Hope and Other Luxuries (26 page)

“Lordy!”

“I know, right? And there was another girl who was here for several weeks, so the art-therapy people paid her a visit—you know, do-a-little-coloring-to-cheer-you-up kind of thing. The picture she made was so beautiful they framed it, and now it's hanging by the nurses' station.”

“Oh, hey, I think I've seen that,” I said. “The torn-paper portrait of a lion?”

“Yeah, that's it.”

“I thought it was donated artwork,” I said. “She's really talented. But hey, when I asked how lunch was, I really meant to ask, how was lunch food-wise?”

“Meh,” Elena said with a shrug. “Sandwich and a salad.”

I tried to apply my newfound knowledge about anorexics to Elena as she said this. If she was an anorexic, shouldn't she be stressed and angry about having been forced to eat? I looked for some tremble of her lips or irritation in her voice, some sign that the meal had disturbed or upset her.

But Elena didn't look stressed. She just looked disinterested.

She doesn't seem like an anorexic to me
, I thought. And my imagination played for me again the memory of that old-horse woman, with the rough skin sagging across her collarbones and bagging at her knees and the sharp bones poking out everywhere.

Elena didn't look like that. But it
was
true that Elena was thin these days. I studied her. In fact, she was terribly thin.

“So,
do
you have trouble eating?” I asked.

Elena shrugged. “Ask the doctor.”

“No, I don't mean
are
you eating, I mean are you able to
enjoy
it?”

“Not the crap they serve me here, no.”

“But . . . overall? If you could eat what you wanted? Remember, your school counselor was worried last year.”

“Yeah, about my stress level because my sister was a moron. Look, you know Dr. Petras is an idiot. You don't need me to tell you that.”

This was true. She didn't.

“I had chicken-fried steak,” I said as I walked to the desk to put down my book and purse. “Also chocolate pudding for dessert. With Oreos.”

“Lucky!” Elena said. “They don't give me dessert.”

“Not even pudding? Doesn't that break some kind of law? I thought hospitals had to serve pudding with every meal.”

“I wish!”

The note of envy in her voice convinced me: this anorexia diagnosis was nonsense. Elena didn't hate food at all. She just hated bullies trying to force her to do things. Probably if Dr. Petras had locked her up to get some rest, she would have stood in a corner of the room until she fell to the floor from exhaustion. And she never, ever would have come near the bed.

Dr. Eichbaum was right
, I thought in relief.
She's completely normal. And why shouldn't Dr. Eichbaum be right? He was the only psychiatrist who actually took the time to run her through panels of tests. He tested Elena for hours. Dr. Petras just spent a few minutes talking to her, and that's what the psychiatrists here have done, too
.

The conversation reminded me, though, how much Elena liked pudding. When she was little, she used to ask for the stove-top kind. So, the next time I went to the cafeteria, I looked in the refrigerator case for chocolate pudding. There was plenty of vanilla, and there was a rainbow assortment of little plastic bowls of Jell-O. But there was a gap where the chocolate had been.

“Will you be getting more chocolate pudding today?” I asked one of the cooks. “It's for my daughter. She's on full bed rest, and I'd like to cheer her up.”

“We'll make your daughter some pudding,” he told me. “We can make her as much as you want.” And sure enough, while I was eating my dinner at my table by the two glass walls, he tapped on my elbow and handed me a plastic takeaway bowl. Inside was a generous scoop of chocolate pudding, complete with Oreos crumbled across the top.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked, reaching for my purse. But he only smiled.

“No charge, ma'am. You just tell that daughter of yours I hope she enjoys it.”

When I got upstairs, Elena was still finishing her dinner. I could hardly wait for the tech to leave.

“Check this out!” Elena said when the tech left. “They brought me my own video player!”

“And check this out!” I said, triumphantly producing the pudding. “It's not on the menu, but you've got your dessert.”

Elena smiled. “All right, Oreos! Let's share it. Here, I'll scooch over to make room. You should watch this video with me.”

