The Retreat, page 1
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For my bold and brilliant daughter, Rowan—don’t do any of the things the characters in this book do and you’ll probably be okay. Love, Mom
This place had made a killer out of her.
How about that for a testimonial! The retreat really did deliver on its promise of a complete transformation. She’d arrived a failure and was leaving a total success.
Everything she’d hoped to accomplish here had been checked off. Her core was stronger than ever, her joints looser, and she’d achieved a level of mindfulness that made her certain she could manifest any reality she wanted, simply by thinking about it really hard.
Most important, her head was finally quiet and that sad stinging in her chest was gone. The disguise she’d been hiding behind had been shed, and her true nature was now out in the open. She was awake, balanced. The sky should be ablaze with fireworks because she fucking loved herself.
A wheeze, a gurgle, then a sudden gulp of air and kicking feet.
She rolled her eyes and pressed harder on the tree branch, hoping she’d hear the conclusive snap of a windpipe and she’d finally get to move on. “Just die already,” she said in a tired voice, then at last, it was quiet. No more movement. She waited a beat to be sure she’d really finished the job this time. Even took a moment to appreciate the inky beauty of moonlit blood as it oozed and pooled on the rocks. The peaceful silence after death. Finally, she was living in the moment.
She climbed out of the ravine, and as she started back toward the retreat she blissfully sang: “One, two, three, four bodies are left on the forest floor. Oh wait, make that five. Five, six, seven, eight, I feel pretty great. One, two, three, four, I am a perfect warrior.”
She always knew she could do it. All she had to do was believe in herself.
When people fail, it’s their own fault. It comes down to laziness and a lack of self-discipline. You have to be willing to suffer to achieve your goals. You need to accept a certain level of agony if you want to become your best self. It’s as simple as that.
There were no witnesses either. Or at least, no credible ones. No cameras or nearby neighbors to report when the screaming started. Just the black sky.
What would she say? About the trail of bodies in the woods? Anything. She could say anything at all.
She was the last girl standing.
Three days earlier …
FRIDAY
KATIE
Katie jerked awake, eyes popped open at the foreign trill of an alarm set at full volume. She bolted upright, startled and confused, as if a gun had just gone off in her bedroom. First thing she did was assess where she was, which was the waking habit of not only a drinker but also a clinically diagnosed sleepwalker, thank you very much. Her Sphynx cat mewed his displeasure at being disturbed, needing her body heat like a kitty-vampire.
Katie sank back down into the bed.
She was not an early riser.
Her mornings, and sometimes afternoons, were usually spent sulking in bed, thinking about what other people were doing, daydreaming she also had someplace important to be, then happy she didn’t because she was prone to hangovers. She said it just like that—I am prone to hangovers—like they were allergies and she was helpless to fend them off.
When she did finally get up, the remainder of her day was just as aimless.
That there was the lifestyle of the previously rich and famous.
Katie lived off her trust fund—a fast-deflating cushion of money she’d earned playing the loveable kid detective Shelby Spade. A monthly allowance was doled out to her by an accountant named Mr. Walt Maloney. He’d been managing her money since she was seven years old when she was already flush with commercial earnings. He was a paunchy, smiley man with spiced meat breath—she’d called him Baloney-Maloney as a child—who’d say things like, “And to think, all this money and you haven’t even hit the double digits yet,” in a way that wasn’t entirely nice.
Now he called her every few months about her extra withdrawals, to ask her if she knew what a drain was. “Go into your bathroom, fill your bathtub, then pull the plug. That little hole at the bottom of the bathtub, y’know where all the water goes? That’s a drain. I know it looks like a lot of money, but not at this rate. You need to start making deposits, topping it up in some way. This money could be a nest egg that lasts you the rest of your life if you manage it well. You tried college and a few other things—is there anything else you want to do? What comes next for Katie Manning?”
What to do next? Now that was the question, wasn’t it?
Katie had been working since she was four years old. By the age of seven all the way through to a geriatric fifteen, she was Shelby Spade, Kid Detective and already the official family meal ticket for her brother, heavily Botoxed stage mom, and disappearing father. Her mother, of course, pushed her to keep acting, giving her the usual speech that she was a natural performer right out of the womb, which was really just Lucy’s way to justify selling off Katie’s childhood. But Katie knew her red hair, cutesy chipmunk cheeks, and freckled nose did not translate well into adulthood going by the roles she was offered—mostly soft porn or murder victims because people like to watch self-piteous, spoiled ex–child stars get either fucked or murdered—and then of course there was the scar.
But before delving into an existential crisis—she had all weekend to do that—she should probably get up first and pack.
She’d meant to do it the night before, but somehow she just hadn’t.
Katie did a floppy roll out of bed, wandered over to her closet, pulled out her suitcase, and started tossing in Lycra pants, matching tank tops, and pullovers, tags still on, purchased solely for this trip.
