Hope and Other Luxuries (14 page)

Valerie must have been right next to the phone. “Hey, Momma,” she said in her cheerful way. She sounded like she always used to—like my wise, practical girl.

“So, what's this about these razors?” I asked, as if she were the sane one here and it was the orderly who was crazy.

“Yeah, sorry about that, Momma. I was kinda bored. I got a teeny bit carried away.”

“But, Valerie . . .”

I trailed off. What to say? How to reach her?

“So, it's not helping?” I finally said. “It's not helping, you being there?”

“I dunno.” Valerie's voice still sounded cheerful. “That depends on what you call
help
. Anyway, it's kind of funny: the staff is freaking out. My therapist says they're afraid I'm going to kill myself.”

I froze.

I felt as if some giant predator was hunting me, moving closer and closer. I could feel it, this huge invisible hunter. It was snuffling, turning this way and that . . .

I couldn't breathe. I had to hold my breath.

“I'm not gonna say I haven't thought about it,” Valerie went on in that same breezy tone. “Sometimes, it really sounds like a good idea. But I've told the staff that option's off the table. I said, ‘I would never do that to my mother.'”

I didn't answer. I couldn't answer. I couldn't speak for the lump in my throat.

“So anyway, I'll talk to you later, Momma. Love you! Bye.”

I hung up the phone.

And I cried.

M
rs. Dunkle, this is the school counselor calling. I'm worried about your daughter, Elena. She's a little underweight. Is she eating well at home?”

I pondered the question.

“No, I'm afraid she isn't,” I said. “In fact, to be honest, I don't think any of us is eating well right now.”

It was October, three months after Valerie's overdose. Elena was finally attending the high school on base. She had let me enroll her there as a junior when the new school year came along. And she loved it. Already, she had made good friends.

No, it wasn't the school that was the problem.

It was Valerie.

Valerie had come home at the end of August, and we had seen improvements in her outlook: she had voluntarily enrolled herself in university courses on base and was making As. She had also found a job on base. I was driving her there every morning and picking her up every evening. It was great to see her getting out of the house and staying busy.

But when Valerie was at the house, she kept to her basement room and avoided us.

This galled Elena. Once upon a time, Valerie had been her guide, the one she had looked to for guidance and help. Now, the gulf between them couldn't be bridged.

“
We're
her family!” Elena said to me day after day, her voice savage with anger. “All she does is go on about her loser mental friends!” But at the same time, Elena didn't seem to be entirely comfortable being Valerie's family.

“Do you have to
look
like that?” she yelled at Valerie as we drove home from the base. “Do you have to wear clothes that look like they've been in the
trash
? Did you see the way they all
stared
?”

Valerie snorted. “Like I give a rat's ass if they stare.”

“
I
care!” shouted Elena. “I hate going anywhere with you. I don't even want people to know you're my sister!”

“I'm sorry Miss Neat Freak can't deign to acknowledge my presence,” Valerie said. “Did I
ask
to be your sister?”

“Can we please just calm down?” I heard myself saying yet again, as I had heard myself say a hundred times before. And then, as the voices got louder, “Stop it! Stop it! Just—
please
! Just shut
up
!”

That night, again, I lay awake and promised myself—really
swore
to myself—that tomorrow, I would keep my cool and help my family stay balanced and cheerful. But by the end of the next day, all four of us were standing outside Valerie's bedroom door, and all four of us were shouting.

No wonder the school counselor was worried about Elena's weight.

“Elena's always been a picky, nervous eater,” I told the counselor now. “She's such a perfectionist that even back in grade school, stress and nerves could choke off her appetite. She always had trouble eating breakfast if a big test was coming up, so I'm not surprised, with all the stress in the house, that she's having trouble now.”

“But Mrs. Dunkle, Elena's quite thin,” the counselor pointed out. “Stress is one thing, but she's less than ninety percent of the expected weight for her height.”

Guilt flashed through me. Had I noticed this?

Yes, I'd known that Elena was thinner than the other girls in her class. But members of my family tend to run thin until old age, even though we eat everything in sight. I've always baked with butter, and I've always baked a lot, but I was still wearing a favorite high school skirt when I reached forty. And Joe, too, was practically a spaghetti noodle until he was in his thirties. He couldn't put weight on back in high school no matter how much he ate.

So it hadn't surprised me that Elena was staying thin. She seemed to be running true to type. But was she? Or was this something more serious?

“Elena has been slightly underweight ever since she hit adolescence,” I said. “But her weight doesn't vary by much. It's not as if she does anything extreme. You know, I was worried about her, too, for a while—she seemed so nervous. But we took her to a child psychiatrist a couple of years ago, and he and his staff tested her extensively.”

“What did you find out?” asked the counselor.

“Oh, that everything was fine,” I answered. “There was nothing that teenage moods couldn't explain.”

“Well, maybe you could encourage her to bring snacks with her to school,” suggested the counselor. “If she's not eating well at home, maybe she can eat more here. She could stop by my office to have a snack. It's usually pretty quiet.”

“Yes, I'd imagine that things are calmer there than they are at home,” I said.

This may have been the understatement of the year.

That afternoon, when Elena got home from the bus stop, I tried to see her with fresh eyes. She was that same quick, nervous girl she'd always been. Maybe she was a little thinner this year, but her eyes were sparkling, and she still had a curvy figure.

“The school counselor called today,” I said. “She's worried about how well you're eating.”

“I have been pretty stressed,” Elena admitted.

“What would you like to eat tonight?” I asked. “We'll eat whatever you want.”

She brightened. “Could we order a supreme pizza? There's this pizza at the food court that I really love.”

“No problem,” I said. And we ordered supreme pizzas pretty often after that.

