Hope and Other Luxuries (30 page)

“Oh. All right.” And in another few seconds, the door opened, and a white-coated staff member took it from me.

I walked back across the empty waiting room and pushed on the outer door, but it had locked automatically behind me.
Not a problem
, I thought.
The staff member will know to let me out
. I waited by the door.

Nothing happened.

After a minute, I realized:
She's forgotten about me
. So I crossed back to the intercom.

“The reason for your visit?” the intercom wanted to know again.

“I've already given you the sweater,” I said. “I need to be buzzed out.”

“Just a minute, please.”

So I crossed back to the door.

Nothing.

I waited.

Nope, still nothing.

After a couple of minutes, I went back to the intercom. “Can you please let me out?” I said.

This time, the voice on the intercom was new. It also had a distinct edge. “We're very busy with mealtime,” it told me. “Can you please be patient?”

Did I have any choice?

I sat down and tried to be patient, but the silent waiting room unnerved me. I couldn't recall a single time in my life when I had been locked in somewhere against my will. What if there was a fire? Would they evacuate through here? Or would they use a different exit? Would they remember that I was stuck in here?

Instantly, my overactive imagination produced a picture for me of thick black and white smoke pouring underneath the door by the intercom, filling the room with a gray haze. I saw myself frantically waving to firemen passing outside through the thick glass of the undoubtedly high-security shatterproof windows that lined one side of the waiting room.

Now I saw myself coughing uncontrollably. I was falling to my knees as axes thudded on the heavy wooden door . . .

How silly! Of course there wasn't going to be a fire. I wasn't some hysterical child, to give way to an attack of nerves like that. I was a reasonable, responsible adult, and there was a reasonable explanation for all this. The staff were reasonable people. I had let them know what I needed. They had asked me to be patient in return, and that was what I was going to be.

So I made myself choose a magazine. And I waited.

I waited for fifteen minutes!

Okay, this wasn't reasonable. This was downright insane! I crossed to the intercom again.

“Hello?” asked yet another voice. It sounded surprised. “The reason for your visit?”

“I'd like to leave the waiting room now,” I said with some force.

“Of course!” replied the voice, sounding even more surprised.
Why didn't you tell us sooner? You crazy woman!

And the outer door buzzed open at last.

I was halfway back to the hotel, walking very fast and out of breath, before I could calm myself down enough to think straight.

Drew Center was failing to impress me—that's exactly what it was doing. Yes, there had been a friendly and normal interaction every now and then, but from the psychiatrist who hadn't bothered to look at Elena's file to the staff who couldn't bother to open the front door, the majority seemed disinterested and unprofessional.

Not only that, but I couldn't help comparing my fifteen-minute ordeal with what my poor daughter must be going through.

Elena had been locked in against her will for weeks now, labeled with a disorder that might be nothing more than the figment of a brutal quack's imagination. In her entire life, I had never seen her looking less
healthy or more stressed, and she was back to having those mysterious blackouts again. Without anybody justifying such a serious step or even taking a position one way or the other, she had become an inmate in a psychiatric institution where she might not even belong.

It was horrifying, that's what it was. It was horrifying!

Your daughter is completely normal
, Dr. Eichbaum had told me. But what happened when a normal person got locked up in an institution and treated as if she weren't normal? It added up to nothing less than serious psychological trauma. No wonder Elena kept blacking out!

When I got back to the hotel room, I called the only psychiatrist in the entire United States with whom I had ever felt a connection. That was Dr. Harris, the Texas doctor who had worked with Valerie before she had run away. Not only was he an expert in adolescent and young adult psychiatry, but he specialized in eating disorders, too. I was pretty sure that I remembered him telling me that he even ran an eating disorder center for a while.

I wasn't expecting very much when I placed the call. It was more of a shot in the dark than anything. But amazingly enough, Dr. Harris took the time to talk to me. I found myself babbling out the whole story, and Dr. Harris didn't hurry me or cut me off. His voice on the phone, patient and engaged, helped me to get through the painful details without breaking down or leaving out anything important.

“I can see why you're worried,” he said when I came to the end of my tale. “It sounds like each doctor is just passing her on. It may be that no one has taken the time to do the proper tests to see if she really does have anorexia nervosa.”

Relief washed over me. “So there
are
proper tests!”

“Oh, yes. Patient history, physical condition, lists of questions, medical tests. It can take several hours to do a full assessment. And have they done a twenty-four-hour EEG on her yet?”

“No. I know they did a CT scan, and I think they did a short EEG one afternoon.”

“It would be a good idea to do a brain MRI and a twenty-four-hour EEG,” he said, “just to rule out the possibility of anything neurological
causing the blackouts. And a full psychiatric assessment to find out if your daughter does have anorexia nervosa, and also whether there are other psychological conditions comorbid—that is, present along with it.”

Outside my hotel room, dusk was settling in, but I felt as if the clouds had just rolled back to reveal the sun and a chorus of angels was singing Hallelujah. “If I bring her to Texas, will you see her?” I asked. “Will you arrange for those tests?”

“You're a long way away,” he pointed out.

“I'll rent a car,” I said. “We can be there in two days. We
have
to get a handle on this!”

“Two days. Friday. Let me check with the secretary and see what my schedule looks like.” There was a pause. “Yes, I can see her on Friday afternoon.”

Full of excitement, I called Drew Center and told Elena the plan. Then I asked to speak to Dr. Moore. This time, when I spoke to him, he didn't sound so complacent.

“She was transferred into
my
care,” he said. “We had to clear a bed for her, and you agreed to it.”

“That was before she had another one of these fainting episodes and wound up in the emergency room again,” I countered.
And before you couldn't get around to diagnosing her for a whole week
, I thought.

“We are
working
with your daughter, Mrs. Dunkle,” he said. “We have her best interests in mind.”