Just one suitcase—she wasn’t going to pull a Lacey Evans, who brought nine suitcases to summer camp in season 1, episode 11. This pathetic mental reference to Shelby Spade’s mean-girl enemy refreshed Katie’s self-loathing.
She was twenty-seven now, the age when celebrities (and yes, she used celebrity loosely) died from their bad habits. Their tender, bloated, black-hole bodies, where nothing was ever enough, simply gave out. And here she’d cynically muse about how the long-dead Shelby Spade franchise would get a bump in revenue, maybe even a reboot with some other, cuter girl to replace her.
Just last week, she saw her face in one of those “Stars you loved as a kid—where are they now?” clickbait sideshows. It read:
Just admit it—if you were born in the ’90s, you probably owned a Shelby Spade lunch box or doll or duvet set or gut-wrenching perfume. For seven seasons Katie Manning played the adorable—and, let’s face it, annoying as hell—Shelby Spade, Kid Detective. Her signature line, “I’LL SOOOOOLVE IT,” had us all glued to our TV sets to follow squeaky-clean Shelby’s slapstick sleuthing to solve banal crimes from stolen P&J sandwiches to missing library books. This was the orderly world of Shelby where all wrongs were righted and evildoers spent a month in the “hole,” also known as detention. It was a balm to the budding adolescent’s growing confusions about the world at large.
Katie skipped over the part about the Incident that derailed her life.
Katie then went on to attend the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU but dropped out after her first year. She spent her free time club-hopping and making it onto TMZ.
Just when it seemed Manning had finally drifted into obscurity (aside from her overactive Instagram account), she resurfaced again last year when an award-winning director cast her to play a Hooters waitress and girlfriend to a suspected killer in what would have been a career comeback (though it probably wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Miss Manning if anyone remembers how well she filled out her trench coat in that last season of Spade).
But then, she recently doled out a highly offensive tweet that resulted in her being fired. The part was recast, and Manning was forced into hiding or at least online banishment (bye-bye, Instagram shots of Manning’s hairless cat).
Shelby Spade would not be impressed and would probably sentence Katie Manning to the longest after-school detention EVER!
What the clickbait missed was that Katie was depressed. Profoundly depressed. The most interesting thing about her was over a decade old. Obviously, she wanted a better answer to the Whatever happened to question than being a walking ex–child star cliché. What to do next? It had plagued her since the series ended. Oh, sure, she’d come up with dozens of things she’d like to do in theory: open a cupcake shop or a clothing boutique, run a catering business, become a
She’d latch onto these new ideas with adolescent intensity but no follow-through when it became clear that these careers lacked the effortlessness and polish that they do on TV.
She’d go back to doing what she always did—living off her past success, drinking, spending money on things that gave her a short thrill, sometimes watching herself on YouTube until her skin started to prickle and aimlessness rolled over her like a panic attack.
So when her brother’s fiancée started going on about a wellness retreat up in the Catskills, especially one that was legally allowed to administer ayahuasca ceremonies because the guru running it was an ordained shaman—well, why wouldn’t she go?
Why wouldn’t she want a complete overhaul of her shitty self over a single weekend?
A month ago, Katie wouldn’t have been interested in a retreat. She would have been panicky-pissed for even being asked. It was too much like an intervention. But her life had gotten especially messy lately.
Her last boyfriend had cheated on her; she’d intercepted a text with A souvenir, so you’ll always remember last night. Attached was the female equivalent of a dick pic—a headless torso with a mannequin-thin waist inside Walker’s grungy bathroom.
Hey, cheating assholes of the world, don’t eat greasy, sauce-laden chicken wings and swipe your passcode if you don’t want to leave a traceable outline that your girlfriend can use to break into your phone.
After finding this out, Katie had fled to Nate’s apartment downstairs. Her brother was always good about putting her up when she was feeling especially histrionic. His fiancée, Ellie-Rose (yes, she’d introduced herself that way, pretentious hyphen and all—Katie was certain that set the unfriendly tone between them), attempted to whip up some late night comfort food consisting of kale and brown rice soup. Katie ended up drinking all the red wine instead.
She could only piece together that, for unknown reasons, she felt compelled to use her last lucid moment before passing out on her brother’s couch to tweet a bad joke about lesbians. The tweet put her in a virtual pillory, and the masses came out with an especially gleeful hatred reserved only for spoiled, self-piteous ex–child stars. This sudden thrust back into the limelight also resurrected her old stalker, who drew shaky portraits of her like he was masturbating with his free hand. She was always in her signature Spade fedora, naked, and restrained with a bizarre patchwork of ropes. Now in addition to being depressed, Katie was also disturbed.
Profoundly disturbed.