As the semester progressed, Elena stopped by the counselor's office frequently to talk and blow off steam, and whenever she did, the counselor checked her weight. Elena was consistently running about ten pounds below median weight for her age, but at least the numbers were stable, and they didn't fall into an unhealthy range. And Elena continued to do well in school and in her volunteering at the hospital, too. No longer did she
wail that she hated her life. She was having real fun with her new friends. She was the most engaged she'd been in years.

But the stress in the house wasn't getting better. In fact, it was getting worse.

I threw the front door open one morning as Valerie came walking up the sidewalk to the house.

“Valerie! I was up half the night!” I said. “Where were you? I checked your room at two in the morning, and you were gone!”

“Oh, sorry, Momma! Rick was having a tough time, so he came by and picked me up and we sat in his truck and talked. He's been afraid ever since he was in the psych ward with me that they're gonna kick him out of the Air Force. Seriously, Momma, we were just down the street, just talking.”

“But I called and called!”

“Sorry about that, I didn't have my phone with me. It's somewhere in my room.”

I followed her down the stairs into the gloom of the basement. At one time, this had been a separate apartment, but the landlord had rented it to us along with the rest of the house. He had been apologetic about the scratched-up walls and battered and stained blue carpet. “I'll fix it up for you,” he had promised.

But I had known Valerie would have these rooms. “No, please—it's perfect,” I had told him.

Now, great drifts of Valerie's belongings covered up that stained carpet: crumpled stacks of sheet music, a broken coffee table, a metal coil of loose guitar strings, broken tubes of mascara.

“But I didn't hear it ring,” I said. “If your phone was in here, why didn't I hear it ring?” That was better than saying what I wanted to say, which was
Why did you let me go through that, dialing your number over and over and hoping each time that I'd finally hear your voice?

“It's on vibrate,” Valerie said, scanning the rubble as she strode into the room. Her hiking boot landed on a music CD, and it gave an unmusical snap. “Oh, hell!” She stopped in the middle of the drifts of trash, gave one last look, and shrugged. “Anyhoo, it's around here someplace.”

“But, Valerie, you can't keep doing this to me!” I said. “I can't keep losing sleep like that, I was so worried, I almost called the police! The other night, you
promised
me—you
promised
me! Besides, you were grounded.”

“Oh, that's right!” Valerie said in a tone of discovery. “Still, it wasn't like I went anywhere fun. I was only down at the corner, Momma, really. We just talked because Rick's having a hard time—all we did was talk.”

And the thing is, I believed her. I believed that Valerie didn't mean to cause me trouble and heartache. It was as if she had developed some strange superpower, some knack for creating chaos wherever she went.

She's backsliding
, I thought.
She's losing the progress she made in England. We need to find a way to help her hold on to the ground she gained there
.

So I came up with the idea to send Valerie back to England for follow-up visits with her therapist. It was expensive, but if it helped her hold on to the progress she'd made with him, it would be worth it.

Valerie loved the idea, and the first couple of visits seemed to help. But then the sessions with her therapist seemed to get overshadowed by the partying she did with her psych-hospital friends. She came home from one visit sporting an eyebrow piercing. And when she wound up missing a flight due to a lost weekend in London, we called the experiment off.

That meant Valerie was back to regular sessions at the military hospital again. But those doctors moved in and out to support the soldiers downrange. Valerie had gone there six or seven times, and I didn't think she'd seen the same doctor twice.

We're starting all over, every time
, I agonized.
Every two weeks, a new guy starts from zero. Maybe a German professional could help us. It's a shame Dr. Eichbaum is so far away
.

So I found Valerie a German psychologist. “How did it go?” I asked her afterward.

“Fantastic!” she said. “He told me there's nothing wrong with me smoking cigarettes.”

“
What?
You've got to be kidding me!”

“No lie, Mom. He says smoking is only bad for some people. Since our family doesn't have any cancer or lung stuff in it, he says you can tell
it wouldn't be a problem for me. It makes sense if you think about it. You know Grandma smoked forever.”

“No, it does
not
make sense!”

I thought she must have misunderstood him, so I asked the psychologist myself. He was a little man with round pink cheeks and a bullet head and a habit of bouncing forward onto his toes as he talked, like an ex-gymnast. He smoked cherry-flavored pipe tobacco, a habit I might have found endearing if it weren't for the grave lecture he gave me on how to tell if smoking was right for your body type.

I declined to schedule another appointment.

That night, I once again lay in bed and worried. Valerie had lost her job on base that day, and Joe was so furious about it that he practically steamed. He saw her self-destructive behavior as a willful refusal to grow up, but I was sure it was something else.

She's sick
, I thought.
She needs regular care. She's not going to get better if we can't find her the right professionals. Just the three of us, trying to guide her—really, just yelling at her—we can't make her well
.

Valerie needed careful, thoughtful, sensitive professional care from a psychiatrist and a therapist who could truly get to know her, just as they had done in England. It seemed like such a simple thing, the obvious first step. But I couldn't manage to find it for her here.

She could get it back in Texas, though.

I lay in bed and pondered this idea. It wasn't my first choice, but it had a lot to offer. Valerie could go to college back in our home city, and with our contacts in the area, we could find her great care. She still had friends in the area, too. We had a support network there. She just wouldn't have us. We wouldn't move home for another year and a half.

She needs a doctor more than she needs her family, though
, I told myself.
All we do these days is fight, and that's just giving her a reason to backslide. Valerie seems to thrive on alienating her father and sister. We're all spinning our wheels
.

The book I had written about Martin and his computerized dog had just sold for a very good price. The whole family rallied around to take me out to dinner to celebrate. It was a chain restaurant on base: bright Mexican
tiles and big American portions. In honor of my celebration, Valerie was looking less rumpled, and we were actually not fighting for once.