Reconstructing Amelia

by Kimberly McCreight

  “Shit,” Sylvia whispered, waving for me to follow her. “Come on.”

  We crept around and ducked into a cramped little alcove on the far side of the roof and squatted down. A minute later, Liv came around the corner. Sylvia and I looked at each other, mouthing “OMG” in unison as she pulled out her phone to call somebody.

  “Hi, yes, this is Liv Britton,” she said. “Oh, thank you. I’m so glad. That’s a huge compliment coming from you. But I think I’m going to have to retract the manuscript. Things have gotten complicated at my school, and—”

  She was quiet for a minute, probably as the other person talked. She was chewing on one of her fingernails.

  “Yes, I was definitely assuming I’d change all the names. But even so, I think—” She nodded through another pause. “Yes, I am aware of that. Okay, yes, I’ll think about it. Thank you for your time. I’ll be in touch.”

  Liv hung up and stared down at her phone for a minute. She took a deep breath and blew it out loudly before heading back toward the steps. We stayed down until we heard the door close behind her. Luckily, she was long gone when my phone signaled with a text.

  BEN

  Not mad are u? I know I suck . . .

  AMELIA

  It’s ok, really

  BEN

  R u sure?

  AMELIA

  Totally.

  BEN

  U’ll b okay?

  AMELIA

  Yes. Def. Have fun. Xoxox; we’ll still meet soon! I’ll make sure of it ;)

  “Who was that?” Sylvia asked.

  “Ben, he’s in town.” I said, already knowing what her reaction would be.

  “You’re not actually planning on seeing him, are you?” she asked. “Because over my dead, lifeless body are you meeting up with that psycho.”

  Sylvia walked over to the edge of the roof then, which had a weirdly low wall around the top. Just seeing her that close to the creepy edge gave me vertigo. She was standing with her back to me.

  “Can you step back?” I asked. “You’re freaking me out. What if you trip?”

  Sylvia took one tiny half step back, which didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Ian broke up with me,” she said. “He brought me up here an hour ago to do it. Maybe he thought the view would soften the blow.”

  Crap. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but that didn’t actually make it any better.

  “Are you okay? I mean, I’m sure that sucked. He’s such a douche.”

  Sylvia tilted her face a little then, so that it faced the sun. In the glow, she looked even more sad. Poor Sylvia. If I’d totally seen it coming, she must have, too. But I still felt awful for her. And I wanted so much to have something more to say, something really great, the kind of thing Sylvia had said to me about Dylan. But everything jumping to mind sounded hollow and stale, even just in my head.

  “You want to know what he said to me?”

  “What does it even matter what that dickhead thinks?” I asked.

  But it mattered to Sylvia. She needed for me to know.

  “He said he wasn’t sexually attracted to me. And when I was, like, ‘What are you talking about? We have sex all the time.’ He was, like, ‘Yeah, we do, but basically I’ve only been doing that because I felt bad for you.’ ”

  When she turned toward me, she was full-on bawling. I went over and wrapped my arms around her shoulders.

  “He’s just saying that,” I said, burying my face in her neck. “You know that, right? You’re beautiful.”

  She shook her head and sniffled. “I’m not as pretty as I used to be. I know that.”

  “That’s nuts, Sylvia. What are you talking about?”

  The worst part was that she was kind of right. Sylvia had been a crazy-looking little kid, like off-the-charts cute. The kind of kid people stopped on the street and gawked at in restaurants. It wasn’t that she was ugly now or anything. But she was a lot more average.

  “I’m not like you,” she whispered as I squeezed her even tighter. “Pretty is all I have.”

  I pulled back to look her in the eye.

  “Sylvia, that is not true,” I said, and suddenly everything that was so amazing about her rushed at me. “You are funny and loyal and supportive and honest, and I wish I had a quarter of the passion that you have. You’re my best friend, Sylvia, and I don’t know what I’d do—”

  Her phone alerted with a text. I prayed it wouldn’t be from Ian. As bad as this was, it would be worse for him to get back together with her only to break up with her again later, which he definitely would, eventually. And from the way Sylvia was frantically digging for her phone, I could tell that a text from Ian was exactly what she was hoping for.

