Skinny (26 page)
Authors: Diana Spechler
I woke up feeling as if I had only one eye, and knew immediately that I was in a hospital because rails confined my mattress, white curtains hung on either side of me, and a red box-shaped metal receptacle stood in front of the bed. And then I remembered an ambulance, a low voice saying, “I can’t get a vein.” Had that happened? When had that happened? I looked at my arms. There were no tubes taped to them, no needles piercing them.
I closed my eyes, remembering what I’d done in the kitchen at camp. I remembered the 100-calorie packs of mini chocolate chip cookies. How many packages had I eaten? Ten? Fifteen? I remembered the leftover sugar-free pudding, remembered polishing off the mixing bowl of it. And then the cereals, straight from their single-serving boxes. And then . . .
My left eye throbbed. When I opened my eyes, a woman in pink scrubs with a stethoscope slung around her neck was leaning over me, inspecting something on my face.
“How we doing?”
We.
And then I remembered. “Is Eden okay?” I grabbed the metal rails and tried to slide into a sitting position, but the strength had been vacuumed from my arms. “The girl in my car. Eden Bellham. The girl in the passenger seat.”
The nurse stood up straight. “You let us do our job and you do yours. Your job is to rest . . . Honey, don’t sit up. Whew
boy
, did you hit your head. You took some glass in the face, too, but we got it all. You in pain?”
I thought about it. I felt a heavy pain I couldn’t locate. I remembered Mikey.
“Yes.”
“Figured you must be.”
“Wait—”
“Honey, there’s nothing in all of creation that you need to worry about at this moment.” She bent over a tray on a shelf beside the bed. Then she took my arm. “This’ll hardly hurt.”
“No shots!” I said. “Pain makes me crazy.”
And then darkness.
The next time I woke up, I could tell it was daytime, but I couldn’t see a window, couldn’t locate the source of the sunlight. On a table by the bed, a glass vase bloomed yellow roses. Bennett was standing beside me. I looked at him and wished I could fold up into the wall like a Murphy bed, as if his seeing me in a hospital bed were more personal than the times he’d seen me naked.
“What day is it?”
“Saturday.”
“What time is it?”
He looked at his watch. “Noon.” He was dressed in a button-down shirt. Khaki pants. A brown leather belt. As if he were off to a stuffy Sunday brunch. He was incognito. No one would recognize him as the assistant director of a weight-loss camp. It occurred to me for the millionth time that I didn’t know Bennett Milton.
“Did I lose an eye?”
“You’ve got a patch over one.” He touched it gingerly. “But you’re going to be as good as new. You just got a little roughed up.”
I pulled the blanket tight around me.
“Bet you weren’t expecting me to meet your mom anytime soon. I told her, ‘Mrs. Lachmann, it’s so nice to meet you. I’m the old man who’s been banging your daughter.’ ”
I rubbed my eye and almost smiled. And then I sat up. “You’re kidding, right? My mom’s not here.”
“In the waiting room.”
“No. How long have I . . . Where’s Eden?”
“She’ll wake up soon. Everyone’s saying so. You both hit your heads pretty hard, but everyone’s going to be just fine. I’ll tell you what’s not fine is your car.”
“It’s not my car.”
“Well, whose is it?”
I saw my father then, his coffee and doughnut between us on the console.
“What were you doing? Where were you headed?”
I closed my eyes over the heat of tears. “Is Eden’s mother here?”
“Yup.”
I laid back to rest on the pillow and opened my eyes. “What’s going on at camp?”
“Yeah. About that.” Bennett’s eyes were bloodshot.
“You look exhausted.”
“Don’t you worry about me, Angeline.”
“What’s the latest?”
“Hell of a mess. I’ll tell you about it later.”
I reached for Bennett’s face. He bent down a little so I could touch him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What for? I’m just glad you’re alive. I’m glad you hit a guardrail instead of falling into the gorge.”
“Me, too.”
“I went to where you crashed. You could be graveyard dead.”
I pulled the blanket tight around my body.
“You sure had a lot of stuff in your car. I brought it all to the post office. It’s on the way to your mom’s house.”
“You did that for me?”
Bennett took one step away from the bed.
I sighed. “I’ll pay you back.”
“You don’t owe me a thing.” Bennett studied me for a minute. “How about this?” he said. “Here’s how you can pay me back. If I’m ever in New York, you can show me around town. Deal?” He stuck out his hand for me to shake.
I remembered the last time we’d shaken hands, when I’d agreed to a summer of fun. I knew enough to recognize defeat. I knew what an ending looked like.
