Still a Work in Progress (22 page)

My dad puts down his fork, too. “I’m sorry, Noah. I should have asked if you were OK eating dairy. It was wrong to assume.”

“It’s fine,” I say.

He looks at me like he knows it’s not, though. “I wish I knew the right thing to do. I’m the parent. I should. But sometimes I really don’t.”

“It’s all right, Dad.”

He wipes his eyes with his napkin. “This is so hard.”

“I know.”

He puts his napkin next to his plate. “You go on up and do your homework. I’ll take care of the dishes.”

“What about watching a movie?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Maybe later, kid.”

“All right.” I bring my plate to the kitchen and put it in the dishwasher. The Captain follows me in, and I let him lick the plates in the dishwasher before I close it. No one needs to know.

In my room, I check my phone for messages, out of habit. Of course there aren’t any. I haven’t had any for days. I scroll through some of the old ones and feel a twinge of missing Sam and Ryan and our stupid conversations. I wonder if they’re still mad at each other. I wonder if they’re having conversations without me now. I wish it was still fall and our biggest worry was going to the school dance and whether anyone would dance with us. Why did that seem so important? I can’t remember.

I find Emma’s letter and read it again. There’s really nothing much there. No clue to say why she did what she did. Or does. I don’t understand it. I’ve read all the stupid pamphlets they gave us at the place she’s staying. All the websites they said to go to. But none of them really make sense. None of them tell me why. Why Emma? She’s the good one. The perfect one. She’s the popular one. The pretty one. Everyone wants to be her friend. She doesn’t need to be anything different from what she already is, so why would she do this to herself? It’s like she sabotaged her life. For what?

How could she be so stupid?

Doesn’t she know how many people can only dream of looking like her? Of being as smart as her? Of being as loved as her?

How could she be so ungrateful? How could she put herself at so much risk?

How could she be so selfish?

I almost tear her letter in half but stop.

It’s a disease,
I tell myself.
It’s not her fault. She doesn’t
want
to be sick.

OK.

Fine.

So whose fault
is
it?

For the next few weeks, my life is kind of the same. Go to school. Ignore everyone. Be ignored back. Go home. Eat increasingly rich and cheesy and forbidden food made by my dad. Feel sick. Go to my room to do homework. Watch mindless TV. Write a letter to Emma. Wait for her to come say good night, even though I know she can’t. Eventually fall asleep.

Every night at dinner, my mom gives my dad a funny look about what he’s serving, but she never tells him to stop. We have baked mac and cheese. Mashed potatoes with real butter ponds. Homemade pizza. More lasagna. The only rule we don’t break is eating meat. I guess none of us can face knowing how Emma would feel if we ate something that actually “contains death.”

We don’t compare letters from Emma, even though we all get them. We don’t talk about Emma at all, actually. It’s like an unwritten rule.

It’s like I really am an only child.

Emma still writes me letters that don’t say much. She tells me stories about how nice the nurses are, but she doesn’t talk about the other patients, because she says it’s all confidential and she’s not supposed to. She tells me about what books she reads and what TV shows she’s watching. But she doesn’t say anything about coming home. When we visit her, she’s polite and friendly and tells us she’s homesick but fine. She’s always fine. It’s just another day!

Just another
crappy
day,
I think.

Tonight, my dad has made calzones stuffed with four types of cheese, and I’ve done my usual devour-half-and-start-to-feel-sick routine. My mom picks at her food, as always. She eats it all, but slowly. Painfully slowly. And I decide I really can’t take this not-talking-about-Emma game anymore.

“Why hasn’t anyone said when Emma’s actually coming home?” I ask after forcing myself to drink my milk. “It’s almost February break.”

My mom and dad exchange a look, as if I’m not sitting here.

“What?” I ask.

My dad finishes chewing and sips his wine.

My mom does the same.

“It’s complicated,” my dad says.

“Why?”

They do their private-look exchange again. The one where they don’t talk but say everything.

“We don’t want to worry you,” my mom says quietly.

The food in my stomach seems to harden and curdle. “Well, obviously I’m worried even more now,” I say.

My mom motions for my dad to be the one to explain.

He reaches out to touch my arm, as if he wants me to hold still while he tells me the news. “The therapy team is concerned about Emma’s progress,” he says. “She’s . . . not quite where they hoped by now.”

I feel my food starting to come up my throat, and force it back down again. “Where they hoped?” I ask.
What does that mean?

My mom reaches over to touch my hand, but I slide it away. “It’s just taking more time than we thought it would,” she says. “We have to try to be patient. She’s in a safe place. That’s what’s important.”

“So, does she just stay there forever? How are you guys going to pay for this?”

“We’re fine.”

“No, we aren’t! I’ve heard you fighting about it.”

My dad drinks his wine. “Insurance covers a fair amount, and we can get by with the rest. It’ll be hard, but we’ll be OK.”

“Sometimes I really hate her,” I say.

“No, you don’t,” my dad says. “You hate her disease.”

“She doesn’t have cancer!” I say. “She’s the one making herself sick!”

“Stop it!” My mom slams her fork onto the table. “You know it’s more complicated than that. She wants to come home, but it’s not safe yet. She needs to stay there as long as it takes to get well, no matter what. We’re not going to risk losing her.”

“Losing her?”

“Louise!” my dad says, shocked.

“She could have
died,
Jeff!” my mom cries. “Let’s be honest for a change!”

My dad glares at her. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine.”

“She didn’t
really
almost die,” I say. “Did she?”

A whimper comes from under the table. The Captain hates when we fight.

My mom takes another long sip of wine. Her hand is shaking.

