. And you’ll never believe who the lucky winner is. But you won’t hear it here. Some things even I know better than to put in writing.

  Staring at the screen, Kate’s throat started to burn again. She wasn’t upset that Amelia might have had sex—or maybe she was a little upset about that—but she was more hurt that her daughter hadn’t told her. She’d always imagined that she and Amelia would talk about it beforehand. For years, Kate had been preparing speeches about love and safety and trust. About being true to yourself while connecting with another person. About choosing carefully when and how much to give over to anyone. Kate had planned to tell Amelia all those things, things she should have known much better herself. And so why hadn’t she? What had she been waiting for?

  “Hey.”

  Kate startled and looked up toward the steps. Seth was slowly lowering himself into the kitchen. He looked as if he were hoping something would stop him from making it all the way there.

  “You found something,” Kate said.

  She could tell from the look on Seth’s face that he had. And whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  Seth nodded as he came over to sit down across from Kate. He pulled out a folded piece of paper that he had tucked into his shirt pocket. He put it on the table and slid it toward Kate but didn’t lift his fingers.

  “I found it in her desk drawer.” Kate tried to slide the note free, but Seth pressed his fingers harder against it. “Are you sure you should be doing this? What if you find out things that you’d be better off not knowing?”

  “If it happened to Amelia, I need to know it. I need to know everything, Seth.”

  He nodded finally, lifting his fingers. Kate unfolded the square of paper.

  The three little words screamed out from the center of the torn square of lined notebook paper. Kate’s chest tightened. Somebody had written that to Amelia? The letters looked so angry, too—jaggedy and thick, as if someone had leaned their full weight against the pencil.

  It didn’t make any sense. Amelia wasn’t the kind of girl people hated. She was smart and pretty and athletic. A girl people might have been jealous of, if she hadn’t been so fundamentally modest. She didn’t go around trying to draw attention to herself the way Sylvia did. How could someone possibly hate her?

  “I don’t understand,” Kate said more to herself than to Seth. “Who would have written something like this to Amelia?”

  Seth’s mouth turned down as he stared at the tabletop. Finally, he shook his head and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a stack of two dozen more similarly folded squares of paper. When he opened his hands, they rained down on the tabletop into an awful, lopsided pile.

  “They all say the same thing.” His voice was sad, but angry, too. “All twenty-two of them. I think they’re from different people. The handwriting’s not the same.”

  Kate’s hands hovered over the pile, her fingers moving in disbelief.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, unable to pull her eyes away from the notes.

  “I know,” Seth said. “It’s bad. But maybe it’s not what it looks like.”

  “Some kind of gang was harassing Amelia.” Kate turned to look at him, her eyes so wide they’d begun to burn. “What else could it be?”

  Seth shook his head and looked down. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have any fucking idea. To be honest, all I can think about right now is heading down to that school and slapping some kids upside the head. I can’t imagine how you feel.”

  “Neither can I,” Kate said, pressing her hands to her chest to see if her heart was still beating. “I can’t feel anything.”

  “I didn’t find a note from Amelia or anything. Nothing else really except a box under her bed with a bunch of your old journals and photo albums in it.”

  “Mine?” Kate had kept a journal religiously from middle school all the way up until she graduated from law school, when the demands of raising a baby and having a career made the prospect of having thoughts about her life—much less jotting them down at the end of the day—an absurd impossibility. She hadn’t seen the journals in years. “Under her bed?”

  “I’m pretty sure. Some of them are those black moleskin ones you were always carrying around in law school. I didn’t look in them or anything, but your name was on the front of one.”

  “What was she doing with my journals?” Kate asked.

  Maybe Amelia had never again asked about her dad because she’d gone and found all the answers herself. And what else was in there that Kate would not have wanted Amelia to read? Her agonizing over whether to keep Amelia? How she’d decided to keep her initially only to later turn up at the door of a clinic no fewer than four times, each time intent on not keeping her? Had she also read the part where Kate’s doubts about whether she should keep her baby had briefly ripened after her birth into regret that she had. Because those regrets had so quickly been overshadowed by love for her daughter. Deep, heart-wrenching, life-changing love. But would Amelia have kept reading long enough to get to that part?

  “I don’t know what she was doing with them,” Seth said. “But I know that nothing Amelia could have read would have changed how much she loved you. And she did, Kate. She really loved you.”

  “Then why do I feel even worse?”

  Seth reached forward and put his hand over Kate’s. “Because she’s still gone.”

  After Seth had reluctantly agreed that he should be heading home, Kate picked up Amelia’s phone again and went to her list of contacts. There were 367 names and numbers saved in her daughter’s phone. Kate had maybe a couple dozen in her own phone, including every living relative, all of her and Amelia’s doctors and dentists, and their last three cleaning women. How could Amelia have known so many people?

  Kate’s eyes rolled down the list of unfamiliar names. Many were girls, maybe even most. But there were lots of boys’ names, too: Adam, Aikin, Aiden, Arden—or maybe that was a girl. Kate recognized only a few of them. Bennett Weiss was someone Amelia had played soccer with back when she’d been young enough to be on a coed team. George McDonnell was another name Amelia had mentioned once or twice before, same, too, for Carter Rose.