So we lay side by side on her hospital bed and watched cartoons and passed the pudding back and forth. After the dark days and sad nights in the ICU, it felt amazing and wonderful to be able to share that pudding with my daughter.

I brought Elena a pudding every day after that, and we always ate it together. It became a symbol to me of everything the psychiatrists weren't bothering to learn about my daughter. I considered telling them about it, but I could just imagine their look of polite disbelief. If they were keeping secrets from me, then I was going to keep secrets from them.

They think she hates food
, I thought,
but she's so happy to have her dessert! This is nonsense—there's nothing wrong with my daughter. Elena's going to put this ghastly time behind her, and we'll never look back. It's just one more obstacle she'll overcome
.

It was love—pure, devoted love—that led me to these conclusions. Given the circumstances, I know I would come to the same conclusions again. And I don't regret that. I can't regret giving Elena my wholehearted trust and support.

I'm not sorry.

But that doesn't mean I was right.

D
r. Costello told me that the EEG test of Elena's brain was normal.

The heart echo confirmed the damage but also suggested improvement. Her blood values seemed to be fine as well. No big issues had cropped up.

“So there's nothing serious,” I said in relief. “Elena just needs to gain the weight back, and then we can go home.”

Dr. Costello hesitated. “Well, actually,” he said with an apologetic look in his eyes, “she's supposed to go to an anorexia treatment center.”

“I'm glad you brought that up,” I said. “I've got my doubts about the anorexia.” And I explained to him my problem with Dr. Petras, who hadn't taken the time to fully assess Elena, and the weight loss during one month, from normal to underweight, that seemed to form the entire basis for his diagnosis.

“Her pediatrician there didn't believe him,” I said. “And I've been waiting myself to see if more evidence would turn up. For instance, aren't anorexics terrified to eat? But you say Elena's eating with no problem, and every time I come back after her meal is over, she's energetic and happy and full of interesting new stories she and the techs have talked about. So where is it? Where's that new evidence of obsessive terror around food? Is there any? Or are we still basing the entire anorexia nervosa diagnosis on one low weight on a scale?”

“Anorexia isn't my area of specialty,” Dr. Costello said. “I have to rely on what the psychiatrists tell me. But I do see your point. We'll keep looking and see what we find.”

Elena spent that whole week on full bed rest, with a different tech sitting by the door every night, staying awake to watch over her. The
feeding pump hummed me to sleep every evening, and each day, Elena ate her meals without complaint.

But when Dr. Costello had a scale brought into the room at the end of that week, and Elena climbed out of bed and stood on it, I could see—we
all
could see—that she was
still
losing weight.

I felt almost frantic!

“Why?”
I demanded afterward as Dr. Costello and I stood in the hallway together. “Why is her weight still dropping?”

“I don't know,” he confessed. “I thought it would be turning around by now.”

“Just two months ago, her weight was normal!” I said. “All last year, her weight was stable. And ever since she's been confined to hospitals and fed these special meals, she's practically wasted away!”

“I'm not finding any answers,” Dr. Costello said. “Nothing has turned up. A few blood values are slightly off, but it's nothing that the anorexia can't explain.”

“Anorexia! How can this be anorexia? That's voluntary fasting, right? But you said she's eaten everything, and the feeding pump goes all night, and she's doing nothing but sitting in bed, and the weight is still melting right off her! I called Drew Center, that eating disorder treatment place the psychiatrists recommended, and they say they won't even take her as a patient. She's not in the anorexic range.
Not
in the anorexic range! Those were their exact words!”

“But the psychiatrists told me—”

“What,
more
psychiatrists who ignore their own diagnostic guidelines? Do you know that those psychiatrists have only been to see Elena twice? How are
they
supposed to know what's going on? What are they—
psychic
?”

“Believe me, believe me,” Dr. Costello said hurriedly, “I'm just as frustrated as you are. But I can't explain it, and if they can . . . Well, I think she needs to get to the experts.”

