A Slice of Heaven (8 page)

“Oh,” she said meekly. “Well, she’s an attractive woman. You can hardly blame me for jumping to conclusions.”

He bit back a smile. “No, I can hardly blame you.”

But he was going to do everything in his power to see that she never had any reason to jump to such a conclusion again.

The next few days were the longest of Dana Sue’s life. Not only was she worried sick about her daughter, but having Ronnie underfoot every time she turned around was unnerving. He looked better than he ever had, and he was being so darn sweet and considerate, it almost made her forget why she’d kicked him out. That momentary flash of jealousy had been a stark reminder, but he’d taken the wind right out of her sails when he’d explained who Dr. McDaniels was.

Add to that the fact that the man hadn’t left Annie’s side for more than a few minutes at a time. His blue eyes were clouded with worry and exhaustion, but every time Dana Sue suggested he get some sleep, somehow he turned the tables and got Helen or Maddie to take her home for a nap.

“What do you think he’s up to?” she asked Maddie as her friend drove her home the first time. Maddie had added her two cents to Ronnie’s argument, which was the main reason Dana Sue had agreed to go. She didn’t have the strength for a fight when the two of them ganged up on her.

“I don’t think he’s up to anything,” Maddie said. “I think he’s worried about Annie.”

“Sure, but there’s something else going on,” Dana Sue insisted. “He keeps giving me these strange, speculative looks, as if he’s trying to figure out what I’m thinking.”

Maddie chuckled. “I’m sure he is. He’s probably waiting for you to wake up and remember what he did, then tear a strip out of his hide again. It’s not as if you just said ‘so long’ and sent him on his way. That scene on the front lawn had the whole town talking for months. Given your volatile temperament, I’m sure he thinks it could happen again at any second.”

Dana Sue grimaced. “Once was enough. It was mortifying.”

“It was what he deserved,” Maddie corrected.

“No, I mean I was mortified when I thought about it afterward. Thanks to my public drama the whole town knew what he’d done to me. It’s little wonder Annie skipped school for an entire week after that. I wanted to hide, too.”

“Well, all that’s in the past now,” Maddie consoled her.

“Don’t you think having him back here will remind everyone?”

Maddie gave her a knowing look. “Do you honestly regret calling him?”

Dana Sue thought it over, then shook her head. “As much as it pains me to admit it, he has every right to be here. And maybe he can actually get through to Annie. I certainly haven’t had any luck.”

“Maybe this scare will be enough to do the trick,” Maddie suggested. “Passing out is one thing. A cardiac arrest at Annie’s age is quite another.”

“I wish I thought you were right, but Dr. McDaniels, the psychologist, seems to think the impact will be temporary unless Annie deals with the underlying issues. She told both me and Ronnie that she wants her in therapy. I can’t disagree, but something tells me Annie’s going to pitch a fit.”

“Let her, but see to it she goes anyway. If the alternative is being sent to an inpatient facility, I imagine she’ll get with the program soon enough. And it’ll help to have Ronnie as your backup.”

Dana Sue blinked at that. “He’s not staying. I’m sure he’s just waiting for the doctors to say that Annie’s out of the woods, and he’ll be leaving again.”

Maddie looked startled. “He’s not staying in Serenity? I got the impression…” Her voice trailed off. “Maybe I got it wrong.”

Panic crept through Dana Sue. “Did he tell you something different, Maddie?”

“Talk to him,” her friend encouraged. “You should be discussing this with each other, not with me. I refuse to get caught in the middle.”

“Oh, I intend to talk to him,” Dana Sue said grimly. “Calling him the other night was not an invitation for him to move back here.”

Maddie grinned. “I don’t think he sees it the same way.”

“Oh?”

“I believe he said something to Helen about fate stepping in.”

Dana Sue sat up straight, suddenly reinvigorated and spoiling for a fight. “Fate, my behind! Get me back to the hospital right this second. I need to have a little come-to-Jesus chat with my ex.”

“You sure you want to have that conversation there?” Maddie asked worriedly.

“Why not?”

“Because, sweet pea, it’s a hospital. You’ll have to keep your voice down.”

That was a downside, Dana Sue thought, but she could manage. She’d once told off a produce vendor with fairly colorful language without anyone eating in the restaurant being aware. Of course, getting anything through Ronnie Sullivan’s thick skull without shouts and shattered pottery was another matter.

Annie was so surprised to find her father sitting beside her hospital bed that she almost passed out again.

“Daddy?” she whispered weakly, in case she was hallucinating.

A smile spread across his face. “I’m here, angel. It’s good to see those big blue eyes of yours open again.”

“I thought I heard you talking to me, but I was sure it had to be a dream. How long have you been here?”

