Hope and Other Luxuries (53 page)

“Oh! I—I don't know,” I stammered. “I mean, you know I don't live there. I'm several states away. I can't just move into a hotel, I've got my family here to take care of.” And in my head, I'm afraid I added,
It's
your
job to manage her. Not mine!

“I'm not sure how long you would need to be here,” Emily said, “but maybe only for a week or so. If Elena does well and stops self-harming—if she shows us that she's trying—then she can go back into our halfway house program. And it would give you two a chance to go through some family therapy sessions.”

“Me? Why?” I said blankly. “Elena's an adult now.”

Three years before, during the Summer from Hell, I would have jumped at the chance to do family therapy. But back then, one psychiatrist after another had blocked us from Elena's care. Now, Elena was an adult, and that was exactly how I saw her. She had lived on her own for a year, and even in our house, she had had her own independent existence. She had made it clear, in a thousand arguments, that that was how she wanted things to stay.

I was ready to let things stay that way, too.

“Elena's family has no say over her treatment,” I pointed out. And, again, in my mind, I added,
This isn't my job! I'm not welcome in this part of Elena's life. This isn't my problem anymore, and that's fine with me. She tells me all the time to let
her
handle it
.

“We think family therapy would be helpful,” Emily said.

“Well, sure, then,” I said, and I let it drop. But I still didn't see the point.

Together, Emily and I worked out the details. Elena's care team would ask the insurance company for approval to put Elena back into twenty-four-hour care for a few more days. In the meantime, I would drive out, spend one night in a hotel alone while they assessed how well Elena and I did in some sample sessions together, and then, if all went well, Elena would spend the next week in the hotel with me. If she handled that week successfully, they would let her back into their halfway house program. Then I could go back home.

Waking up Elena, doling out medications, pushing her to get ready in the mornings and to eat dinner in the evenings—it all sounded very distressing. And then there was the purging. She had thrown up for years. What if she was vomiting, right there in the hotel room? Was I supposed to lock the bathroom door and do some sort of sick inspection routine?

And the cutting. What about the cutting?

Oh, this was going to be ghastly!

“You know I don't have any special training,” I said. “Elena purged for years right here in the same house with me. So, if she decides to purge or hurt herself, I'm not exactly sure . . . I mean, what do you think
I
can do?”

“We're not looking for you to give her nursing care,” Emily said. “It's just to keep her company, and to call nine-one-one if things go wrong. We'll see you soon, Mrs. Dunkle. Good-bye.”

I replied automatically and hung up the phone.

Nine-one-one?

I got a shivery feeling in the pit of my stomach. I would have cried if I believed in doing that sort of thing.

Nine-one-one!

Some of my worst memories crawled out of the back of my brain, and my imagination served them up in my own private documentary movie. The crude slash of a razor cut healing on the inside of a forearm. “I wasn't trying to kill myself, Momma!” Valerie walking downstairs, humming, and her hands . . . What was wrong with her hands? . . .

I crept away from the memories like a kicked dog. I wanted to put my head under the blankets and howl. Of all the places I'd had to go with my daughters, this was the
one
place I had never wanted to come back to.

But I didn't howl. I reached for paper, and I wrote out a packing list. And then I walked out and had a matter-of-fact conversation with Valerie about it. “I just hope it goes okay” was all I would reveal of my anxiety.

“She's pretty crazy,” Valerie agreed.

Joe and I talked it over that night as I packed. He was supportive and a little worried for Elena and me both.

“Tell her I love her,” he said. “Give her a hug for me.”

I remembered Elena's latest angry phone call. I wanted to give that hug, but would Elena accept it?

Would she even talk to me?

A long cross-country trip later, I arrived at the city that was home to Clove House and joined the traffic on its outer loop. The city was sprawling and impressive from the highway, full of modern glass office buildings and big hospitals. I drove further in, through gorgeous historic neighborhoods with wide lawns and quaint mansions. What a beautiful place!

