Elena Vanishing (11 page)

I eat the entire bag.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Dad exchanging meaningful glances with Mom. He thinks I'm doing great.

Mom relaxes, too. Pretty soon she and Dad are joking and having fun.

“I'll be right back,” I promise, and I head for the bathroom.

Someone is in the next stall. No problem. It could be Mom, and it wouldn't matter. I guarantee that she wouldn't hear a thing.

I bend over and close my eyes, and it all flows smoothly out—soft bread, edges of chips, and hard knots of pickles. Then I wipe my mouth with toilet paper and flush.

I feel like Wonder Woman. I feel fantastic. Nothing brings on a quicker high than purging. I'm not losing my touch. No fear and no pity. This is going to be a great senior year.

Afterward, I stand in front of the mirror, pop two Tums, and chew them cautiously while I fill my mouth with water. Calcium carbonate to neutralize the stomach acid. Baking soda works, too.

Then I pop an Altoid, reapply lip gloss, and grin to check my teeth.

Smooth. White. Perfect.

You can tell I don't purge.

Eight months have gone by since the drive across the States to meet
with Dr. Harris. Senior year is almost over. Even though that psychiatrist tried to take it away from me, I'm having my senior year in Germany with all my friends. I'm finishing up advanced-placement classes at the high school on base, and every other day, a school bus takes me to the military hospital, where I volunteer in the emergency room for high school credit.

Right now, it's ten o'clock in the morning, and I am where I love to be: in nursing scrubs in the middle of a busy hospital, with patients and staff all around me.

Every room in the ER is full, and the waiting room is packed. Even the hallway is packed, but not with patients. We've just gotten in a new set of Army trainees, and they're clustered by the big dry-erase board—nervous, miserable, hoping not to be asked to do anything too complicated. By the end of the month, each one of them needs to know how to perform basic medical procedures in the field. Then they'll disappear, and a new batch will show up and cluster by the dry-erase board.

I listen to Sergeant Blake lecture the group on how to start an IV. Then he spots me.

“Ah, Elena!” he says. “Accompany . . . ,” he scans the group,
“. . . Private Henning into Room Six and monitor as he starts an IV on the patient there. The rest of you, come with me.”

Inside Room Six is a middle-aged woman with little baggy eyes and a pinched mouth. She's cradling her abdomen like she's carrying a baby, but if she were pregnant, she'd be upstairs in Labor and Delivery. Appendicitis? Constipation? Since starting here, I've been surprised at the number of patients who need emergency enemas. There's even a special “enema” hand signal in the ER: the first finger curled into the thumb to form a butthole.

I wash up and coach Private Henning on how to wash up as we put on sterile gloves. Private Henning is a gangly African American with the words “Only God Can Judge Me” inked in blue letters into his neck. He can't hide his worry as I tear open the IV kit and lay its components out on a sterile tray.

“Couldn't you just do it for me?” he begs in a low voice.

The middle-aged woman with the constipated appendix has picked up on his nerves, and she too looks toward me in mute appeal. I could, and it would go well—undoubtedly better than it's about to go. I've started IVs on several of the techs for practice. “Hey, Elena, find my vein” is a pretty weird pickup line, but hospital techs have to be creative.

I'm not allowed to start IVs on patients, though. No IVs and no medications. I wonder how this pair would feel if they knew I'm only a high school student, bussed to the hospital on alternate school days to work here for class credit. There are four of us students at the hospital this semester: two in Labor and Delivery and two here in the ER.

No need to tell these fearful people that their “expert” is a schoolgirl, though. They're already having a rough day. So I give them both my most reassuring smile.

“You'll do fine,” I tell Private Henning. “I'll talk you through it.”

A couple of false starts, and Private Henning accomplishes his task. That actually went pretty well. The cluster of nervous newbies has re-formed by the dry-erase board. Private Henning goes to join them, but I notice that he's already walking a little taller.

A short, dark-haired man stomps to the door of Room Five. His scrubs are patched, and his lab coat is so wrinkled, it looks like he's been sleeping in it. He surveys the herd of newbies with a furious frown, but his face clears when he spots me.