  But then there were so very many others. The phone numbers were mostly local with a couple of Manhattan ones sprinkled in. Others, though, had area codes that Kate didn’t recognize. She scrolled up, checking the Bs for a Ben, and there he was, at the top: 518-555-0119.

  Kate was still staring at the list of names when somebody knocked hard on the kitchen windows. She jumped, cracking her knee against the leg of the table.

  “Sorry!” called the voice of a woman through the windows.

  In the dark outside, she was hard to make out beyond long dark hair. The woman pointed toward the door before her face disappeared from the windows.

  Kate made her way over to the ground-floor kitchen door slowly. She was not in the mood to talk to anyone. But the way the woman had pointed toward the door with such confidence made Kate suspect she wouldn’t leave just because she was ignored, at least not quickly. Kate took a deep breath before she slowly pulled open the door.

  The woman was standing the couple of steps up from the recessed kitchen floor, lit in the glow from the streetlight. With her long black hair, enormous black eyes, and delicate pale face, she was extremely beautiful, almost in a disconcerting way. She held out a perfectly manicured hand.

  “I’m so sorry to have startled you,” she said with a smile. Her lipstick was deep red, and flawless, too. She motioned toward the front steps above, leading to the upstairs door off the living room. “I
rang the bell upstairs. I don’t think it’s working by the way. Then I saw the lights on down here. And now you’d probably like for me to identify myself and tell you what I’m doing lurking around your home. I’m Adele Goodwin, I’m with Grace Hall’s PTA.”

  “Hi,” Kate said. As she reached to shake her hand, Kate noticed the huge diamond ring and matching band on the woman’s wedding finger, and the sparkling tennis bracelet on her wrist. Adele shuddered then, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. It was the first truly cold night of the year. “I’m sorry, come in,” Kate said reluctantly. “It’s freezing out there.”

  “Oh, are you sure? I don’t want to intrude. I’m realizing now that I should have called first. I hate unannounced visitors myself.”

  No, I’m not sure, Kate wanted to say. Because if Kate was uncomfortable around Grace Hall’s general parenting population, what she’d glimpsed of the PTA at back-to-school nights made its members some of the last people she would have wanted in her house. These were not the PTA moms of her childhood either, with bad jeans and plates of cookies and loads of free time to sew homemade Halloween costumes. Most of the women were creative types, architects or designers or writers, sometimes with flexible careers, but always with extremely lucrative ones. They were fashionably dressed and decidedly unwelcoming. Grown-up cheerleaders with impressive résumés and enormous bank accounts.

  “Oh no, that’s okay,” Kate said unconvincingly as she turned back toward the kitchen table and glimpsed all those awful little notes still piled up in the center. She rushed ahead, scooped them up, and dumped them in a nearby drawer. It was awkward and suspicious, but there was no alternative. Kate avoided eye contact and pointed toward the table. “Please have a seat. I was just . . . Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thank you, I’ve already imposed enough,” Adele said. Her coat was open now, revealing a pretty emerald wrap dress underneath and very tall fashionable heels. She had several heavy necklaces wrapped elegantly around her throat and she was looking around the kitchen, openly appraising it, though the conclusion she’d reached was unreadable. “I really don’t want to take up too much of your time. We just wanted to talk to you about some events the PTA would like to organize in Amelia’s honor. We didn’t want to go ahead without speaking with you first.”

  “Events?” Kate did not like the sound of that.

  Events meant parties. Parties she might be expected to attend. Kate wrote modest but not embarrassing checks to Grace Hall when asked to make contributions, but she’d always avoided events whenever possible. As an outsider to the school’s clubby parenting network, she would have felt too much like the odd man out. Attending now, when she was no longer a parent at all, was unthinkable.

  Adele waved a hand and shook her head, grimacing. “Events, I’m sorry, that sounded terrible,” she said, and she did look embarrassed. But there was something else, too, in her voice, a deliberateness that Kate found unsettling. “You’ll have to forgive me, it’s been a long day. I had back-to-back meetings, and my brain has liquefied.” Adele smiled again. This time it was a harder smile. “We’d like to honor Amelia at the auction by dedicating a memorial.”

  “Oh,” Kate said, even though she wanted to say no. Wanted to say: Please leave. “I’m afraid I probably won’t be of much help. My job . . . I work really long hours. It’s always been hard for me to make it to school events like the auction.”

  It was as good an excuse as any. Familiar, socially acceptable.

  “All we’d need from you would be some childhood photos and your permission, of course,” Adele said, her smile more relaxed now, warmer. Maybe she’d been nervous, uncomfortable having to talk with Kate about this. “And believe me, I understand completely about the work issue. You’re a lawyer, right? A partner at a firm?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, wondering if that was part of the narrative now surrounding Amelia’s death: her mother, the lawyer.