I took his hand. I held it in my palm. I wanted to tell him this was his loss, which would be proportionate to my gain. But I didn’t really believe that. Loss was never so tidy.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.”
My mother, her hair a mess, fiddled with one of her pearl earrings. “You’re so thin,” she said, her voice trembling.
“I’m thin in a good way.”
“We all think thin is so
good
.”
I remembered her from years before, weighing broccoli on a scale, trying on a light yellow bikini every morning before getting dressed.
“I’ve been at weight-loss camp all summer. I’m in the best shape of my life. If you saw me without cuts all over my face—do I have cuts all over my face?—if you saw me in workout clothes or in a bathing suit, you’d tell me I look great.”
“Are you losing your hair?” She sat at the foot of my bed and held my toes through the faded blue blanket. “You could have told me.” She pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. But despite the crying, she looked stronger than she had the last time I’d seen her. There was more color in her face. She filled out her jeans. She looked like a person on the mend.
“Told you?” I tried to rearrange my hair over the bald spot. “What could you have done?”
“I mean, you could have told me why you were coming here for the summer.”
I studied her. “What exactly do you mean?”
“Does Mikey know?”
“Mikey doesn’t know anything. Mikey . . .”
“Saul told you about Azalea.”
“You know about Azalea?”
I floated out of my body, watching us: a mother perched on a hospital bed, holding her daughter’s feet.
“He told me he told you her name,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t
you
tell
me
? I know I’m missing something.” She pulled one of her earrings off and I saw that they were clip-ons, covering the holes. “Like why you wanted to meet Azalea Bellham’s daughter, like why you cared about any of this. I know you miss Dad. You were looking for a connection. Was that it? You wanted a connection to him?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I just can’t fathom why you—”
“She’s my sister!” I said. “Why
wouldn’t
I care? You guys never told me she existed!”
My mother cocked her head at me. “Who’s your sister?” Her eyes moved over my face.
“Eden,” I said, my voice weak.
My mother shook her head. She leaned in to inspect me more closely. She seemed to be searching my eyes for a hint that I was joking. Then she leaned back. “You don’t have a . . . Gray!
What
?”
And that was how I learned that I had gotten the whole thing wrong.
This was what happened at Camp Carolina while Eden and I were unconscious: Friday morning, people with serious faces, sensible shorts, and socks and sneakers arrived in official-looking vehicles. They came from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the North Carolina Department of Health. It took them under an hour to announce that the jig was up.
Camp Carolina’s kitchen didn’t meet the state’s sanitation standards. Lewis, sometimes with campers in the car, had been driving around all summer with a revoked driver’s license. There were other infractions, too, a list that amounted to seventy-eight; and while the child molester accusation, at least presently, seemed to be fictitious, Lewis was still going to be swimming in lawsuits.
Spider’s parents were suing.
The original kitchen ladies were suing.
Kimmy’s parents were suing.
Harriet’s parents were suing. She’d returned from camp with a staph infection.
From Friday morning until Saturday morning, parents came and collected their children. Because of all the chaos, no one ever took the kids’ “after” pictures. All that was left of the summer were the pictures from before.
The kids were either devastated or stoic. Miss and Whitney screamed and sobbed, as if they hadn’t just screamed and sobbed about how much they hated camp, as if they hadn’t been whining all summer about how badly they wanted to leave. Other campers stepped stone-faced into their parents’ minivans and didn’t look back.
They rode away from the Blue Ridge Mountains and back to their homes, to the places where they had grown fat. They stepped into their houses and remembered the smells that were trapped in the walls—the years of pancake breakfasts and Sunday night pizza dinners. They lay on their beds and felt happy and thin. They took naps in the middle of the day. Then they woke up and went downstairs, where their parents had ordered feasts of Chinese food, or where their mothers had made them their favorite lemon cake.
In the morning, they had Belgian waffles for breakfast.
They watched television.
They ate Kettle chips straight from the bag.
Sure, some of them tried to keep losing weight. They ran around the block every morning, or attempted the exercises they’d done in cals, or strained to remember what they’d learned in Mia’s nutrition class. Some asked their parents to buy them Dance Dance Revolution. But even the ones who wanted to try wound up feeling confused. Was Diet Coke okay? Was pizza healthy if it was covered in vegetables? Was cereal acceptable? What about a second bowl of cereal? What about apple pie? After all, it was mostly fruit.
Eventually, the trying was replaced with not trying.