* * *
So a retreat was an easy sell. All Ellie had to say was that ayahuasca tea was like ten years of therapy in a single cup—and she would know because she’d tried it before—and, well, Katie loved a good shortcut. Tip back a cup of cure-all tea, hallucinate, let your life play out like a film before your dilated pupils, check off exactly those places where things went wrong, and bang, you have all the answers for what to do next. A full mindscape. Or something like that—either way, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d felt like the answer was at the bottom of a glass.
She immediately called on her old college besties. Their attempts at having annual reunions were getting increasingly difficult (Everyone is so busy but me), so there was no better time to force one on them because it was Memorial Day weekend and there was no way she was going to have a good time with just Ellie-Rose. She downloaded some Enya songs to get into the mood for a new age retreat. She bought a ridiculous amount of Lycra, which she was now finishing packing. Facecloths. Her pillow. She needed to bring her own. She couldn’t bring herself to use hotel-issued facecloths or pillows; it had something to do with the scar on her cheek, an irrational fear that she could get an infection—as if it were still an open wound.
Katie showered, dressed, zipped up her suitcase, put it by the front door, and looked at it with a flash of satisfaction at her organizational skills, like she’d just completed the blueprints to a high-rise, before grabbing it again and clomping down the steps to her brother’s place.
Katie’s only sound financial investment was buying her Brooklyn townhouse. She’d it converted it into two self-contained units. The third and fourth floors were hers, while Nate had the main and garden levels. He paid a nominal amount of rent, which Katie accepted because it made her brother feel better about himself, but now that he’d moved his girlfriend in, she was having second thoughts. Ellie had taken over the garden level for her jewelry-making hobby, which wasn’t really a hobby since she sold her wares on Etsy, and yet as far as she could tell Ellie wasn’t even helping pay part of the “nominal” rent.
Her usual hostility, whenever she suspected she was being used, fizzed bitter on her tongue like aspirin. But Katie had to swallow it down since she was about to spend the weekend with Ellie.
As she reached the final bend in the banister, she had that frequent childish urge to slide down it, to please an audience that no longer existed. “Yes, way, we’re going on va-cay!” Katie hollered, doing her little shoulder dance as she barged her way through her brother’s unlocked door. If storm clouds hovered over her when she was alone, they turned into cannons popping confetti when she wasn’t. She put down her suitcase and handed her brother instructions on how to take care of her cat—no easy feat because Mr. Dick Wolf needed his daily hairless-cat version of body butter and at least one sweater change, which usually left her with a few bleeding scratches. He was not a nice cat, but what could she say? She had a soft spot for ugly, misunderstood animals.
“You’re forty minutes late, Katie. Ellie texted you three times. I knocked on your door twice.” Nate was standing there in a crisply ironed, checkered button-down shirt and beige Dockers. Since meeting Ellie, his style had shifted from jeans and ironic T-shirts to something a preschooler wore on picture day.
“Really? I didn’t hear you or my phone.” Not true, but Katie hated being rushed. It made her anxious. She moved into the kitchen, grabbed a pancake off a tinfoil-covered plate, took a bite, and immediately spit it out into the garbage. “Oh my god, this is awful! Seriously, how can pancakes be gluten-free? It’s like taking water out of clouds.”
He gave her a you’re ridiculous shake of the head and dropped his voice. “Listen, Katie, be nice, okay? Just try to get along with Ellie.”
“What the fuck? I’m always nice to Ellie.” She hated that her future sister-in-law set her brother on her like this. They’d have a single exchange—Katie would maybe say hello or something—and somehow Ellie would twist it all up and Nate would call her and ask, “What did you say to Ellie? She thinks you hate her.” They just had nothing in common. Ellie completely lacked any sense of humor. Or at least Katie’s brand of it. Whenever they talked, it was all jagged edges, and Katie could always sense how hard Ellie was trying to be nice.
“You know what I mean. Just tone it down a bit. Get to know her. She isn’t going anywhere. You know that, right?”
“I do, yes.” Katie softened at the sight of how in love her brother was with Ellie. “I am going to some flaky, guru-led retreat, Nate, to get to know your fiancée better. You can’t say I’m not trying. Hopefully when we return, we will be bonded and totally zenith like the TV made out of fake wood in Grandma’s basement.”
Nate rolled his eyes. “You’re not as funny as you think you are.”
“Probably not, and that explains why your fiancée always says, ‘That’s so funny,’ in lieu of just, y’know, laughing.” Then Katie imitated Ellie’s nasally puff of air that she passed off as laughter.
“Katie.” Nate’s voice went up.
“Just kidding, Nate. I will make sure Ellie has a wonderful weekend, and I will woo her like she comes with a dowry, ’kay?”
“Thank you.” Nate reached over and squeezed her shoulder. Katie patted his hand, then grabbed some milk out of the fridge, saw that it was coconut milk, and put it back. “I really hope this experience brings you two closer.”
