Hope and Other Luxuries (55 page)

“But are you making that decision for the right reasons?” I asked.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “I should be near family, and there's an eating disorder center near family, in our own city. It'll work just as well as this one.”

The plan actually made a lot of sense. It would make the insurance company happy, and they had certainly bent over backward to make us happy. It would save us the cost of Elena's stay each night at the halfway house. And if family therapy really
was
important, well, we could certainly do that at home.

But still . . .

Was it my good sense talking? Or was it just my own anxiety? Was I becoming one of those faint, fearful mothers who hovered and fretted and never had anything nice to say? My imagination obligingly pictured an Edward Gorey mother for me, moping through endless passages of crosshatched stone, trailing a long handkerchief from one limp hand.

Maybe I didn't look like that, but it's how I sounded.

“We don't know anything about Sandalwood,” I pointed out. “You may hate it.”

“I hate Clove House. So what? That doesn't mean I can't get what I need there.”

She certainly hates Emily
, I thought.
Poor Emily! But she's right, they've still done good work together
.

In the morning, I dragged my suitcases to the car, and we drove through gray drizzle to Clove House. Elena went to talk to her care team about leaving while I stayed in the waiting room and made calls.

It surprised me how quickly everyone jumped on board with the plan. Sandalwood back in Texas had an opening. They booked an introductory appointment for the following Monday. Lynn at the insurance company thought it was a fantastic idea.

“You'll need a waiver, of course,” she said. “Sandalwood isn't a preferred provider, but we don't have a preferred provider in the area that supplies that particular service. We'll have to arrange a single-case agreement with them. I'll start working on it right away.”

Dr. Greene called me into her office within minutes and gave me an envelope full of paperwork to take with me.

And as Elena came walking out with her arms full of therapy art, was that relief I saw in Emily's eyes?

“Good-bye, Elena,” Emily said. “I'm glad I got to work with you. Good luck!”

“Meh,” Elena said, turning away.

In the parking lot outside, Elena was jubilant as she waved up at Clove House's windows. All the patients were standing there to watch her leave. Enthusiastically, they waved back.

We drove out onto the rainy highway, and Elena put her playlist on. “Oh, here it is, Mom,” she said. “Listen to this. It's my favorite song.”

“What happened to the other one?” I teased. “I thought that one was your favorite.”

“This is better,” Elena said. “That's my
old
favorite song. This is my
new
favorite song.”

That made me laugh out loud, and I pushed aside the unwelcome image of the Edward Gorey mother.

We've gotten past the bad times
, I thought.
Things are getting better now
. And I imagined the Dunkle slumber party with the addition of Elena's quick wit and ready laughter.

I can't wait
, I thought.
The whole family will be under one roof again. How many families get that kind of second chance? How many mothers have that kind of luck? Except, there's no such thing as luck
.

And Elena and I sang all the way home.

E
lena was the only thing the Dunkle slumber party had been missing. She couldn't get enough of her brand-new niece. She held baby Gemma and wouldn't put her down. And she and Clint fell into a fun and annoying brother-and-sister role that came naturally to both of them. They teased each other and tripped each other and punched each other on the arm.

“Oh my
God
, you two!” said Valerie.

The next morning, I came into the kitchen to discover my girls sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard, talking and smoking their cigarettes. Over my dead body, Valerie had started smoking again now that Gemma was born. I hated the habit—hated it with a passion.

But when I looked out the window and saw my girls that morning, I felt bittersweet nostalgia. They looked so much like Joe's own sisters had looked, years and years ago. I remembered watching those sisters and their mother sit outside and smoke and talk like that, years before Elena was even born.

Life isn't a line
, I thought.
It's a circle
.

“Elena,” I called, standing in the doorway as the cats weaved back and forth in figure eights and collided with me softly. “Did you remember to take your pills this morning?”

“Yep!” she called from the lawn chair.

“Did you eat breakfast?”

“Yep!”

“Liar!” Valerie said dispassionately between puffs. “You watched me eat, but you didn't eat.”

“Oh, that's right. I wasn't hungry.”

This didn't surprise me. Life at the treatment center had helped Elena gain weight, but she still had trouble listening to her body's cues. She didn't feel normal hunger yet.

“Well, why don't you come eat something now,” I said.

“Sure. I will in a couple of minutes.”

And I went back inside.

An hour later, the girls were watching a horror movie with Clint while Gemma dozed in Valerie's arms.

“Hey, Elena, did you have that breakfast?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Elena said, distracted. “Mom, you ought to watch this. You'd like it.”

“Nope,” Valerie contradicted with calm enjoyment. She might be a wife and a mother, but tattling on one's sibling never gets old.

“Oh! That's right, I forgot.”

“I reminded you,” Valerie said.

This wasn't good. Missing a meal was one thing, but by this time, it was almost noon, and Elena had missed two. Back at Clove House, she would have eaten two thousand calories by now. Her high metabolism made it very difficult for her to hold on to weight.

“Elena!” I said. “You need to eat breakfast. And now you've missed snack, too!”

“Mom, you've got to chill out about this,” Elena said kindly. “This is
my
problem.
I
have to manage it.” And my imagination flashed to the image of a helicopter parent, humming along anxiously.

Why was she making me worry like this? Really, it was her fault that I hovered!

“Okay, it's your problem. So manage it!”

“I am. Tomorrow, I start at Sandalwood. I'll be eating five times a day there. It's not going to matter what I eat today. The real work of recovery starts there.”

Did that make sense?

Not really. But sort of.

Did I like being a hovering, mopey mom?

Not at all.

“Now, come watch this,” Elena said. “It's really good.”

“It
is
really good,” Clint echoed. “We can restart it.”