“Elena! Good!” he barks. “Get over here right now! I need assistance!”

“Yes, Dr. T.”

Dr. T. is from somewhere in the former Soviet Union. He's a fantastic doctor, but his bedside manner is nonexistent: he takes offense just as readily as he gives it. He's already had a run-in with a patient today, but he handled it surprisingly well. A beefy man with chest pains roared with anger and refused to be treated by him: “I didn't come here to see some damn Polack!”

To my amazement, Dr. T. went away like a lamb and transferred the patient to another doctor. It turned out that he and the beefy man were secretly in agreement. He told me, “I would not let a Polish doctor treat me, either.”

Now I join Dr. T. in Room Five, where a big young Marine is sitting on the examining table. He's stripped to the waist, and his pecs and biceps are a thing of much work and preoccupation if not beauty. He has pale blond fuzz on his head, and across the baby-pink skin of his shoulder is a skeleton riding a Harley. With him is another big young Marine—possibly his boss.

Dr. T. is an avid doodler. While he's talking with the Marines, he's scribbling away on his pad of paper.

“Draining an abscess is very painful,” he says. “I can perform it here, but I would strongly recommend that you get a surgical consult.”

I take a few steps farther into the room and scan the patient. On his back is what appears to be a giant red pimple. We see two or three of these a day. They go deep into the tissue and can even cause gangrene. The skin inflammation is only the tip of the iceberg.

But the Marine looks at his Marine friend, and they both burst out laughing.

“Dude, I've been in the
desert
!” he scoffs. “I think I can handle a little
zit
!”

“Very well,” says Dr. T. He's doodling daggers and harpoons on his sketchpad.

I wash again, don new gloves, and lay out the sterile kit. Five minutes later, I'm up to my knuckles in the Marine's back, wiping away blood so Dr. T. can see what he's doing.

“
SHIT!
” roars the Marine, gripping his friend's hand so hard that it's white.

“
SHIT!
” roars the other Marine in agreement, and probably in almost as much pain. Only once did I make the mistake of offering my hand for a patient to hold through a procedure. The poor guy almost broke it.

Behind Dr. T.'s safety glasses, a smile lights up his dark eyes. He begins humming softly as he works.

After the procedure, I stand in the hallway to wait for my fellow student to finish up. The newbies are gone, packed off to the chow hall, and it's almost time for us students to catch the bus back to school. Sergeant Blake is here, chatting with a couple of the techs. Things are slowing down in the ER. Several rooms are vacant.

Behind us in Room Two, I hear Dr. Lawrence. He's a fairly new doctor with kind blue eyes and a propensity for ordering
mushroom-and-pepperoni pizzas whenever he's having a bad day. I hear him say, “Can you tell me your name?”

A small voice answers him: “Please help me. . . .”

I turn around. A handsome Army soldier is standing in Room Two. His eyes look lost and frightened.

“I'm an American,” he tells Dr. Lawrence in a low voice. “They took my money and locked me up here. Please help me escape. I want to see my family again.”

Beside me in the hallway, Sergeant Blake shakes his head.

“Remember the guy they pulled out of the cave-in?” he asks a nurse who walks up. “Remember how much trouble he had with doorways?”

She nods. “It took twenty minutes to coax him through the door.”

The conversation covers other interesting cases of combat-induced PTSD, but I continue to watch Dr. Lawrence. He's the least frightening medical person I know, and he's using his gentlest voice, but all this is wasted on the soldier, who is still trapped in his memories of trauma.

“Please help me,” he begs. “I'm an American. I just want to go home.”

The conversation beside me has turned from PTSD to craziness in general. The nurse is detailing a suicide attempt gone awry.

“I have a hard time with it,” she admits. “The things they can do with razors . . .”

“The craziest patient I had,” says one of the techs, “stabbed himself in the arm with a scalpel from a medical kit while I was out of the room getting his blood transfusion ordered.”

“The craziest patient
I
had,” says Sergeant Blake, “burned a
smiley face
into her arm!”

