Elena Vanishing (25 page)

I'm afraid of getting in trouble with the care team, but I can't face the thought of another quota increase. I'm already at thirty-three hundred calories, and I eat so much, I feel like a living bomb.

“I won't eat any more food,” I say. “I can't do it without a tube.”

“We don't have another option,” says Dr. Greene.

So I storm out of the office and collapse into a Foof.

Breathe. Just breathe. Don't panic!

Stella looks up from the blanket project she's knotting together. “What happened?” she asks.

“They're upping my calories! They want me to gain X amount a week!”

I don't say the number, and Stella doesn't ask. We don't say numbers because numbers are all we think about. Numbers are magic words. If we hear another patient's number, it sends us into a rush of competition. We start to worry and obsess. The real problem is that
we don't know our own number anymore, so all numbers seem ominous and powerful.

If I knew my number, I wouldn't be such a nervous wreck right now, but the staff keep our numbers secret. It's supposed to help us find new ways to define ourselves, but all it's done is make me feel desperate.

There's nothing I can be sure of without my number.

“They won't let me have a PEG tube!” I continue. “It's the asshole insurance company!”

Stella nods. She knows all about the insurance battle. Her last full day of treatment is tomorrow because her insurance company refuses to keep paying.

It's a good thing for my sanity that we're getting out of this place for a couple of hours. Today is Outing Day, when we patients pile into the van and go someplace fun. We've been to the botanical gardens and the zoo, and today we're getting our nails done.

Sam climbs into the van next to me and sings and dances in place to her own music. Ms. Carter isn't here to tell her not to exercise. Mark is our chaperone today.

“Try not to embarrass me too much,” Mark says as the van pulls up to the mall. We giggle because that's exactly what we'll try to do.

We love Mark best of all the staff. He's young and good-looking, but we don't think of him in that way. We think of him as a brother, and that's how he treats us, too. He doesn't fuss over us patients and clap his hands and baby us. He growls at us: “Cut it out!” Or he laughs and jokes.

Mark's sister died of an eating disorder. That's why he chose this line of work. His life has been touched by the shadow, and that makes him family.

At the nail salon, I opt for my favorite manicure: French nails. Sam immediately clamors for them, too.

“Your nails are long enough,” I tell her. “They'll look great. You'll like it. It's a classy look.”

“You know everything there is to know about makeup, don't you?” says Sam.

“I'll help you with your makeup one day if they'll let me,” I promise. Then I laugh as she tries to sit still enough to get her manicure.

I hate Sam's parents. I truly do. They're the reason she has her eating disorder. They're evil incarnate, but not the kind of evil that's going to drink blood or take over the world. Sam's parents are worse than that. They're whiny, grasping, greedy, infantile, and completely self-absorbed.

Sam's parents aren't the ones who want Sam to get well. They don't want to be bothered with her at all. Sam's parents have fights over which one of them is going to have to keep her.

Demons with pitchforks look like saints compared to Sam's parents.

My manicurist has snapping black eyes and black straight hair, and she speaks very fast in another language to the worker next to her. She buffs my nails at lightning speed and then applies the white polish to their tips.

I admire my hands while she works. They've changed for the better these last two months. Anorexia is hard on the hands.

In school and at university, I could pick out eating disorder people by their hands. Anorexics develop “old-people hands”—thin skin and popping veins. Then I would look for the hand with the ragged, cracked nails, or the hand that had its nails clipped short while the other hand's nails were long. Or I'd look for the beat-up, faded polish. Stomach acid is hell on nail polish.

And then I would stay as far from that person as I could.

It was nothing personal. It's just that hanging out with anorexics on the outside can be risky. We give each other away. It's like an escaped prisoner partying with other escaped prisoners: spend enough time with them and you'll find yourself back in jail.

But now my hands actually look nice for a change.