“Well . . . Okay,” I said, and I scooped my old terrier off the couch behind them and took her place. Then, at the look in her sad brown eyes, I scooped her back up and plopped her onto my lap.

So what if I should be doing laundry? The laundry could wait. My three children wouldn't always be together in one room like this, and they wouldn't always invite me to join them. How many mothers had that kind of luck? Treatment was starting tomorrow. This was a fight I could leave to the professionals.

That made me think of poor beaten-down Emily at Clove House. Emily had been the new me. Did I want to become the new Emily?

Not if I could help it.

The next morning, Elena got up early, wrapped herself in the darkest of emotional thunderclouds, and swept out the door to drive to Sandalwood.

“Have a good time!” Valerie called after her.

“Like hell!” Elena said.

At ten o'clock, my phone rang. My heart beat faster as I answered it. Phone calls never meant good news.

“Hello?” I faltered.

It was Dr. Leben, from Sandalwood.

Of course.

“Elena just walked out the door,” she said apologetically. “I wanted you to know so you wouldn't be surprised.”

I wasn't surprised. I was dismayed and upset, but I wasn't surprised.

“What happened?”

“Honestly?” Dr. Leben said. “I don't know. I think Elena was looking for reasons to make this not work.”

That didn't surprise me either. And the Edward Gorey mother fluttered back into my imagination, wringing her hands and trailing her handkerchief.

I told you!
she sobbed.
I told you!

“So . . . What do we do now?”

What do we do? What do we
do
?

“Well, if I were you,” Dr. Leben said, “I'd try to talk her into trying again. Let her know that we're right here for her. We're ready as soon as she is.”

Almost as soon as I hung up the phone, the door slammed.

“Hey!” Valerie called. “Do I have to murder you? Gemma's asleep!”

“That place sucks!” Elena announced as she stomped into the room. “I'm never going back there again!”

“Why? . . . ,” I said. “What? . . .”

I could hear the anxious whimper in my voice. I could feel the nervous thumping of my heart. And, oh, God! I could feel myself turning into
her
, that Edward Gorey mother, the silly Victorian melodrama mother whose shrill voice flutters around her children in a series of falsetto grace notes:

Oh, I don't think we should! Oh, I don't know about this! Darling, darling, wait! Can we
please
talk about this?

Meanwhile, Elena was ignoring me (such mothers are always ignored) to pour out an equally melodramatic tale of her own. According to her, Sandalwood was a terrible place where unqualified leaders used their work as a shallow excuse to hustle their closed-minded religious beliefs, where patients were either stooges or cheats, where the kitchen smelled horrid and the staff were uncaring; a place, in short, where no illness of any sort could possibly be healed and where Elena's only hope of survival lay in her rapid and headlong flight.

“It's bad for me to be around people as sick as those people are,” she said. “I'm
much
closer to recovery than they are. All they would do is depress me and teach me new tricks. I'm better off here, with my family who loves me.”

“But Elena!” I said. “Your family doesn't have the training to help you!”

“It doesn't matter,” Elena said. “
I
have the training. I know what I need to do.” And she went outside to smoke.

Valerie gave me an elaborate and meaningful shrug. And then she went out after her.

I wanted to burst into tears. I wanted to have a tantrum. Victorian melodrama mother that I was, I wanted to have hysterics.

How
had I let Elena do this to me?
How
had I given her all the power? Hadn't I
known
she was too weak? Hadn't I
known
what she would do?

What are we going to
do
?

But I didn't have hysterics because Clint was standing there. Poor man, he was learning far more about our family's inner workings than I would have hoped. But then again, Clint
was
family.

“So . . . pizza tonight?” he asked mildly.

“I was thinking we'd change it up,” I said. “Maybe spaghetti.”

“Sweet!” Clint said. “I love spaghetti.” And he followed the two girls out into the yard. From the kitchen window, I could see Valerie call him over to the chair next to her. Elena gave him a playful shove with her foot as he walked by.

The Dunkle slumber party continued over the course of the next week. Valerie and Clint sat on the floor and shot zombies while Elena cheered them on. I could hear their laughter as I worked on my web pages in the living room. The three of them were having a great time.

I wasn't. I was back to staring at the ceiling at night, almost sick with worry. Elena was surrounded by food, but she was eating almost nothing. She still had that vivacious personality and those pink, healthy cheeks. She could still get out of bed and go do things. But for how much longer?

Valerie asked me to watch Gemma for them while she, Elena, and Clint went out together to get very similar but slightly different tattoos. I wasn't a fan, but then again, it wasn't my money. While they were gone, I rocked my granddaughter and told her nursery rhymes. I sang her the alphabet song as I bounced her in time to its rhythm.

Gemma drank me in with solemn blue-gray eyes. She wrapped her tiny hands around my fingers and pulled them into her mouth to chew on them.

A universe of possibilities. What would she grow up to be?

The front door slammed. “Take a look, Mom!” They'd all gotten stars and their initials.

“They look like tattoos,” I confirmed. “You know how I feel about tattoos. So, did you guys eat while you were out?”

“Nope,” Valerie said as she walked to the fridge. She located the whipped-cream chocolate cake I'd made the day before and cut a piece for herself and one for Clint.

“Elena,” I said, “what have you had to eat today?”

“Mom,” Elena reminded me patiently, “
I
have to do this for myself. This isn't something you can do for me.”

I held the lid on my anger.

“Sure, I know that,” I said equally patiently. “I'm not trying to do anything for you. But: What have you had to eat?”

“I'm not sure,” Elena said. “It's important not to count calories.”

She wasn't sure? Of course she was sure! Food was all she thought about.

These days, it was all I thought about, too.

Elena had had one brown sugar Pop-Tart without the crusts. That was it, all day long. And what was that—maybe two hundred calories?