And Clove House didn't look clinical, I was happy to see. It didn't look like Drew Center had, like a massive imposing University of the Mentally Ill. It looked comfortable. A busy Starbucks occupied a corner across the street from the office building that housed it.

With butterflies in my stomach, I introduced myself to the receptionist behind the glass.
At least this place has a receptionist
, I thought to myself, and I remembered getting trapped in the empty waiting room at Drew Center.

I'm so afraid
, I thought while I waited.
I'm so afraid this is going to be ghastly!
And my imagination replayed for me snippets of that furious voice on the phone, of that stranger who seemed so full of rage.

After a couple of minutes, Elena came out to greet me, and all my worries melted away.

Elena didn't look like a stranger. She looked like my beautiful daughter. Her face wasn't gaunt and pale anymore. She looked better than she had in years. Even the color in her cheeks was different: a bright, healthy pink. I'd gotten used to the gray skin tone of anorexia.

A little shyly, Elena hugged me. So she felt shy, too! Maybe she, too, had been afraid.

“Do you want to eat lunch with me?” she asked.

“I'd love to!” I said.

Elena's meal arrived in courses: salad, soup, chicken tenders, and fruit for dessert. It was a lot of food, but she handled it like a pro. I hadn't seen my daughter eat with such matter-of-fact ease in years. While we had our meal, she told me stories about the girls she lived with. But she wasn't using the stories to keep the food away this time. That was an exciting change.

This new Elena was a little more subdued than I was used to, but hints of the old Elena surfaced from time to time: a wry smile, or a sudden sparkle in her eyes. It was obvious that she had made some important friendships. But what I couldn't get over was how much better she looked. Her whole body had filled out in a way I had never even known it could. She didn't look like a thin little old lady anymore or a child from a famine zone. Now she looked like a real young woman in her twenties.

“You look so healthy,” I said. “You look fantastic!”

“Mom,” Elena said a little apologetically, “it's better if we don't talk about appearances. That kind of talk can be triggering for eating disorder patients.”

“Triggering?”

“It can make us obsess about negative thoughts.” She sounded like she was reciting a rehearsed speech. “It can bring out our interior critic and increase the urge to engage in negative behaviors.”

“Oh, I get it. Sorry.”

“No, that's okay. Don't worry about it.”

I watched Elena work her way through the plate of fruit salad in silence. I had said that I got it, but I didn't really. Why would a compliment release negative thoughts? I thought I understood insecurity pretty well, but compliments made me feel better.

“So, how's Valerie?” Elena wanted to know. “Is Clint nice? What's Gemma doing now?”

“She's smiling,” I said. “And she's just started making a noise that's maybe a laugh—this robotic giggle that makes everybody in the room
laugh. She's found her feet, too, so as soon as you put a pair of socks on her, she pulls them off. Valerie can't bear to put her down.”

Elena smiled. “I wish I could see her.”

“I watched her get her two-month shots,” I said. “Clint wanted to come, too. Valerie was just like she always is, joking with the nurse, but you should have seen Clint's face! When the nurse gave Gemma her shot, he turned green. Really green! There he is, this big strong guy with biceps like tree trunks, but he couldn't bear to see them hurt his baby. He has more names for her than I can even remember: Angel, Itty Bitty, Precious, Princess . . . He just adores that child.”

“I wish I could see her,” Elena said again.

After lunch, I met Emily. Elena's therapist was very young. She hardly looked older than Elena herself.

“I'm going to arrange for you two to have a pass for the afternoon,” she said. “Why don't you go take a walk together and get some fresh air? Just be back before the van leaves to take Elena to the overnight house.”

Elena and I went downstairs in silence, and I waited while she smoked a cigarette. “I'm down to four a day,” she told me, but her voice didn't hold much enthusiasm. I knew that the Clove House staff strongly discouraged her smoking.

“Do you know any good walks nearby?” I asked.

