Handle With Care (30 page)

“Assumed what?” I interrupted. “That just because my mother’s a jerk, I’m one, too?”

Suddenly Rob stepped into the reception area, snapping a pair of rubber gloves off his hands. He used to blow them up for Emma and me, and draw little faces on them. The fingers looked like the comb of a rooster and felt as soft as a baby’s skin.

“Amelia,” he said quietly. He wasn’t smiling, not one iota. “I guess you’re here about your braces.”

It felt like I had been walking in a forest for the past few months, a place where even the trees might reach out to grab you and nobody spoke English—and Rob had said the first rational, normal sentence I’d heard in a long time. He knew what I wanted. If it was so easy for him, why did nobody else seem to get it?

I followed him into the examination room, past the snarky receptionist and the dental hygienist whose eyes went so wide I thought they might pop out of her head. Ha, I thought, walking beside him proudly. Take that.

I expected Rob to say something like Look, let’s just get this over with and keep it strictly business, but instead, as he settled the paper bib over my shoulders, he said, “Are things okay for you, Amelia?”

God, why couldn’t Rob have been my father? Why couldn’t I have lived in the Reece household, and Emma could have been in mine, so I could hate her instead of the other way around?

“Compared to what? Armageddon?”

He was wearing a mask, but I pretended that, behind it, he cracked a smile. I’d always liked Rob. He was geeky and small, not at all like my father. At sleepovers Emma would tell me my father was movie-star handsome and I’d tell her it was gross that she even thought about him like that; and she’d say if her dad was ever in a movie, it would be Revenge of the Nerds. And maybe that was true, but he also didn’t mind taking us to movies that starred Amanda Bynes or Hilary Duff, and he let us play with brace wax and fashion it into little bears and ponies when we were bored.

“I’d forgotten how funny you can be,” Rob said. “Okay, open up…You may feel a little pressure.” He picked up a pair of pliers and began to break the bonds between the brackets and my teeth. It felt weird, like I was bionic. “Does that hurt?”

I shook my head.

“Emma doesn’t talk much about you these days.”

I couldn’t speak, because his hands were in my wide-open mouth. But here’s what I would have said: That’s because she’s become an überbitch, and she hates my guts.

“It’s obviously a very uncomfortable situation,” Rob said. “I have to admit I never thought your mother would let you come back to me for orthodontic care.”

She didn’t.

“You know, orthodontics is really just physics,” Rob said. “If you had brackets or bands on crooked teeth alone, it wouldn’t do anything. But when you apply force in different ways, things change.” He looked down at me, and I knew that he wasn’t talking about my teeth anymore. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

Rob was cleaning the composite and cement off my teeth. I lifted my hand and put it to his wrist, so that he’d remove the electric toothbrush. My spit tasted tinny. “She’s ruined my life, too,” I said, and because of the saliva, it sounded like I was drowning.

Rob looked away. “You’ll have to wear a retainer, or else there could be some shifting. Let’s get some X-rays and impressions, so that we can make one up for you—” Then he frowned, touching a tool to the backs of my two front teeth. “The enamel’s worn down a lot here.”

Well, of course it was; I was making myself puke three times a day, not that you’d know it. I was just as fat as ever, because when I wasn’t puking, I was stuffing my disgusting face. I held my breath, wondering if this would be the moment someone realized what I’d been doing. I wondered if I’d actually been waiting for that all along.

“Have you been drinking a lot of soda?”

The excuse made me feel weak. I nodded quickly.

“Don’t,” Rob said. “They use Coke to clean up blood spills on highways, you know. Do you really want that in your body?”

It sounded like something you would have told me, from one of your trivia books. And that made my eyes fill with tears.

“Sorry,” Rob said, lifting his hands. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Me neither, I thought.

He finished polishing my teeth with the toothpaste that felt like sand and let me rinse. “That is one gorgeous occlusion,” he said, and he held up a mirror. “Smile, Amelia.”

I ran my tongue over my teeth, something I hadn’t been able to do in nearly three years. The teeth felt huge, slick, like they belonged in someone else’s mouth. I bared them—not a smile but more of a wolf’s grimace. The girl in the mirror had neat rows of teeth, like the string of pearls in my mother’s jewelry box that I’d stolen and hidden in one of my shoe boxes. I never wore them, but I liked the way they felt, so smooth and uniform, like a little army marching around your neck. The girl in the mirror could almost be pretty.