“Yeah,” I say. “That was my sister.”

They break off talking to stare at me. Then they laugh in disbelief.

Why did I say that? Why would I want them to know about Valerie? But I can't help myself. I'm like that soldier—trapped in my memories of trauma. Because I see it all. I remember it all.

It had been a beautiful summer day. Mom and Dad and I were at a party. Valerie had stayed home to lie in bed and listen to her music. Naturally, we were worried, but what could we do? We couldn't just stop living our lives.

At first, Mom and I met in corners from time to time to call home. But by the time dusk had fallen and we were toasting marshmallows around a fire pit, we were actually feeling happy.

That's when Valerie called to tell us:

“I've swallowed a bottle of pills.”

As long as Valerie was conscious, she cried and told us she was sorry. She wasn't trying to kill herself, she said, because the psychiatrist had told her the pills wouldn't do that. She was sure it was perfectly safe.

But Valerie wasn't conscious very long.

She lay like an angel in Room One of the ER—the cardiac room—with her long, glossy brown hair fanned out on the turquoise sheets and her lips stained black with charcoal slurry. The burns and slashes on her bare arms somehow added an exotic touch of beauty. Her skin was so pale as she lay there that she looked like she was already dead. She looked like Ophelia, drowned.

Mom and Dad and I sat by her bedside all night long.

At four o'clock in the morning, they transferred my sister upstairs to the psych ward. A tech in green scrubs bundled her into a wheelchair to take her away. She didn't know we were there, and she couldn't have told us good-bye. Her head hung down almost to the plastic bucket propped on her lap. As the tech wheeled her backward
through the swinging double doors, all we could see of my sister was that glossy brown hair and her two white hands, dotted with angry red burns.

My sister. My sister! The calm, rational one. The one who talked me down from my fears. My sister, the one who had always been there to save me from the monsters.

You're making a scene!
growls the voice in my head.

I come to with a jolt. The techs are looking away, silent. The nurse is studying my face.

“Elena, oh my God. I'm really sorry,” Sergeant Blake begins. But I don't want to listen, so I cut him off.

“That was my sister,” I say again.

Then I walk away to catch the bus.

The bus back to school takes the same route to the air base that the blue transport bus took last summer the day they loaded me onto the C-17. I look out the window down at the very same asphalt flowing by next to our wheels.

I shouldn't have told them about Valerie. I should have just let them talk. What Valerie did doesn't matter anymore. My sister is dead to me.

Valerie left us. She left and wouldn't tell us where she was going. I remember Mom screaming into the phone, begging for a name, an address—anything. But Valerie wanted out of our lives.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, she's out.

Maybe Mom has forgotten what Val did to us, and that's how she can write to her now. Me, I don't forget. I remember exactly how Dad's face looked when we got the call. I remember how Mom couldn't get out of bed for days.

Nothing can make up for what Valerie did to us.

My sister is dead to me.

The bus brings me back to school in time for lunch break, and my
friend Barbara and I meet up at her locker. She's a soccer star and a fantastic student. Both of us are overachievers.

“Do you want to walk to Burger King?” she asks. “I feel like having a burger.”

Ten minutes' walk there and ten minutes back
, says the voice in my head,
at a burn rate of four calories a minute. That's eighty calories you'll lose.

“Sure,” I say.

As we close our lockers, the wrestling guys come by in a noisy group. “Hey, come watch us weigh in,” they call. “You can be the judge.”

Barbara laughs, and we follow them to the gym.

One by one, they stand on the scale outside the boys' locker room and argue over ounces. Only one member of the wrestling team will eat today: the one who has lost the most weight since Friday.

Curly-haired Stevie steps on the scale and howls out swear words while the others jeer.

“How come I never get to eat on pizza day?” he mourns.

The winner is Vince. He pumps his fist in the air while the others curse. He jingles a handful of change under their noses. “Do I have enough money for ICE CREAM? I think I DO!”

Barbara steps onto the scale while they shove and punch. Vince says, “Hey, Elena, what about you?”