“I don't want to walk,” she said. “I want to go to the hotel and rest.”

“But Emily said we ought to walk,” I said, feeling a little worried, as if I'd just been invited to cut class.

“This is the first break I've had in over two months,” Elena pointed out. “They run their program seven days a week. I don't want to walk. I walk all the time. I just want to sit around and see what's on television.”

This sounded so reasonable that I drove us both to the hotel.

I liked my hotel room. When the desk clerk heard I was in town to visit my daughter in the hospital, he booked me into a corner suite instead of a regular room. It was on the third floor, and it had wide clear windows on two sides, so I could see over the nearby buildings to distant gray clouds. The furniture and room colors, taupe and soft green, looked peaceful.

Elena turned on the television, curled up on the bed, and instantly fell asleep. I muted the television and unpacked my things into the dresser. It felt good to be moving in, even if it was just for a week. I lined up the books I'd brought with me on the kitchenette counter, and I set out my laptop on the writing desk.

After a couple of hours, I woke Elena up. She didn't yell at me in that exhausted monotone as she had a few months ago. She just blinked and stretched. Then we drove back to Clove House.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon,” the receptionist told me. “After lunch.”

The next afternoon, Elena had another free day, and this time, we did go for a walk. We wandered through the little shops nearby. Then we found a bookstore and vanished inside, vanished from ourselves and from each other like water drops soaked into a sponge.

When we returned to awareness forty-five minutes later, Elena had two books of short stories to read that night, and my imagination had the memory of dozens of old black-and-white photographs to play with: handsome young men standing by their covered wagons; earnest, unsmiling girls; grandmothers who had been born in the old country; and babies lying in their coffins. Bouquets of flowers had been tucked in next to those babies' little fists—flowers that had lived longer than they had.

I thought of Gemma and felt a pang. She was growing up every minute that I wasn't there. But at least I had the comfort of knowing I'd see her in a week or so. No wonder Elena felt so bad about missing out.

Emily came out of her office when we returned. “How did things go?” she asked. The question sounded artificially cheerful, like the greeting of a tour guide or a first-grade teacher.

“I had a lot of fun,” I said.

Elena stayed quiet.

“That's great,” Emily said. “Tomorrow morning, why don't we have a family therapy session. Say, nine o'clock?”

On my way out, Elena walked with me through the main room, where the other patients were resting. But this place wasn't what Drew Center had been, a sort of reform school dominated by locked doors. The
whole place felt friendly and informal, like a small private school run by a principal with advanced views. The Clove House staff members weren't in white uniforms, either, and their greetings sounded warm and genuine.

But the patients—
they
were something else again.

The patients assembled in that warm, welcoming room looked very creepy. They were so abnormally, painfully thin—so ridiculously tall for their features—that they looked like grade school children who had been stretched on Willy Wonka's taffy puller. And even when they laughed, their eyes stayed tired and shadowed. They looked ready to give up on life.

Elena didn't look like that. She looked like Elena, a healthier and better-looking Elena than ever before. I couldn't see Elena as one of those skinny, towering little girls with abnormally long legs and knobby knees.

“I don't get it,” I said to her. “What do they do about their schooling? Like that girl—is she working on homework over there?”

“Mom!” Elena said, and her tone carried an amused warning. “She's getting her master's degree.”

I took another look, and a shiver caught me by surprise. That rail-thin Alice in Wonderland child—a woman in her twenties? It didn't seem possible!

In the morning, I climbed the stairs to Clove House again, feeling as nervous as I had on Day One. I'd been in only three therapy sessions in my entire life, and never in anybody else's. Except for the one disagreement with the social worker, I had enjoyed my sessions thoroughly. How could it not be fun to talk about yourself to an attentive audience?

But this time, things were different. This wasn't my session, it was Elena's, and I had never had a group session before. What would it be like? Would it be quiet and helpful? Or would it explode into some sort of horrible
Jerry Springer
episode, with nasty statements and sordid accusations?