  “Who’s this?” Sylvia asked, looking down at the screen when she’d finally found it. “Blocked number . . .” Her voice drifted as she tapped open a message.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know . . . some picture. The note says, ‘Look in mirror.’ ” She tapped the screen again. Made a confused face at me. “It’s you. Why are you in your underwear? Was this some kinky thing you did with Dylan.” She sounded totally entertained. “I’m kind of impressed, Baron. It’s ballsier than I would have given you credit for.”

  She turned her phone toward me. Sure enough, there I was making my sexy face. It was the furthest I’d gone in any of the shots, my legs open, leaning over toward the camera. I hated seeing the picture again. It was so humiliating. I handed the phone back to Sylvia.

  “Ugh, gross,” I said. “It’s a long story. But trust me, there was nothing sexy about it.”

  “Look in mirror,” Sylvia muttered as she turned back down to her phone. “It’s, like, a clue.” She used her fingers then to enlarge the picture. “Holy shit,” she whispered as I watched the color drain from her face. When she looked up at me, her eyes were wild, crazy. “Holy fucking shit!”

  “What?” I asked, leaning forward to see what she’d seen. But she was swinging her phone in the air like a lunatic. “Sylvia, calm down! What is it?”

  “You fucking bitch!” she shouted, suddenly charging at me with those crazy eyes.

  “Who’s a bitch? What are you talking about, Sylvia?!”

  “You!” She screamed like some kind of animal. I’d never heard a person make that kind of noise. “You’re a fucking bitch!”

  Finally, she shoved her phone in my face. There in the photograph, in the blown-up reflection of the mirror, was Ian Greene.

  “Sylvia, no,” I said, my heart pounding. I took a step backward, as if that could somehow move time back to a place where she’d never seen the picture. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “Oh no?!” she screamed again. Her face was all red and veiny, and she was holding her phone back like she was going to whack me across the face with it. “Because what it looks like is that you were the Magpie that was fucking around with my boyfriend!”

  “Zadie set the whole thing up. Come on, think about it, Sylvia.”

  “You fucked him because the Maggies told you to!”

  “No, Sylvia, no,” I panted. I’d backed up so much that my legs were jammed against the little wall. “I didn’t have sex with Ian. Nothing happened between us.”

  “Except fucking this!” She jammed the phone at me harder this time and I bent back, trying to stay clear. “Naked fucking pictures! Do you even like girls? Or is that just a thing you made up so you could try to steal my boyfriend!”

  She swung her arm back then and slammed the phone down hard against my collarbone. I winced and leaned back, my chest throbbing from where she’d hit me. It was too much. All too much. They were never going to stop. They were never going to leave me alone. I tried to move, to get farther away from Sylvia before she tried to hit me again.

  Then, all of a sudden, it was like something behind me gave way. I put my hands out to catch the wall, braced myself for pain when my back scraped against it. But there was nothing there, no pain. Just gravity. And
I kept going, and going.

  And then I saw this look on Sylvia’s face. I saw in her eyes the awful thing that had already happened. That we were powerless to stop.

  “No!” she screamed, trying to grab me. “Oh my God, Amelia!”

  And I tried. I tried to grab her back. I tried so hard to hold on.

  facebook

  OCTOBER 24

  Amelia Baron

  “I am rooted, but I flow.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  Epilogue

  MARCH 7

  “It’s getting warmer,” Kate said as she lowered herself onto a patch of cold, manicured grass. It was unseasonably mild for early March but still coat weather. The words were barely out of Kate’s mouth, though, when the wind picked up, cutting into her. “Okay, maybe only a tiny bit warmer, but if you were here, you’d probably think it was time for summer. That was always you, asking to wear short sleeves as soon as the snow melted. ‘I won’t be cold, Momma.’ ” Kate smiled, thinking of Amelia’s round little face, making all those little-girl promises. So fervent and sure. “The funniest part was how I’d always bring along your coat, counting on you to change your mind when you felt the cold. But you never did. Not once. So perfectly stubborn. So perfectly perfect.”