Only Pudge would make a drastic change. Nurse would take him home with her, enroll him in school, treat him like a son. In time, she would get her nursing certification, and then she would pay for his gastric bypass surgery. For a while, that surgery would make his life better.
But for most, the successes were extremely short-lived, as if weight loss were a wound, something time was supposed to heal.
Here’s what I learned from my mother fourteen months after my father’s death, in my bed at Falling Rock Hospital: When I was a child, when my father was still a lawyer, a man named Jimmy Hagen fell from a ladder while trying to replace a roof shingle.
After he fell, Jimmy paced around his yard, cradling his aching arm. He cursed for a few minutes, and then popped black-market prescription painkillers, cracked a beer, and passed out. The next morning, his left wrist swollen and throbbing, he drove to see Dr. Koa Bellham, an orthopedic surgeon in Cambridge, a friend of a friend of a friend, who had agreed to see Jimmy free of charge, and who suggested immediate surgery.
Jimmy refused. “Buddy of mine had shoulder surgery and his shoulder was never the same again.”
It is important to understand some things about Jimmy Hagen. He was thirty-seven years old. He lived with his mother in the house he’d grown up in. Sometimes he had a job. More often, he did not. When he was nineteen, he lost five thousand dollars in a pyramid scheme. In subsequent years, he attempted his own pyramid schemes, but his attempts were unsuccessful because no one ever trusted him.
“I don’t have insurance,” Jimmy said. “I have no money.”
Dr. Bellham sighed. He looked at Jimmy’s wrist again. “Look,” he said. “Off the record, maybe you could wait a few months on this. Maybe it will heal on its own. I don’t recommend it, though.”
“A few months?”
“Could heal without surgery. It’s not my recommendation, but it is possible.”
Nine months after Jimmy’s fall, my father got a call from an old friend. “My cousin needs legal advice. None of us likes the black sheep fuckup, but . . . you know how it is. Family.”
Days later, in his office, my father looked across the table at the splint on Jimmy Hagen’s wrist.
“So the doctor told you to have surgery immediately.”
“My wrist is ruined!” Jimmy cried. “Forever! My life will never be the same.” He was desolate, as if his injury spelled the end of his career as a concert pianist. “The medical profession is corrupt. I want to fight for justice.”
“You really don’t have a case,” my father said. “He advised you to have the surgery. You didn’t follow his advice.”
“He told me ‘off the record’ that I didn’t have to.”
“Really?”
“He did! He did! He told me not to tell anyone. He said, ‘Don’t bother with surgery, Jimmy.’ ”
My father was suspicious, but—why not?—he did a little research into Dr. Koa Bellham, and this was what he learned: Koa Bellham was thirty-three years old. He had grown up in Hawaii. His wife was pregnant with their first child. Oh, and his malpractice insurance had lapsed.
Dr. Bellham had let his insurance lapse not because he was unethical (he was not unethical), not because he was trying to pinch pennies (he was meticulous and fair), but because of a fatal oversight. His practice was new. He’d made a mistake. The lapse was only three and a half weeks, but the timing, for Dr. Bellham, could not have been worse. For Jimmy Hagen, it could not have been better.
My father told Dr. Bellham, “I know what you told my client ‘off the record.’ Bad medical advice? Lapsed insurance? You wanna play rough? Okay. It’s on!” Or something to that effect.
“I told him to have surgery!” Dr. Bellham said.
“Oh, yeah? You have that in writing?”
“No. I saw him as a favor.”
“You should really get everything in writing,” my father said. “If you don’t have anything in writing, there’s not much we can do now, is there?”
Because of Jimmy Hagen, because of my father, because of Dr. Bellham’s oversight, because of bad luck, because of greed, because of fate or the alignment of the stars or God’s will or corruption or justice, Dr. Koa Bellham, his wife pregnant and unemployed, turned every penny he owned and then some over to Jimmy Hagen and my father.
My father told my mother, “I might have just done something reprehensible. I’ve become one of those lawyers I never wanted to become.” But then, for a few weeks, he barely thought about Dr. Bellham again.
Perhaps Dr. Bellham, hopelessly in debt, wandered around his house at night, unable to sleep. Perhaps he thumbed through the
Boston Herald
want ads, circling words he could barely read through his panic. Perhaps one day, while drawing these circles, he paused and saw the futility of life—how the best that anyone could do was make loops with a cheap red pen.
He pushed his chair back from the kitchen table, stood, walked down to the basement in his pajamas and socks, entered the garage, sat on the wooden workbench, and shot himself in the mouth.