“Since the night they brought you in.”

Everything was so fuzzy. She remembered practically gagging at the sight of all the food her mom had brought in for the sleepover. Then she and the other girls were dancing when her chest started feeling funny, like something was squeezing her heart real tight. She’d never felt anything like it before in her life, not even in phys ed, when she’d had to run. She’d decided to take a nap, and that was the last thing she remembered.

“When was that?”

“A few days ago.”

“That long? Why can’t I remember coming here? Or anything that’s gone on since I got here? How come I’m hooked up to all this stuff?”

“The monitors are keeping track of how you’re doing and the IV is getting some fluids and medicine into you. You’ve been mostly asleep since that night. I don’t mind telling you that you gave us all quite a scare,” he chided gently.

“I’m sorry. How did you know to come?”

“Your mom called me.”

That meant her mom must have been terrified she, Annie, was going to die. She couldn’t imagine any other reason her mom would have called her dad.

“How long are you going to stay?” she asked.

“For good,” he said.

Annie just stared at him, a faint spark of hope stirring in her heart. “Does Mom know?”

“Not yet,” he admitted. “Think she’ll flip out?”

Annie managed a wobbly grin. “You know it.”

He sighed. “Yeah, that’s what I figured, too.”

She reached for his hand. “Don’t let her talk you out of it, okay?”

“Not a chance, angel. Not a chance.”

Annie leveled a look straight into her dad’s eyes to see if he was telling her the truth. He didn’t even blink.

“You promise?” she asked, just to be sure.

“Cross my heart,” he said, as he had after every single promise he’d ever made to her.

Annie thought back. He’d never broken one of those promises. He might have betrayed her mom, but he’d always been honest with
her,
even when it had hurt.

“Good,” she whispered.

She was still clinging to his hand when she fell back to sleep.

T
he next time Annie woke up, there was a woman she didn’t recognize sitting beside her bed. The white lab coat over her street clothes probably meant she was a doctor. Though her smile was friendly, the somber expression in her eyes made Annie nervous. She had a feeling she didn’t want to hear whatever this woman had to say. And whenever she got scared, she used belligerence to cover her fear. Annie tried her best to stare the woman down, but she only stared back.

“Where’s my dad?” Annie finally demanded, her voice laced with suspicion, as if this woman were somehow responsible for his absence. “He was here a minute ago.” Annie had no idea if that was true. Given the way time was slipping by without her being aware of it, he could have left
hours
earlier.

“I don’t know where your dad is right now,” the woman claimed, her tone perfectly—and annoyingly—calm. “He wasn’t here when I arrived.”

Annie studied her with increased suspicion. “Who are you and why are you in my room?”

“I’m Dr. McDaniels. I’m going to be working with you for a while.”

Alarm bells went off in Annie’s head. “Working with me how? Like in physical therapy or something?”

This time the woman’s smile reached all the way to her eyes. “Afraid not. I’m a psychologist. We’re going to try to work on this eating disorder of yours.”

“You’re a shrink!” Annie said, horrified. The last thing she wanted was somebody poking around in her head, as if she was crazy. “I don’t think so.”

“I could show you my certification,” the woman said, as if proof was what Annie was after.

“Not interested,” she said stubbornly. “I don’t need a shrink. There’s nothing wrong with me. I certainly don’t have an eating disorder.”

“Really? Then why are you in the hospital?”

Annie realized she didn’t know all the details about why she’d ended up here. Probably her mom and her friends had just freaked over something silly. “I got sick. No big deal,” she claimed with sheer bravado. “I’ll probably be out of here today.”

“I doubt that,” Dr. McDaniels responded. “I’d say a week to ten days if you work really, really hard.”

Annie panicked at her certainty. “I’m telling you it’s no big deal,” she insisted. “I feel fine. I could probably run a marathon this afternoon if I wanted to.”

The doctor leaned forward and looked her in the eye. “Really? You think so?”

“Sure,” Annie said. “My mom probably overreacted the other night. She does that a lot.”

“Not this time,” Dr. McDaniels said gently. “You’ve met Dr. Lane, right?”

Annie nodded.

“And you know he’s a cardiologist?”

He’d probably said so, but it hadn’t registered. “That’s a heart doctor,” Annie said slowly. “Why would I need a heart doctor?”

“Because not eating can take a serious toll on your heart. That’s what happened to you. You developed an arrhythmia—that’s an erratic and too-fast heartbeat. Do you remember that?”

Annie swallowed hard. “I guess,” she admitted. “But I feel okay now.”

“Because the staff here has been working to get all of your electrolytes back into balance and to start boosting your nutrition levels. We can only do so much, though. The really hard work is up to you. Otherwise, next time, you might not be so lucky.”