  Kate teared up as her voice drifted. Sometimes she made herself promise that she wouldn’t cry when she went to visit Amelia at the cemetery. Sometimes she just accepted that she would. Either way, she cried every time.

  Still, inch by slow inch, the darkest of her grief had begun to lift or perhaps shift, leaving behind only her longing for Amelia. Kate was even coming to accept that no matter how tight she tried to hold on to each and every detail about her daughter, she could not prevent their gradual fade. She could only mourn their loss.

  In the few months since Amelia had died, there were things Kate had already forgotten. She could no longer remember what Amelia had smelled like, even though she hadn’t given up searching for some hint of it still buried in her pillows. Kate couldn’t remember either that thing Amelia would do when she was eager to end a conversation: had it been two snaps of her fingers and then a thumbs-down, or three snaps and then a finger point? Lost, too, were the ages Amelia had been when she’d finally learned to ride a bike, which tooth she’d lost first, and how much money Kate had left under her pillow.

  But what Kate did recall was frozen to crystalized perfection. She could still feel the weight of Amelia’s newborn head resting in the crook of her neck as they slept upright in the rocking chair. She remembered how she’d shouted in delight when Amelia had said her first word—dog—but so loudly that Amelia had burst right into tears. Kate remembered the time she sent Amelia to nursery school without a diaper on. And the horrified look on Amelia’s face when she was eight and Kate had tried to explain sex one morning on their way to school. Kate remembered the sweet, infrequent bliss of Amelia hugging her as a teenager. And what it had felt like to see her cry hard at that same age, nearly grown-up tears.

  In the end, Kate recalled all that she needed to. Everything that had ever really mattered. Especially, how very much she had loved her daughter. And how very hard she had tried. The rest—the shortcomings, the mistakes, the things Kate would have done differently—she was working to forget. Because Seth was right. So much of how it turned out now seemed like luck, good and bad.

  “I saw Julia today,” Kate said. “Sylvia wants to come to see you here, to tell you how sorry she is. I said that I thought that would be fine. I hope I’m right to believe what Sylvia says happened on the roof. That it was an accident. I think I am. But I’m still not sure what the police are going to do. Even if she’s telling the truth now, she lied about so much and for such a long time.” Kate took a breath, running her hand over the well-tended grass. “Zadie is gone finally, some boarding school in upstate Connecticut for troubled girls. Her mom is off the school board and the clubs are shut down for good, too, at least as far as everyone knows. It’s not enough; nothing will ever be enough. But it’s a start, I guess.”

  Kate wanted to be able to tell Amelia that Dylan had written, saying that she really had loved Amelia after all. But she hadn’t heard from Dylan, not a single word. Kate pulled her coat tighter around herself and looked out from the top of the hill where Amelia was buried over the rolling hills of Greenwood Cemetery, past an ugly strip of worn-out bodegas and the huge Home Depot, to the horizon of New York Bay.

  “I feel like I owe you an apology, that I’ve owed you one for a long time. I should have told you everything about your dad from the start,” Kate said. She had been planning this speech for a while, but it was still hard to get the words out. “You had a right to know what I knew, even if I was wrong about what the truth was. It turns out that your father is Jeremy Firth. Yes, that Jeremy. We only had sex once and he was married and it was wrong. I was confused and lonely, and it was just something that happened. But it led to something great: you.”

  Kate shook her head and twisted some strands of grass through her fingers. She thought then about Phillip. So far it had been only one cup of coffee and a couple of e-mails. With his short salt-and-pepper hair, the soft lines around his eyes, and his clean-shaven face, he looked nothing like Rowan had. But Phillip reminded her so much of that passionate boy she’d known so very briefly, so many years ago. She wondered whether or not Amelia would approve, but she had to believe that she would. Gretchen had been right about that much: Amelia would want Kate to be happy.