Which meant she couldn’t be me.

“Here’s something we give out to kids who’ve completed treatment,” Rob said, handing me a little plastic bag with his name printed on it. “Thanks,” I muttered, and I leapt out of the chair, yanking the bib off.

“Amelia—wait. Your retainer—” Rob said, but by then, I had already fled into the reception area and out the front door. Instead of heading downstairs and out of the building, though, I ran upstairs, where they wouldn’t think to come after me (Not that they would. I wasn’t really that important, was I?), and locked myself in the bathroom. I opened the goody bag. There were Twizzlers and gummy bears and popcorn, all foods I hadn’t eaten in so long I couldn’t even remember how they tasted. There was a T-shirt that read SHIFT HAPPENS, SO WEAR YOUR RETAINER.

The toilet bowl had a black seat. With one hand I held my hair back, with the other, I stuck my index finger down my throat. Here’s what Rob hadn’t noticed: the little scab on that finger, which came from digging into my front teeth every time I did this.

Afterward, my teeth felt fuzzy and dirty and familiar again. I rinsed my mouth out with water from the sink and then looked in the mirror. My cheeks were flushed, my eyes bright.

I did not look like someone whose life was falling apart. I did not look like a girl who had to make herself vomit to feel like she could do something right. I did not look like the kind of daughter who was hated by her mother, ignored by her father.

To be honest, I didn’t know who the hell I was anymore at all.

Piper

In four months, I had been reborn. Once, I’d used a paper tape ruler to determine fundal height, now I knew how to figure out a rough opening for windows using a measuring tape. Once, I had used a Doppler stethoscope to hear fetal heart tones; now I used a stud finder to locate the sweet spots behind a plaster wall. Once, I’d done quadruple screens, now I installed screen porches. I had applied myself to the task of learning as much about remodeling as I had about medicine, and as a result, I could have been board-certified as a contractor by now.

I had first remodeled the bathroom, then the dining room. I pulled up the carpets in the upstairs bedrooms to install parquet floors instead. I was planning to start faux-painting the kitchen this week. After a room was finished, it went back on my list to be renovated again, eventually.

There was, of course, a method to my madness. Part of it was feeling proficient at something again—something I hadn’t known how to do before so I couldn’t possibly mess up. And part of it was thinking that, if I changed every bit of my surroundings, I might be able to find a spot where I felt comfortable again.

My refuge of choice had become Aubuchon Hardware. No one I knew shopped at Aubuchon Hardware. Whereas I might run into former patients at the grocery store or the pharmacy, at Aubuchon I blissfully wandered the aisles in a state of complete anonymity. I went three or four times a week and gazed at the laser levels and the drill bits, the soldier rows of two-by-fours, the bloated tubes of PVC and their delicate cousins, copper piping. I sat on the floor with paint chips, whispering the names of the colors: Mulberry Wine, Riviera Azure, Cool Lava. They sounded like vacation photographs of places I’d always wanted to go.

Newburyport Blue was from Benjamin Moore’s Historical Colors collection. It was a dark, grayish blue, like the ocean when it rains. I’d actually been to Newburyport. One summer, Charlotte and I had rented a house on Plum Island for our families. You were still small enough to be toted, with all the gear, through the tall grass to the beach. In theory, it had seemed like the perfect vacation: the sand was soft enough to break your fall; Emma and Amelia could pretend to be mermaids, with seaweed hair that had washed up on the shore; and it was close enough for Sean and Rob to commute down on their days off. There was only one caveat we hadn’t anticipated: the water was so cold that even standing up to your ankles made you ache to the core of your privates. You kids spent your days splashing in tide pools, which were shallow enough to be heated by the sun, but Charlotte and I were too big for those.

Which is why one Sunday, when the guys had taken you kids to Mad Martha’s for breakfast, Charlotte and I decided to try boogie boarding, even if it resulted in severe hypothermia. We shimmied into our wet suits (“They’re supposed to be tight,” I told Charlotte when she moaned about the size of her hips) and carried the boards down to the water’s edge. I dipped my foot into the line of surf and gasped. “There’s no way,” I said, jumping backward.