Annie started to tremble at the unspoken implication. Before she could control it, tears were welling up in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. “You’re just saying that to scare me,” she protested. “My mom put you up to it, ’cause she doesn’t like it that I’m losing weight and she’s not.”

“Annie, I’m not saying any of this to upset you. And your mom didn’t put me up to anything. I just want you to understand that this is very, very serious, but we can fix it. If you want, I can bring Dr. Lane in here to explain exactly what happened to your heart the other night and why,” Dr. McDaniels offered. “He can talk to you about how weak your heart is, what a disaster your potassium and other levels are. Or you can take my word for it that I would never lie about something this important.”

Annie let her head drop back on the pillow and closed her eyes. It all made an awful kind of sense. Nothing less than a heart attack would have gotten her mom to call her dad—that was more telling than anything else. Annie was pretty sure he wouldn’t have raced back home if she’d just fainted or something. But it was crazy. Kids didn’t have heart attacks.

She felt a cool touch on her hand and looked up into Dr. McDaniels’s sympathetic gaze. “Pretty scary, huh? I imagine you never thought that what you were doing could have this kind of consequence.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Annie protested again, but now there was less conviction in her voice.

“We’ll talk about that next time I come by,” Dr. McDaniels told her. “For now, I want you to be openminded when Lacy Reynolds gets here. Work with her, okay? She has your best interests at heart.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s the nutritionist who’s going to help make you well again. She’ll regulate your food intake and teach you about nutrition.”

“My mom owns a restaurant. She knows all about food.”

“I’m familiar with Sullivan’s,” Dr. McDaniels said. “It’s got a great menu. Too bad you haven’t been eating what your mom serves there.”

“Who says I haven’t?” Annie said belligerently.

“The scales don’t lie,” the doctor replied gently. “And the fact that you’re here is pretty telling, too.”

Annie studied Dr. McDaniels for a minute. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d be cruel or make too big a deal about something. In fact, she looked more sad than mean, as if she felt bad that Annie was here, and really wanted to help. Annie wasn’t ready to trust her yet, but she couldn’t dismiss her the way she’d wanted to at first.

“Could you find my mom or my dad for me?” she asked. She knew she didn’t sound half as brave as she had earlier.

“Of course. I’ll tell them to come by as soon as your meeting with Lacy is over,” the doctor promised. “It’s very nice to meet you, Annie. I think we’re going to make a lot of progress together.”

Annie watched her leave the room, then closed her eyes again. There had to be some mistake, she told herself. There had to be. But somewhere deep inside, she knew that Dr. McDaniels had been telling the truth.

Without even realizing it could happen, Annie had almost killed herself.

When the door to her room opened again, Annie was hoping it would be her mom and dad. Instead, the woman who walked in, wearing white slacks, a brightly flowered uniform top and thick-soled white shoes, had spiked black hair and a pierced eyebrow. The uniform and name tag gave away the fact that she was a hospital employee. Otherwise Annie would have thought she was a college student or maybe a member of some rock band.

“Hi, Annie,” she said cheerfully. “I’m Lacy Reynolds.”

“The nutritionist,” Annie said, surprised.

“Ah, I see Dr. McDaniels told you about me.”

“Not that you’d be so young and cool-looking,” Annie said candidly. “I wish my mom would let me pierce something.”

“When you’re my age, you can do whatever you want. See? There’s something to look forward to.” The woman grinned at her. “Doesn’t mean I’m not tough, though, so watch out. When it comes to what goes into your mouth in this place, I’m in charge, and believe me, there’s nothing that happens that I don’t find out about.”

Despite the warning, Annie couldn’t help liking her. At least she laid everything out there so you understood the rules.

“Dr. McDaniels said you were going to talk to me about food,” Annie said. “My mom knows all kinds of stuff about food and I hang out at her restaurant a lot.”

“Then you know something about food, too,” Lacy said. She took a small notebook out of her pocket. “Let’s talk about what you’ve been eating lately.”

Annie squirmed.

The nutritionist continued to wait, her pen poised above her pad of paper. “Well?” she prodded.

“I eat a lot of different stuff,” Annie claimed eventually.

Lacy gave her a disappointed look. “Here’s the first rule with me, Annie. You have to be honest. If I don’t know where you are, then I don’t know how far we have to go. Let’s be specific. What did you have to eat the day you wound up in here?”

Annie tried to think back. She’d skipped breakfast that day except for a few sips of water. At school she’d bought a salad in the cafeteria and eaten a few shreds of the carrot on the top. When her friends had come over, she’d made a pretense of eating the pizza her mom had ordered for them, but one bite had made her feel sick.

“I wasn’t feeling hungry that day,” she said eventually.

“Come on, Annie. Just be straight with me.”