We leave the nail salon in a laughing, chattering crowd and slowly make our way down the mall. “Can I go to the bear store?” Sam asks. “I want to look at the bears.”

“Sure,” says Mark.

But when we get to the bear store, the cashier lady comes out front. “I'm very sorry,” she says, “but I can't allow you in.”

We stop, stunned. We can't go into the bear store?

“It's our insurance,” the lady explains to Mark. “We can't be responsible if one of your patients has . . . some kind of event.”

I turn around and survey my friends with new eyes. We're pale. We're in baggy sweats and special hospital support hose. Most of us have nose tubes stuck to our cheeks, and some of us are wearing portable pumps.

I guess we do look like patients, don't we?

“Besides,” the lady says in a lower tone to Mark, “there are children in the store. I don't want them to be upset.”

Children? What the hell? What the
hell
??

Ha, ha, ha!
laughs the voice in my head.
You're so ugly, children run from you! You're so ugly, you make babies cry!

That's too much for Sheila. She pushes her way through our group. “What do you have against CANCER?” she demands loudly.

The lady changes color and swallows hard. “I really am very sorry,” she says.

“Let's go,” Mark says as he turns away. Reluctantly, we turn to follow him.

Scary ugly!
laughs the voice in my head.

But Sheila doesn't follow Mark. She's still glaring at the cashier lady. She pats her shining, gorgeous honey-brown hair and gives the lady a withering look. She says, “I put on my
wig
for this!”

The cashier lady looks like she's going to faint.

“I'm
so
sorry,” she whimpers. “
Very
sorry.”

“Stop it!” Mark snaps. “Let's go!” And we walk away, giggling. An unpleasant moment has been salvaged. We've managed to embarrass Mark.

But when we get back to Clove House, we sit down with Susan and have a group therapy session about it.

Stella cuts straight to the point, as always. “Do we look that shitty?” she asks.

Susan is not a woman who is easily rattled. She's not rattled now, but she's picking her words with care. “Here's something you need to think about,” she says. “I know I've explained this to some of you before. The fact is that you can't see yourselves the way that store manager saw you.”

I say, “
Won't
see ourselves that way, you mean.”

“No,
can't
,” Susan says. “You physically
can't
.”

I don't like Susan, but she does have my attention.

“Our brains—
all
our brains, yours and mine both,” she says, “have a special way of coping with starvation. When we drop even a few pounds below our ideal body weight, the part of the brain that assesses our appearance stops functioning. Then when we look in the mirror, we don't see the damage that's being done to our bodies. What we see is somehow normal.”

Somehow normal!
sniggers the voice in my head.

“This helped our ancestors survive,” Susan continues. “If a harvest failed, it might mean months of famine before they would get
enough to eat again. Not being able to see what the famine was doing to them kept them from losing hope and giving up. But that same trick of the brain works against patients with eating disorders. You can't see a reason to change.”

“So we
do
look like hell is what you're saying,” Stella concludes.

“You don't look like hell, no,” Susan says. “But you look ill. In fact, some of you look very ill. And that's why you're here: to get better.”

I think about this as Sam and I go back to our mod-podge. Is that why the mirror girl turned into a stranger? Because my brain couldn't see who I was anymore?

In between jokes and glue-bottle artistry, I sneak furtive looks around the room. It's true that Stella looks a lot better than when I first met her. Her skin is bright and clear, and her dark blond hair is glossy. So does Sam. She used to look like a little beggar out of a Dickens novel. Now she looks like a happy little girl.

They deserve to get well
, says the voice in my head.
You don't.

After we put our art supplies away, I go to my basket and fetch my makeup bag. Then I sit down in the art room and look at my face in the compact mirror.

Can I see the person who's really there? Can I see the person other people see?

Well, I've broken out since coming here. Thank you, returning hormones! And my hair might look better if the place that colored it the last time hadn't done such a shitty job. And my nose still looks like a squashed potato, but now it's a fatter squashed potato than before. Is that just my imagination? Do noses put on weight?

