• • •
I am left alone, surrounded by unmoving bodies. We are not much different, the bodies and me. Even the palm trees are still. But I know the stillness is an illusion. I know beneath it there are machines that never stop running.
I look up at the windows on the second floor, at the figures darting around behind the curtains, and I don’t know if they are tonight’s guests or the apparitions I saw before. They are restless, just like Ivy. They are shadows intersecting with other shadows. They are hungry ghosts on their endless quest for something to fill them up.
18
Pancakes with Papa and Daddy. Gotami purring on the sofa. A ray of sun breaks through the window, hitting Daddy’s crystal hanging above the kitchen sink and bathing us in a million tiny rainbows. This is where I learned how to be happy.
But something is off, like wallpaper peeling. Everything is frayed at the edges. Something hidden wants to be seen, something beneath the surface.
This little world at the end of the gravel driveway, this oasis in the forest—it is too perfect, too safe. I do not belong here. Not anymore.
Is this what it means to grow up? To realize you’re broken and unsafe?
My fathers talk about something but I do not hear them. I am supposed to call Lily today but I will not.
When my phone buzzes with Ivy’s text, I realize I was waiting for it all morning.
“I’m going for a walk,” I say, and my fathers smile. Such a wholesome thing, walking.
When I arrive at Ivy’s, a cleaning crew of half a dozen people is hard at work erasing the debauchery of last night. One woman sweeps up broken glass. One man aims a hose at a puddle of vomit. A private security guard carries an unconscious man down the front steps.
I climb the stairs to Ivy’s bedroom on the second floor. It’s the size of three of my rooms combined. Ivy sits in the middle of her king-sized bed, in a silky white slip, propped up by an elaborate construction of pillows. Light filters in through the thin slats of her wooden blinds, illuminating the dark room in brief, dusty segments. The place is trashed, covered with piles of clothes and boxes and bags, with the sour smell of spilled wine and old plates of food.
At first, Ivy doesn’t know I’m here. I stand in the doorway for a long time, watching her face suspended in the darkness, lit by the cold glow of her phone. She is scrolling, in a trance, on autopilot, her world condensed to whatever appears on the tiny screen.
I close the door behind me, and the sound finally catches Ivy’s attention. “You’re here!” she says, her voice light with its practiced exuberance, but her face is blank, unmoving from her phone.
I stand in the doorway, waiting to be told what to do. Ivy finally sighs and puts her phone down on the dresser next to her, next to an empty bottle of wine and a couple red-ringed glasses and crumb-covered plates and crumpled-up napkins. “You know people go to rehab for phone addiction?” she says. She looks up and smiles, and it’s now that I notice the bags under her eyes and the sickly pale of her skin. She is not the sparkling girl of last night, not the one collecting shiny, useless things. This morning, she is bare, raw-skinned. She’s what’s left after that other girl is done.
Ivy pats the place next to her on the bed. I am beckoned. I am the last shiny thing left.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” I say.
“Climb in,” she says, flipping open the blankets. I kick off my shoes and get in, feel something like sand on my bare legs, smell the unwashed sheets and the remnants of who knows what bodies, and I wonder if the housekeepers have been too scared to come in here.
“Spoon me,” she says.
She lies down on her side and presents me with her back. She smells of alcohol sweat and cigarette smoke, but still I warm as I fit myself around her, as I turn into her shape.
“I can’t find any sleeping pills,” she says.
The thing she’s wearing is not clothes. It’s a thing women wear as a promise of what is underneath. She did not put it on for me, but it is me who is here now.
“Put your arm around me,” she commands.
I press myself into her. She is only her back, these flimsy silk straps, the tiny hairs on her smooth skin. I brush my cheek against her shoulder blades. Maybe she will think it was an accident.
“Give me your hand,” she says.
She smells like unwashed hair and miles and miles and miles between us.
She adjusts her hips, pulls up her slip, opens her legs just a little, and places my hand on the part of her that is burning in me. She guides my fingers to a place that makes me gasp, but I know she does not hear me.
She rocks against my hand, holding it in place with her own like I am her tool. And I am somewhere else, miles and miles and miles away, with all of my clothes still on, my yearning like a wound.
I imagine I become her, my skin is her skin, my body is her body, my other hand, my fingers, are hers, and I do to myself what I am doing to her, and she cannot see me as I press against her, as she pulls away toward herself.
It does not take either of us long. And then it is done. My work is finished. I am finished.
Ivy can finally sleep. And I am still, unbearably, awake.
19
The parties are over. Cars show up to a locked gate.
* * *
• • •
It’s getting hotter. Pine needles are turning brown and falling shriveled to the ground. The lake in the center of the island is shrinking. The earth is cracking.
* * *
• • •
I have not heard from Ivy in days. She has been too busy with Ash. They have been locked inside her house.
* * *
• • •
Socialites wander up and down Olympic Road, dressed for a party that does not exist, not quite sure what they’re looking for—a secret entrance, a portal, a clue, any good reason why they took a boat and drove miles around an island to get to this nowhere place, why they’re wobbling in heels on a rural road with no sidewalk or streetlights and no one to see how good they look.
* * *
• • •
People are saying she went off the deep end again. A breakdown. An overdose. A suicide attempt. People are saying she’s not eating. She’s strung out on a dozen different drugs.
But I know the truth. It is far less interesting than all that.
* * *
• • •
Ivy’s mother swishes down the driveway with a picnic basket just like Daddy’s, full of snacks and a thermos full of gin and tonics. She is one of those drive-in waitresses you see in black-and-white movies, the kind on roller skates that come to the window of your car to take your order. She goes car to car, charming the men here to make money off of spying on her daughter. She is on the hunt for the most handsome, the most bored.