“I had a salad for lunch and pizza when my friends came over,” she said, embellishing the truth.

Lacy didn’t make a single note, just kept gazing at her until Annie blinked and looked away.

“Okay, I ate some of the shredded carrot on the salad and a bite of pizza.”

Lacy nodded and finally made a note. “Any idea how many calories that is?”

She shrugged. “I told you, I wasn’t hungry.”

“A hundred at most, and that’s if you’re even being honest with me. Nobody can survive on that, Annie. You do understand that, don’t you?” She waited until Annie nodded before going on. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You and I are going to work out a plan. While you’re here, you’re going to have three meals and three snacks a day. At first these will be very small, just a couple of hundred calories more than you were eating, but we’ll increase the amount until you’re up to the number of calories you should be eating.”

“No way,” Annie protested. The thought of all that food made her feel physically ill.

“Here’s the alternative, then,” Lacy said, her tone unyielding. “You’re not going to starve yourself on my watch, so we’ll insert a feeding tube to make sure you get the nutrition you need. You need to think of food as medicine for now. It’s the thing that will make you well and allow you to go back home and live a full and happy life. I know that’s what you want, and it’s my goal to make sure you get it. It’s up to you to decide which way we go with this.”

The thought of a feeding tube made Annie cringe. “What kind of food?” she finally asked.

“You and I will decide that together, along with some input from your folks. At first it will be really simple, basic things. Maybe some fruit or crackers and juice, part of a turkey sandwich. Someone on staff will be here when you eat to make sure you eat everything you’re supposed to for each meal or snack. If there’s something you can’t eat or can’t finish, we have a nutrition shake you can have to replace the calories. You might only need an ounce or two, depending on how much of the meal you don’t eat.”

Annie was appalled by the regimen. She was going to feel like some kind of animal in a zoo with people watching every bite she put in her mouth. “How long does this go on?”

“For as long as it takes to get your lab work normal and your heart rate back up. Your whole team will make that decision. That’s Dr. Lane, Dr. McDaniels and me. The monitoring of your food will go on even after you leave here. I’ll work with your folks to see that they understand the food plan.”

Annie felt tears welling up in her eyes, and turned away. “I don’t think I can do this,” she whispered.

“I think you can,” Lacy said. “And we’re all going to be here to help. We have another girl like you here right now who’s almost ready to go home. You could talk to her if you want to. It might help you not feel so alone.”

“No,” Annie said, shaking her head adamantly. She didn’t want someone else knowing her business.

“Okay,” Lacy said. “Let me know if you change your mind. In the meantime, I want you to write down some of your favorite foods for me. I’ll be back a little later and we can plan your menu for dinner and a snack tonight and for the whole day tomorrow, okay?”

“Whatever,” Annie said, still not looking at her. How had she ever thought Lacy Reynolds was cool? She was just another adult on some kind of power trip. Maybe if she told her folks that, they would get her out of here.

She sighed when she heard the door to her room close. Who was she kidding? Her mom and dad were way too freaked to take her home. And somewhere way down inside was this nagging feeling that she ought to be freaked, too. But if she admitted that, what then? Food was the one thing in her life she’d been able to control. Dieting was the one thing she’d been really good at, though her body still wasn’t as perfect as it could be. Now all these people wanted her to stuff her face and ruin everything.

Terrified by the image of herself as fat and ugly, she buried her face in her pillow and let the tears flow.

Ronnie was on his way back from the cafeteria when Linda McDaniels stopped him in the hall.

“Annie’s asking for you,” she told him.

He almost bolted past her, but she put out a hand to stop him.

“She knows she has a heart problem and that it was brought on by her eating disorder. The nutritionist met with her, too. Annie’s in denial right now, so don’t push her too hard to accept the truth. She’ll come around to it on her own.”

“You told her?”

“She’d figured out some of it. As I told you at the beginning, sometimes my role is to be the bad guy and lay out the hard truths. It’s best to get everything out in the open, along with the plan for what happens next.”

He ran his hand over his head. “What am I supposed to say to her?”

“If she has questions, answer them if you can. Otherwise leave it up to the doctors, the nutritionist or me to clarify things for her. Really, all she needs for the next couple of days is to know you’re in her corner and that she’s going to be okay. The rest will come in time.”

“Did you tell her about the therapy sessions?”

“Only that there would be some, not how difficult or intensive they’re going to be.”

“How did she react?”

The psychologist grinned. “She told me she didn’t need therapy, of course. Part of my job will be to convince her otherwise.”

“God, how did things get to be such a mess?” Ronnie lamented.

“That’s what we’re going to figure out,” Dr. McDaniels assured him. “We will unravel this, Mr. Sullivan.”