  “I am, too—a lawyer, I mean. I’m in-house now, at Time Warner. But back in the day I was an associate in the corporate department at Dechter, Weiss.” Adele shook her head, as a stiffness set over her face. “My job’s not exactly as challenging as being a partner in a big firm, but at least the hours are human. Especially having Zadie. I don’t know how you ever balanced—”

  Adele fell silent abruptly, seeming to realize the faux pas she’d been about to make. Because Kate evidently hadn’t balanced it all. Her daughter was dead, which hardly marked her parenting as a rousing success. Adele knit her fingers together on her lap, then shifted in her chair.

  “Anyway,” she said. She looked desperate to change the subject. “Which firm are you at?”

  “Slone, Thayer,” Kate said, racking her brain for an excuse that would get Adele to leave, immediately. We don’t have to do this, Kate wanted to say to her. You can just go. She willed her phone to ring, for the fire alarm to go off. “I’m a litigation partner.”

  “Ah, Slone, Thayer. Yes, that’s quite a place. It must be . . . interesting working there.” Adele grimaced. The firm did have a reputation of being especially cutthroat. “I knew a few people who went there straight out of law school. Seems as if it has quite an intense culture. I still know a few lawyers there, in fact. Maybe you know them?”

  “It’s a huge place,” Kate said. She had even less interest in playing the name game with Adele than she had in enduring more small talk. “There are hundreds of us in the New York office. If they’re outside of litigation, I’d never know them.”

  “Of course,” Adele smiled and fluttered her lashes. She’d gotten the message. “Anyway, I should be getting out of your way here. You can just send along the pictures when you have time. Oh, but there was one other thing. We don’t want to overreach, of course, but several children have indicated an interest in sponsoring a suicide awareness benefit in Amelia’s honor as well. They want to raise money for a national hotline. It seems like it might be an important part of the healing process for them. We were hoping that—”

  “No,” Kate snapped. Her voice had been too loud, almost like a bark.

  “No?” Adele looked startled, then confused, then a little annoyed. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to— I just.” Kate hesitated. What was there to say now, but the truth. “I’m not sure that Amelia killed herself.”

  “What?” Adele wrapped her fingers protectively around her throat. She looked frightened.

  “No, no.” Kate waved her hands. She should never have said anything. The last thing she wanted was for her suspicions to get back to the PTA. It wouldn’t garner her any more goodwill with the police to have a jittery hoard of Grace Hall parents pounding on the police station door. “I mean, it might have been an accident or something. There are still questions, that’s all. If you could hold off on a suicide benefit, at least one in Amelia’s honor, until I can get them answered, I would appreciate it.”

  “What kind of questions?” Adele’s eyes had popped wide open. She wasn’t getting tossed off the scent that easily.

  “Really, I can’t . . . the police . . . I’m sure you understand,” she said, hoping that Adele wouldn’t press her for more. But her eyes were still locked on Kate’s. Adele wasn’t budging without at least getting tossed a bone. “Something happened today. It might be nothing, but it—”

  “Might be something,” Adele said quietly. Her eyes were glassy now as they scanned back and forth across the tabletop, as if she was studying something written there. “Of course, yes, I see.”

  “Then you understand?” Kate was having a hard time believing that Adele wasn’t pressing her for more details. “You’ll wait on the suicide benefit?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. Of course. You just let us know when we can proceed.” Adele stood abruptly, then strode for the door. “And thank you for your time, Ms. Baron,” she said as she pulled it open. When she turned back, she reached out to shake Kate’s hand, flashing a smooth smile. “Your daughter was a lovel
y girl, Ms. Baron. I met her at the beginning of the year when she volunteered for the Harvest Festival. She was so polite and dedicated. You must have been very proud. The most exquisite, unusual eyes, too. That’s a family trait? Two different colors like that?”

  “No, it was a genetic disorder,” Kate said, trying to figure out how they’d veered off into this conversation when she’d been so close to getting Adele to leave. “Waardenburg syndrome. There’s no family history of it, but it can just happen randomly sometimes.”

  “Oh, I see, how unusual,” Adele said, staring at Kate in an odd, unsettling way. Finally, she turned on a heel and started down the sidewalk, raising one hand in a wave. “Well, they were lovely. Just lovely.”

  gRaCeFULLY

  SEPTEMBER 26TH

  * * *

  Because there are 176 definitions for the word loser on urbandictionary.com.

  Don’t Be a Statistic

  * * *

  Hey bitches!

  Word is out that Charlie Kugler is one of the new Magpies, too, but a little birdie told us her Yalie boyfriend is trying to get her to bail. I guess he likes his heiresses to wear underwear and whatnot.

  Oh, and on bobblehead watch: word on the street is that Tempest Bain has an appointment at Renfrew. Proving once again that no one is actually almost six feet tall and a hundred pounds without an eating disorder.

  Looks like George McDonnell is on the wagon again. My guess is it’s because he got locked up by the boys in blue over the weekend for smoking weed on the street down by the Old Stone House. Hey George, note to self, your parents are potheads, too . . . smoke the stuff at HOME.

  One final bit of faculty news, Liv was stood up AGAIN this weekend. Can you believe it? I don’t swing that way, but if I did, I’d never stand you up, Livy. You got to start meeting a better class of men, Liv. You should check out some of the dads. Trust me, they are all checking you out.