I hold the mirror farther away and face the stare head-on.

Who's in there?

Me? Or a stranger?

Not me. The girl in the mirror still looks like a stranger. And she doesn't look like a stranger who's happy to see me.

Remember the lady at the bear store
, says the voice in my head.
Whatever you see, the reality looks even worse.

“Balloons!” shrieks Sam as she and her friend Laurie dash through the door. They're trailing a cluster of red and pink balloons. They close the door to the art room and lock it behind them. It's the only door with a lock.

“What's up?” I ask as I tuck away the mirror and zip up the makeup bag.

“HEEEELIUM!” Laurie says.

The central balloon is Mylar. Sam pulls it from its cluster, flops down on the floor of the art room, and pops off the plastic clip. Then she takes a big breath from the neck of the balloon.

“Say something!” says Laurie.

“Something!”
squeaks Sam in a screechy Mickey Mouse soprano. They laugh in octaves, with Sam squeaking away at high C.

Laurie grabs the balloon, inhales deeply, and starts singing a popular song. But she can't squeal out more than two or three words before dissolving into surreal giggles.

The door handle turns.

“Hey!” calls a voice. “Who's in there? What are you doing with the door locked?”

Sam slurps in more helium and squeaks out,
“It's Sam.”
Then the pair of them fall into each other as they laugh.

“Who is that?” demands the voice. “Who is that really?”

And I'm laughing so hard, I can't breathe.

Next morning, Stella finishes treatment early. I'll see her again because she lives nearby, so she can come to visit, but this is the last time we'll be together on the inside.

“So this is it,” she says. “Don't bother with the whole pump-me-up ‘you'll do great' speech.”

I nod. “If that's what you want.”

“Do you think that's true?” she asks after a minute. “What Susan said yesterday? That we don't even see ourselves right?”

“I don't know.”

Stella stares at the ground for a moment, deep in thought. Then a grin lights up her face. She's
so
beautiful. And I would tell her that, but I know she wouldn't believe me. She'd think it was that pump-me-up speech she just nixed.

“Oh, well,” she says. “I guess it doesn't matter anyway.”

Then she's gone.

I'm somber after Stella leaves. She was right to skip the speech. The fact is that she's not ready. She can't go from ten-hours-a-day nursing care with locked bathrooms and supervised meals to all the temptations and opportunities of home. Stella's compulsions are too strong. She won't have the power to stop herself. They've set her up for failure, and she knows it.

You're all going to fail
, says the voice in my head.
This treatment is just a waste of your time.

Ms. Carter comes up to me.

“Elena,” she says, “Dr. Greene wants us to try the tube again.”

So they can hurry up and get you moved out of here, too.

She can't get it placed. I'm really trying to cooperate, but no matter what I do, I can't help gagging when it hits the back of my throat. Ms. Carter tries again and again, while the tears run down my face and the tube rubs my nose on the inside until it bleeds.

At last, the tube makes it to my stomach. We look at each other in tense silence, hardly daring to hope and certainly not daring to breathe. Two minutes . . . three minutes . . . I'm still keeping it down. Maybe this time it's going to work!

“Okay,” Ms. Carter says, “why don't you walk up and down for a while in the hall, nice and easy, to try to get used to it. I'll go tell Dr. Greene.”

So I walk up and down, trying not to turn my head, trying hard not to think about the straw-shaped thing dangling down inside my throat. Settle, stomach. Settle. Nice and easy. I need this thing to stay in.

Sam darts out into the hall, sees me, and comes up, all smiles.

“They finally got it to work!” she says.

“Yes,” I say. And that's when all hell breaks loose.

Speaking vibrates the tube against the back of my throat—a sensation that does in my esophagus what a tickle in the nose does to make a sneeze. Right there and then, I gag so violently that everything in my system comes up, and the end of the tube flies out and slaps Sam on the cheek.