“I understand that,” I said. “I never doubted it. But the fact is that Drew Center turned her down in the beginning because she probably shouldn't even be there. I want to get her the neurological tests and the psychiatric evaluation she should have had before she even came to you.”

“That's
our
job,” he said, and now he sounded even more annoyed. “If Elena needs evaluation, we'll evaluate her. By law, I can hold her for seventy-two hours. She's in my care, and that's what I'm doing.”

This caught me completely off guard. It wasn't as if I were trying to take Elena out of Drew Center in order to deny her proper care. It had never even occurred to me that I might be refused the right to choose the medical care for my own child.

Very upset, I called Dr. Harris again. But he soon calmed me down.

“I'm sure the Drew Center psychiatrist is just concerned that you may be removing Elena from treatment altogether,” he said. “But I've worked with Drew Center on several occasions. They've seen several of my clients. I'll call and explain that they'll be releasing Elena into my care. That should clear it up.”

Thank God for one rational psychiatrist, at least!

I hung up the phone and started looking at maps on the Internet. Once again, my mind was churning with plans.
Motels . . . Routes . . . Rental cars . . . Aren't there websites that will let me compare all the rental car companies at once?

The phone rang and pulled me away from my plans and searches. Dr. Harris was on the other end of the line again. This time, he sounded puzzled, and even a little sheepish.

He said, “They won't release Elena to me, either.”

W
hen I heard him say that—when I realized that my daughter had to stay locked up in a mental institution where she very likely didn't belong—what I felt was beyond horror. To know that my beloved child, who trusted me, was being held prisoner and that it was my signature on a form that had put her there . . .

My imagination immediately dredged up all the most ghastly images that anxiety and guilt could conjure and played them all for me in one long, gruesome ordeal. Outside was a honey-colored sunset and the long, inconspicuous process of twilight, but none of the mundane things I saw around me seemed to match what I was going through in my head. It was as if I were watching a movie about my hotel room while actually being somewhere else, somewhere very dark and scary that I couldn't escape. And in that dark, scary place was this movie of a lit-up hotel room, playing on a little computer monitor in the corner.

Gray dusk congealed into black night. All the lights were on in that little hotel room on the monitor. But they couldn't light up the dark, scary place I was in.

It isn't that I stopped thinking. If anything, my thoughts spun too quickly. I was worrying, and I was regretting, but strangely enough, I wasn't thinking about Elena. All I could think of was Kate, my Jane Austen girl from Marak's goblin kingdom. She ended up locked in the caves underground, and for a very long time, she hated it there. She would go to the doors and argue and beg to be let out.

Now, as I staggered around in that dark, scary place, I could hardly bear to think of what I had made Kate suffer.
How could I have done that?
I thought.
How could I have been so cruel?
And I found myself obsessing over how I could reach her—how I could apologize to my character for what I had put her through.

“What?” asked a voice. “They won't do what?”

I was crying on the phone to someone. It was Joe. I could hear his voice. It sounded very far away, as if I had set the phone down somewhere. But at the same time, another part of me couldn't absorb that I was talking to a person at all. It was if I were bawling away to the phone itself, and nobody was listening.

Nobody was there with me. I was alone. I was all alone, next to the phone, and I had the most horrible headache of my life.

People say,
She's got a gear loose
. When my family was together, I was the central gear. My husband came to me for things, and my daughters came to me for things. I paid bills, I made calls, I filled out forms and permission slips, I bought clothes, I cooked meals, I planned birthdays, and I booked vacations. The other members thought about themselves and each other, but I'm the one who thought about the whole family.

Then trouble came. We went into the bad years. The harder it got for my family, the more they counted on me to keep everything going. The more trouble the other gears in my family had, the more I pushed against them to keep us all on track. I was turning, turning with all my might, turning for all of us, because when Joe was working twelve-hour days and Valerie was covered in burns and Elena was thrashing around, out of her mind, I couldn't be out of my mind, too, could I?

So I turned. I struggled to turn. It took all I had to turn: to ask the right questions, to pack the suitcases, to stay by the hospital bed, to be the advocate for my family. And then, just when it had reached the point that I was pushing with all my strength—
poof!
No more gears were meshed with mine.

In that hotel room, I was one lone gear, whipping around like crazy. I was staggering around in a dark, lonely place that wasn't the real world anymore, while little images of physical life played out on a tiny computer screen nearby. And dear
God
—how my head hurt! It hurt like
crazy
!

Then there was a click at the door, and there stood Joe.

I had known once upon a time that he was coming, but when I saw him, it was as if I'd had no idea. Joe walked through the door like a flesh-and-blood miracle, and with him came normal life, and minutes and hours, and the hotel room around me again, with afternoon sunlight pouring through all the windows.

I collapsed into his arms and bawled my headache away. Within five minutes, I was myself again.

Joe had rented a car. He was hungry, so he drove us out to find a burger place. He ordered for us, and the miserable little burger he handed me, with one pickle and a teaspoon of chopped onions on it, tasted absolutely amazing.

While we ate, I told him everything that had happened. I told him about the matched set of psychiatrists at the children's hospital who had politely ignored all my questions. I told him about Dr. Harris's calm, interested approach and Dr. Moore's inexplicably hostile one.

“Maybe you got on his bad side somehow,” Joe said.

“Maybe I did,” I said. “I'm certainly not on his
good
side.”

“I'll see if he'll meet with me,” Joe said. “If he feels so strongly that Elena needs to stay at Drew Center, maybe I can get him to talk to me about it. I'd like to hear what he has to say.”

When we got back to the room, Joe tried to follow through on this. He got on the phone and asked for an appointment with Dr. Moore. But no, that would be impossible, he was told. Dr. Moore didn't have time to meet with him.