Charlotte smirked at me. “Getting cold feet?”

“Very funny,” I said, but to my shock, she’d already begun high-stepping over the waves, frigid as they were, and swimming out to a point where she could ride one in.

“How bad is it?” I yelled.

“Like an epidural—I don’t have feeling below my waist,” she shouted back, and then suddenly the ocean heaved, flexing one long muscle that lifted Charlotte on her board and sent her screaming through the surf to land at my feet on the sand.

She stood up, pushing her hair out of her face. “Chicken,” she accused, and to prove her wrong, I held my breath and started wading into the water.

My God, it was cold. I paddled out on my board, bobbing beside Charlotte. “We’re going to die,” I said. “We’re going to die out here and someone’s going to find our bodies on the shore, like Emma found that tennis shoe yesterday—”

“Here we go,” Charlotte shouted, and I looked over my shoulder to see an enormous wall of water looming down on us. “Paddle,” Charlotte yelled, and I did what she told me to do.

But I hadn’t caught the wave. Instead, it crashed over me, knocking the breath from my lungs and tumbling me end over end underwater. My boogie board, roped to my wrist, smacked me on the head twice, and then I felt sand being ground into my hair and my face, my fingers clawing at broken shells, as the ocean floor rose at an angle beneath me. Suddenly, a hand grabbed the back of my wet suit and dragged me forward. “Stand up,” Charlotte said, using all her weight to move me far enough onto the sand to keep from getting pulled back by the tide.

I had swallowed a quart of salt water; my eyes were burning, and there was blood on my cheek and my palms. “Jesus Christ,” I said, coughing and wiping my nose.

Charlotte pounded me on the back. “Just breathe.”

“Harder…than it sounds.”

Slowly feeling returned to my fingers and my feet, and that was worse, because I’d been beaten up badly by the wave. “Thanks…for being my lifeguard.”

“The heck with that,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t want to have to pay for the second half of the rental house.”

I laughed out loud. Charlotte helped me to my feet, and we began to trudge up the beach, dragging the boards behind us like puppies on leashes. “What should we tell the guys?” I asked.

“That Kelly Slater signed us for the world championships.”

“Yeah, that’ll explain why my cheek is bleeding.”

“He was overcome by the beauty of my butt in this wet suit, and when he made a pass at me you had to beat him off,” Charlotte suggested.

The reeds were whispering secrets. To the left was a swath of sand where Amelia and Emma had been playing yesterday, writing their names with sticks. They wanted to see if the writing would still be there today, or if the tide would have washed it away.

Amelia and Emma, it read.

BFFAA. Best friends forever and always.

I linked my arm with Charlotte’s, and together we started the long climb to the house.

It struck me, now, as I sat on the floor of Aubuchon Hardware, with a flamenco fan of color chips in my hand, that I had never been back to Newburyport since then. Charlotte and I had talked about it, but she hadn’t wanted to commit to renting a house not knowing if you’d be in a cast
that following summer. Maybe Emma and Rob and I would go down there next summer.

But I wouldn’t go, I knew that. I really didn’t want to, without Charlotte.

I took a quart of paint off the shelf and walked to the mixing station at the end of the aisle. “Newburyport Blue, please,” I said, although I did not have a particular wall in mind to paint it on yet. I’d keep it in the basement, just in case.

It was dark by the time I left Aubuchon Hardware, and when I got back home, Rob was washing plates and putting them into the dishwasher. He didn’t even look at me when I walked into the kitchen, which is why I knew he was furious. “Just say it,” I said.

He turned off the faucet and slammed the door of the dishwasher into place. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I…I lost track of time. I was at the hardware store.”

“Again? What could you possibly need there?”

I sank down into a chair. “I don’t know, Rob. It’s just the place that makes me feel good right now.”

“You know what would make me feel good?” he said. “A wife.”

“Wow, Rob, I didn’t think you’d ever go all Ricky Ricardo on me—”

“Did you forget something today?”

I stared at him. “Not that I know of.”

“Emma was waiting for you to drive her to the rink.”

I closed my eyes. Skating. The new session had started; I was supposed to sign her up for private lessons so that she could compete this spring—something her last coach finally felt she was ready for. It was first come, first served; this might have blown her chance for the season. “I’ll make it up to her—”