This sounded ominous. It sounded like a place we had been before. About a week and a half before, to be specific.

“
You're
the expert,” I reminded him, and I couldn't keep the bitterness out of my voice. “That's why Elena's pediatrician sent her to you: to get to the experts, he said.”

“I mean, the experts in eating disorders,” Dr. Costello amended. “The psychiatrists at Drew Center do nothing but work with eating disorder patients. They'll be able to rule out once and for all whether your daughter has anorexia.”

I could see the logic of this.

“Well, Drew Center won't take her,” I pointed out.

“I'll call,” he said. “I think I can persuade them to take her. And there are some more tests I'm going to look into.”

As Dr. Costello walked away, I tried to talk myself out of my bad mood. I reminded myself that this time a week ago, I was afraid Elena would never open her eyes again. But the news that Elena's weight was continuing to drop frightened and baffled me. What if she had some strange metabolic disorder Dr. Costello just wasn't catching? Was she just going to waste away?

“So, it looks like we'll be here for a while longer,” I told Elena as I walked back to my desk.

“Mmmph,” she said without interest. “This is bullshit.” And she went back to watching her DVD.

I sighed and opened my laptop. Elena and I didn't have much space in that little hospital room, and I had long ago exhausted the fun of exploring the different public spaces in the building. I was homesick for Joe and my pets and our house in Germany.

But at least I could go stretch my imagination in my various fantasy worlds. I had put together a complicated web project to occupy my time. I was moving the most interesting questions readers had asked me onto pages on my website. Thinking about those questions took me to new places. They were helping me stay calm and optimistic.

I brought up my email and rummaged through stored messages, looking for interesting questions.

“Why does Paul carve Maddie as a tree?” one reader had written. “That seems like a weird thing to do.”

Paul and Maddie were characters in my Scottish werewolf book. It was such a sad, sweet love story that my heart melted as I read the question, and my bad mood vanished at once. I loved Maddie for her frank, open nature, and I loved my poor woodcarver, Paul, for the suffering he had lived through. Together, they were my favorite story couple.

“Maddie doesn't care for it any more than you would,” I wrote. “She's down-to-earth and has a very different view of herself than Paul has of her.” And as I wrote, my imagination played for me a scene in the small, windowless sod house full of peat smoke.

The wooden figure was different. It still had a tree's crown of leaves and apples, but the trunk had turned into a pale, slim girl. Leaves grew out of her hair, and her two arms stretched out to become branches. Maddie walked toward the doorway and turned the carving in the light, studying it with wonder.

“It's you,” said a voice from the doorway, and she looked up to find Paul there. “At least, it looks like you,” he added awkwardly. “Do you like it? I had just finished it that first morning when I looked up and saw you talking to Ned, and then I looked down and saw you in the wood.”

Maddie examined it. The tree girl was slender and sweet, poised and graceful. Maddie could see that she was happy by the lift of her arms and her chin. Happy to be an apple tree, happy to grow where she was planted. The tip of one toe-root just showed beneath her long skirt.

“After I saw you,” he went on, “every block of wood I saw had you inside it.”

“But why would you carve me? Who would want to see me?” Maddie held out the tree girl. “Just me, I'm not fancy like this.”

Paul took the carving to look at it and then at her. She could tell that somehow he still saw the resemblance.

“You're beautiful, Madeleine,” he said.

As I watched my two young characters, I felt again the love they shared—that magical first love that has such wonder in it.
I'm glad I wrote their story
, I thought.
I'm glad I brought them to life. Maddie has such a generous heart, and Paul makes such a fascinating monster
.

“Oh, hey,” I said to Elena over my shoulder, “I forgot to tell you, but your sister says she hopes you get well soon.”

“I don't want
anything
from her!”

The tone was so vehement that it stopped me cold. My hands froze on the keyboard. Elena had been calm and philosophical for so long now that I had forgotten she could still sound like this.