Chapter 1: Anne Marie Callahan CHAPTER 1 ANNE MARIE CALLAHAN
1991

Bolton Landing

My earliest memory is wearing my favorite shirt for an entire month of summer without my mom noticing. I was going into fourth grade and my mom figured since I was now in the public school system, she could leave me alone if needed. There was even a socially acceptable term for it—a latchkey kid.

We lived in an apartment building that was once a motel. The kitchen consisted of a toaster oven and microwave, and Mom worked cleaning rooms at the Chateau, this fancy resort on the shore of Lake George. This was upstate New York, very upstate, with a complicated mix of blue-collar locals and vacationing urban elite. My mom and I, as you’ve probably guessed, were the former.

My mom had lots of formers. Former jobs, former friends, former boyfriends, a former husband, who was also my dad but had never been anything of the kind. Apparently, he’d wanted to make her an honest woman (eye roll), but then a few months after I was born decided he didn’t want honesty that bad.

The shirt, my Tom and Jerry shirt, was white with a cartoon graphic on the front. I loved it. It fit so perfectly that I forgot I was wearing it, which was all I wanted from clothing—for it to disappear. When I wore other shirts, I was always tugging and rearranging, but not this one. Plus, I was wearing it the day this story started—the day I caught the sickness of wanting to eat the world.

It was a summer day, so hot, humid. I was bored, and movement combated the languor of those endless afternoons, so I flipped the kickstand on my bike and pedaled to town, which was overrun with vacationers, as I knew it would be. Even as a kid I could spot city money. It was the way they held their car keys, like they were a sexy prop, and how they tenderly touched the edges of their sunglasses. I’d sit on the bench outside the ice cream shop and watch.

That afternoon, the sky was mostly a crisp blue with an occasional fluffy white cloud. Like I imagine wallpaper of the sky would look. I was sitting on my bench when I looked up into an aqua sea. I visualized myself piercing through the blue, then through the ozone into outer space, then I imagined piercing outer space into—what? The thought triggered a moment of pure derealization—that’s what I might call it now—and my body filled with this odd sensation of the universe is all there is; there’s nothing outside the universe. This wasn’t a feeling of atheism; it wasn’t about heaven; the closest descriptor is uncanny, if uncanny was on steroids.

I sat on the bench, unmoving, until the feeling disappeared, which didn’t take long. It’s not a feeling you can hold on to, nor one you can forget. When I rode home that afternoon, it felt like I’d swallowed a black hole and it demanded filling, somehow.

My mom came home late that night. I was in my creaky twin bed beneath the window, wide-awake. I’d been listening intently for her while watching the raindrops on the glass; the beads of liquid kept merging before I was prepared to lose them.

I heard shoes on gravel, always the first sound of my mom’s return. Then, a few seconds later, her key in the door, a slow turn because she thought I was already asleep—that is, if she was thinking about me at all, which she probably wasn’t. As she was hanging her bag, I said, Hi Mom. I wanted her to know I was still awake. Maybe she’d consider feeling badly that I’d been alone for so long in the dark, desperately needing a hug.

“Oh, hi, honey,” she said sweetly, which is how I knew she’d stopped for many glasses of white wine at the bar on her walk home. Her keys hit the counter, then she came to my bed and kneeled, wrapping her arms around me. I melted, forgetting for a moment the untethering of the day, swimming happily in her warmth. She was beautiful. Light brown hair and a long neck, high cheekbones, her sly smile. People said we looked alike, which thrilled and terrified me; I watched how men looked at her—like they were hungry.

When she hugged me, I forgot everything else and briefly lived in an alternate universe: safety, love, time—so much time together. But most of all, I enjoyed the feeling that I mattered to her, that she’d choose me before anything else.

Abruptly, she pulled back, but kept her hands on my shoulders. She narrowed her eyes, sniffed. “How many days in a row have you been wearing this shirt?” She began aggressively and clumsily tugging the shirt over my head. The warm moment I’d been living inside imploded.

Most of my childhood memories are hazy—the consistency of dreams. Except this one. This one stuns me with its vividness: the colors of my Tom and Jerry shirt; the wallpaper sky before the universe rewired my brain; the presence, and sudden withdrawing, of my mom’s love. In the many years since, I’ve thought of this memory as a blueprint that might help explain the life I constructed afterward.

“Goddamnit, Anne Marie,” my mom growled. I can still hear the slight slurring as she pulled off my favorite shirt. The fabric left my brown hair frizzy with static.

I never wore the shirt again.

Anne Marie. She always said it like a scold, and I could never hear it as anything else. Not once did it sound like a warm breeze, or an open door—always, it was clipped and fierce as if warning me against another wrong step. I don’t know how the name sounds to others who share it; hopefully they wear it well. On me it was a penance, and growing up, I was always thinking of how to rid myself of it.

The first opportunity came later that summer when I noticed a flyer for a free theater camp run by the high school. I told myself it was a sign from the universe. And I was right. That’s where I met my best friend, Amanda, which taught me to always be on the lookout for signs, both tangible and metaphorical.

By high school, I had spent happy months as Scarlett (Gone with the Wind), as Rosalind (As You Like It), as Blanche (A Streetcar Named Desire), but my first gentle step toward a different life came when Amanda started calling me Annie.