Chapter 26 Amanda

CHAPTER 26 AMANDA

2000

Bolton Landing

The first months after the accident I spent hours daydreaming alternate scenarios for my life: I never take Annie to the island in the first place, or she comes back with the first responders—or, or, or. Living in these alternate worlds was a momentary relief, but then my reality—the endless rehab and my uncooperative legs—would come back into focus.

For a long time, the last image I saw before drifting to sleep was Annie, her face hovering above mine in the seconds after the fall. One of the things I remember feeling when she first appeared in that pool was relief. She was blocking the sun, and I couldn’t blink my eyes for some reason—probably shock—so I was thankful for her, for that small mercy. I Then she moved and the sun hit me again. At first, I thought she would be back in a few seconds, then I thought maybe a few minutes. Finally, I figured it would be longer.

I was always thinking about the distance between me and Annie. Wondering how far apart we might be at any given moment—thousands of miles, hundreds, tens? She couldn’t be just a town or two over, could she? No, not possible. I would hear her voice. Sense her. Smell her.

Waiting in line at the store, I’d find myself daydreaming, my mind creating a map of the country, and I’d place a stick figure of Annie in some possible location (at times Los Angeles, at times somewhere random like the middle of Texas) and I’d draw a mental line from me to her. Another kind of zip line, I guess.

At other times, to comfort or torture myself, I don’t know, I’d think of all the moments there was no space between us: a night in our sleeping bags, a kiss on her cheek, my arms thrown around her. I had become so dependent on her love. But then I could feel her affection dimming—at first imperceptible, then undeniable—and I had become desperate. Stupid, reckless, trying to be the coolest version of myself, the one I thought she loved most. Whenever my mind goes down this path, I end up on that zip line. All roads lead to it, I guess.

The accident altered everything about my world, even giving me a new unit of measurement: One zip line, which was approximately sixteen feet. The distance of my fall into the pool. I find that I’m always measuring the space between things: usually an object and the ground, vertically, but sometimes even between two things, like parked cars, laterally.

There’s a pizza shop in town, Iggy’s, and they hung a shingle about a year after the accident, red cursive lettering on wood, and now I can’t go by Iggy’s or see someone eating Iggy’s or hear someone talking about Iggy’s without falling again from that zip line because their sign hangs, according to my subconscious calculations, at the precise height above the sidewalk as the zip line was above the pool. What I’ve come to understand is that the feeling of those few seconds—my entire self at the mercy of the universe—will never go away. I’ve tried. I’ve closed my eyes and relived it, purposefully calling it to mind a hundred times in a row, my stomach turning like I was on the open seas, and what I can tell you is that the hundredth time was just as potent as the first. Eventually I had to realize no dilution of that memory would ever occur.

And still, I’m always thinking about those last few days together. Annie thought she was good at hiding her emotion. She thought she was hard to read; seriously, she thought she was. It was one of her weaknesses. (Hindsight being twenty-twenty.) But she could never keep emotion from those crisp brown eyes. I could see she was scanning me for flaws, in the name of self-preservation, because she wanted to stop loving me. That’s a tough vibe to hide. It felt like she was peering at me through binoculars, from behind a wall.

Which was the worst, seeing as I loved her so much. When she laughed, she squinted, and it was so adorable. Plus, that brain of hers, the higher plane she occupied, I was always trying to keep up.

In other words: She made life exciting.

A few days before it (“it”) happened, we were standing at the trunk of Brando, loading a bag for the trip, and she asked me, “Did you have any different dreams before you met me?”

I wasn’t sure how to react. I hated that I’d hurt her at junior prom, and I wished I hadn’t, but also I was mad that she was letting it affect our friendship so much. I thought we were better, deeper, stronger.

“You do realize you’re not the first person in the world to want to move to Hollywood, right?” I glared at her because, I mean, Fuck her , then I added, “Would you rather go alone? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

I wanted to clasp my hands over my mouth after I said this, put the question back inside. I didn’t want the answer. But Annie wasn’t confrontational; she preferred coded messages. It’s one reason she liked acting: Characters never say exactly what they mean. That would be so boring.

“Feisty,” she said. “I like it.”

I was relieved that the weirdness had passed. Hashing out our feelings in advance of Los Angeles seemed like an amateur move. We would get to Hollywood and get settled, and then we would talk.

She was about to shut the trunk when I asked her to wait. We’d forgotten our sleeping bags: mine was red and hers green, in honor of Christmas. We loved Christmas. As I tucked them snuggly in the back, I thought—as I often did—of the night we slept in my red sleeping bag on the balcony of a motel during a theater field trip. Some clerical error resulted in us staying at a motel instead of a cabin. The room was filthy in a way that jumpstarts the imagination: dark spots on pillows, stains on the comforter and mattress (we looked), yellow patches on the carpet. We were horrified at the range of bodily fluids on display.

At bedtime, we tried to get comfortable without touching much, just lying stiff on our backs staring at the ceiling. But above us were dark stains that seemed to be alive, so after a while Annie asked if I was still awake, and I said there was zero chance of sleep.

“Wanna sleep outside in your sleeping bag?” she asked, and it seemed like a genius idea. The room had a balcony with two plastic chairs, a table, and an ashtray and so we moved everything to the side and unrolled my sleeping bag on the cement. We were somewhere in the middle of New York State, surrounded by lakes and trees, and we angled ourselves so we could see the stars, bright above us.

We talked and talked. About a lot of things I don’t remember, and the night drifted on. We didn’t have a clock so who knows what time it was, and just as I was falling asleep, I heard Annie’s voice again. “Oh yeah,” she was saying. “I’ve been meaning to tell you.” I gave her a mmmm to let her know I was there, but also, I was in that in-between place, my eyes closed. She was talking about the week before, when she’d gone to the nearest town to run some errand.

“I go by that movie theater. You know the one that’s next to that one shop with all the weird baby dolls in the window, and we’re always wondering how it’s staying in business? And they have that old marquee up above, right, and I’m going by, and I read it and it says, ‘ Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett,’ except, oh my god Amanda, they spelled it with a K—Kate Blanchett.”

“Those fucking morons,” I whispered without opening my eyes. But her story was alive inside my mind. I was picturing it: the black letters against the white background, the understandable and yet utterly horrifying mistake of spelling out “Kate Blanchett.”

“We just cannot, absolutely cannot, live in a town that spells Cate Blanchett’s name with a K.”

“No, Annie, we absolutely cannot,” I said.

That anecdote—Kate, not Cate—became synonymous with We gotta get the fuck out of here . A hundred times over the next few years, something would happen—a boy crushing a beer can on his forehead, for example—and we’d look at each other and one of us would say, “Cate with a K,” and the other would reply, “Cate with a motherfucking K.”

Standing at the back of the Civic just days before we were supposed to leave town, I looked down at my tightly rolled sleeping bag that I’d had since I was twelve years old that would now make the long drive west. And because I badly wanted to feel like the version of Annie that was enamored with me, and us, and our big dreams, I said, “Cate with a K.”

I knew I was in trouble when she didn’t respond immediately, when she slammed down the trunk lid and said, “Yup.”

I . Note from Cate: When I read this detail, I had to stop for a few minutes to collect myself. This crystalized how little Amanda actually needed from me after the accident. I was running away from the story my brain had created, but all Amanda needed was for me to… stand still and block the sun from her eyes. And I wonder how many other things in life I’ve misjudged this badly. More than I could stomach, I’m sure.