My dad gets up from the table and grabs his plate. There’s still half a calzone on it. “No,” he says, glaring at my mom. “She didn’t.” But it feels like a lie.

“Where are you going?” my mom asks him.

“I lost my appetite.”

“Sit back down.”

“I’m not hungry, either,” I say.

“You will both sit down and eat what’s on your plates. Now.”

My dad slowly sits back down.

“I can’t eat it,” I say. Already the food that formed into a ball feels like it’s winding up again and getting ready to shoot out my throat and across the table.

“I said
eat,
” my mom says.

You wouldn’t say that to Emma,
I think.

My dad and I stare at our plates, not eating.

“I’m sorry,” my mom says more calmly.

“It’s all right,” my dad says.

I look up at both of them. At their tired, worn-out faces. So much sadness and disappointment has settled over their eyes, they look like they’ve aged five years since Christmas.

“It’s not all right,” I say. “It never will be. Not until Emma comes home.”

My mom starts to cry. A tear slips off her chin and lands on her plate, just missing what’s left of her calzone. She wipes her face with the cuff of her sweater. It reminds me of something Emma would do.

“What’s wrong with you?” my dad asks me. “You could see she was getting upset. Why did you have to make it worse?”

“I’m not the one making things worse! Emma is!”

“It’s not Emma — it’s the disease.”

“But how did she get it? Did we make her sick? What did we do?”

My dad pushes his plate away. “I don’t know, Noah. I don’t seem to have any answers these days.”

My mom cries harder.

Suddenly all the food looks disgusting. I want to shove it off the table.

My mom reaches over and touches my arm. “None of this is your fault, honey,” she says. “And you didn’t make me cry.”

“Yes, I did,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“I need to go lie down,” she says, which means she needs to go cry harder and she doesn’t want me to see.

After she leaves, my dad gets up and hugs me from behind. It feels awkward. “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Noah. I know how hard this is, and I know you need us. I’m sorry if we do a crappy job sometimes.”

“It’s OK,” I say, even though I don’t really think it is.

“I’m going to go check on your mom.”

The table’s a mess, so I take everything into the kitchen, scraping the food into the trash. The Captain wanders in innocently and looks confused when he sees the food in the trash and not in his bowl.

“It’s not good for you,” I tell him.

I load the dishwasher and wash the other dishes in the sink. Then I go back and wipe the table until everything is clean and perfect. Only it isn’t.

I go upstairs and find my letters from Emma. All the lies about wanting to come home and see me soon and all the other fake things she said to make me feel better. I want to rip them up. I want to take a marker and scribble out all her stupid cartoons. Instead, I run down the hall and into her room and start tearing it apart.

I open drawers in her bureau and go through her stupid clothes, looking for food she might have hidden. That’s what all the pamphlets on eating disorders say. How sometimes people hoard food. How they eat it in private and then make themselves throw up. I imagine Emma stuffing her face in here. Did she cry while she did it? Did she laugh, thinking how stupid we were because she was fooling us all?

I look under the bed and find a bunch of shoe boxes, but they’re all filled with letters and old papers, not snacks. I’m surprised when I find a box that says noah on the top and am scared to open it, but of course I do anyway. Inside, there are all the homemade cards and drawings I’ve made for her since I was little and learned to hold a crayon. Every single one. It makes my heart hurt so much, it’s hard to breathe.

I put the boxes away and then keep looking. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, but it doesn’t matter. I search her closet, but it’s just stuffed with clothes all hanging neatly on hangers. I check hoodie pockets, but there’s nothing there.

I check under her mattress. Nothing.

I try everyplace I can think of, even though I don’t even know why I’m looking anymore or what I’ll do if I find something.

Finally, I sit on her bed, exhausted.

Emma’s room is so much neater than mine, even after my rampage through her stuff. Everything is orderly. Even her posters seem unmarred, where mine have little tears at the corners. She uses that sticky stuff that’s like Silly Putty to make them stick to the wall so she doesn’t have to use thumbtacks. My walls are covered with thumbtack holes from various posters I’ve had over the years. Hers are totally perfect. Everything about Emma, as usual, is perfect.

Except for the one thing.

Why can’t she be perfect at staying healthy?

Why can’t she be perfect at that?

Next to her bed, she has a little nightstand where she keeps her favorite books, including photo books she’s made of her friends. But there’s also one I don’t remember. It says
My Life
on the spine. I pull it out and flip through the pages. Some of the photos I recognize, but a lot I don’t remember. She must have gotten them from my mom’s computer.

I don’t know why she never showed it to me. She’s made a bunch of cute captions to go with each spread. There are photos of her trying to teach me how to walk. Feeding me from a bottle. Drawing with me at the kitchen table. Posed photos of us sitting in front of the Christmas tree for our family holiday card.

But as we get older, there are a lot of photos I didn’t even realize she had taken. Me, Sam, and Ryan sitting out back in the grass, talking. She must have taken it from her bedroom window. There’s a shot of me in the Lewises’ carpool, looking miserable. She must have taken it with her phone when I wasn’t paying attention. There’s a photo of my dad busy cooking in the kitchen, the Captain standing behind him hopefully. There’s one of my mom asleep on the couch with an open book resting on her chest. Something called
This Dark Road to Mercy.
I wonder if Emma took the photo because of the book’s title or because of my mom.

The next spread shows my bedroom on one side and Emma’s on the other. On the next spread, there’s a photo of my parents’ dresser top covered with framed photos, some that are in this book. I keep flipping, feeling lonelier with each page. The photos went from such happy times to such lonely ones. Photos of objects and rooms, not people, but where people should be. Like the dining-room table, set for dinner but with no one sitting there. Or the living-room couch with a magazine tossed on a cushion.