  “There was a boy in the bar . . . I didn’t lie about that,” Kate said. “Maybe you already know that. Maybe you read all those old journals of mine, I’ll never know for sure. I think all along I just wished he’d been your father. Not even him, really—I mean, I barely knew him—but the idea of him. And over the years, that idea of him became all the greatest parts of you. I believe Phillip when he says he knows that you were one of a kind. He saw in you what I always saw, and I need that right now. To be with people who know that the world is a darker place without you in it.”

  Kate took a deep, shaky breath, and tried not to cry.

  “I want you to know, too, that even though Jeremy was a mistake for me,” Kate went on, her voice breaking up, dissolving in the wind. “you were never a mistake, Amelia. You were the best thing that ever happened to me. You always will be.”

  It was too late to change anything. Too late to make different choices. To be a better mother than she had been. Kate could only be the mother that she was, Amelia’s mother—the curator of her memory, the keeper of her secrets, the cherisher of her heart. That, she would always be.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest gratitude to my agent and personal superhero, Marly Rusoff, the most compassionate and dedicated advocate an author could hope for. I can’t thank you enough for standing by me through this book’s many iterations, and those of the manuscripts that came before it. To Michael Radulescu, for all your help and your much-appreciated levity; and Julie Mosow, a keen editor, a great creative partner, and a wonderful friend.

  To my amazing editor, Claire Wachtel, your incomparable insights have improved not only this book but also me as a writer. Working with you has been an honor. Thank you to Jonathan Burnham for giving me this incredible opportunity. Thanks also to Elizabeth Perrella and everyone in HarperCollins’s marketing and sales departments for your enthusiasm and all of your hard work on my behalf.

  To Megan Crane, thank you for leading by example, for always being willing to read yet another draft, for telling me the truth when it mattered, and for lying to me when I needed you to. Most important, thank you for your remarkable friendship. Without you to talk about writing and life with over the years, this sometimes harrowing journey would have ended a long time ago.

  Thank you to Victoria Cook, for her excellent cheerleading and for swooping in to save the day so many times. To Elena Evangelo, for her warmth and boundless optimism; and to Cara Cragan for her faith.

  Thank you to my dedicated readers and precious friends whose f
eedback and encouragement have been invaluable: Cindy Buzzeo, Heather Frattone, Nicole Kear, and Tara Pometti.

  To the very many of you out there who offered such generous words of encouragement over the past decade—Catherine and David Bohigian, the Cragan family, the Crane family, Jeremy Creelan, Joe and Naomi Daniels, Larry and Suzy Daniels, Charmaine De Grate, Dave and Joannie Fischer, David Kear, Merrie Koehlert, Hallie Levin, Brian and Laura Mayer, Diane Mehta, Brian McCreight, the Metzger Family, Jason Miller, Sarah Moore, Frank Pometti, Jon Reinish, the Thomatos Family, the members of my very talented Park Slope writer’s group, and everyone else I’ve forgotten—thank you for believing in me, especially at those moments when I no longer believed in myself.

  Thank you also to my parents, stepparents, and family, as well as the Prentices—Martin, Clare, Becky, Mike, and Steve—whom I feel so very lucky to call my family now, too.

  To my husband, Tony, this book is truly yours as much as it is mine. Without you, I never would have had the courage to write a single word, much less the hope to see it through. Thank you for your generosity and your honesty, your patience and your belief. Thank you for making me laugh, for challenging me to think, and for making me feel understood. I could not ask for a more incredible husband and best friend.

  And to my own perfectly perfect girls. Thank you, Harper, for your amazing empathy, outstanding hugs, and for telling me that you were proud of me on days when it felt like no one was. Thank you, Emerson, for standing printer-side, counting pages, for telling me that you want to be an artist someday, and for your incredible smile, which could lighten even the darkest day. Know that no matter how big you girls get, no matter where you go, or who you grow into, I will always love the whole of each of you, without reservation. And your secrets, whatever they end up being, will forever be safe with me.

  About the Author

  Kimberly McCreight attended Vassar College and graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. After working as a litigation associate at some of New York City’s biggest law firms, she left the practice of law to write full-time. Her work has appeared in such publications as Antietam Review, Oxford Magazine, and Babble. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her husband and two daughters.