Elena Vanishing (27 page)

“Four hours three or four times a week,” Brenda says. “Maybe even five times a week to start with.”

“But I'm not ready,” I say. “Nothing's changed. I'm not any different.”

Of course you're not different
, says the voice in my head.

“That's not true,” Brenda says. “You've built up your skills in the last six months. It's time to strengthen them through challenges. In outpatient treatment, you'll go on supervised shopping trips and work together with the other patients to cook meals. You could even take a college course or two in your free time.”

Free time. No rules. No routine.

You'll fail
, says the voice in my head.
You know you will. They want you to fail.

“I haven't built up shit for skills,” I say. “It's a major achievement for me if I can stay awake for ten minutes straight. How am I supposed to go to college when all I'll do is sleep through the classes?”

“I know you're on a lot of medications, and I know the side effects have been rough,” Brenda says. “But you have to look at the improvement over time.”

What improvement?
says the voice in my head.

But I'm too tired to argue.

As a token of my new status, Brenda releases me from treatment for the rest of the day. My first free afternoon in weeks, and all I want to do is sleep. But I'm not supposed to sleep, so Mom takes me to a movie instead. A Disney movie. The bright colors are hypnotic.

“It's over,” Mom says. “Time to go.”

I blink and look around the theater. Everybody else is gone.

“What did I miss?” I ask. “Was it good?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mom says with a sigh. “Amazing.”

There's a pet store next to the theater. Mom drags me in. “Look, kitties,” she says. “They have an adoption center.”

The adoption center is its own small room behind a glass wall. Stacked-up cages hold shelter cats that need a home. A large woman with gray hair is in the room, tending to the cats. Two by two, she lets them out to run around and play.

“You could volunteer here on your days off,” Mom says. “You'd love it.”

She's right. At least, I think she's right. I do love animals. But no feeling, happy or sad, rises out of my muffled soul.

We go inside the glass room, and Mom talks to the large woman. I spend my time looking in the different cages.

That's how I feel. I'm in a cage. Even when I'm having a free day.

I peer into a shadowy crate near the bottom of the stack. A bright golden eye peers back. A young black cat lolls in the recesses of the cage. He's missing his other eye.

I put my fingers through the bars, and he comes forward, purring loudly. His injury barely shows. The black fur across the right side of his face is almost perfectly smooth. And on the other side, there's that big bright eye.

Still purring, the black cat flips over and bats at my fingers. His single eye glows like a topaz jewel. He doesn't know anything's wrong with him. He's full of life and confidence. He thinks he's a handsome young creature.

I could rescue this cat. He could move into my new apartment with me. The two of us damaged souls could brave the future together.

But no emotion rises inside me at this idea. No feeling. No feeling at all.

“What a nice woman,” Mom says as we leave. “I've got her number written down for you. You could volunteer here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That would give you something interesting to do.”

I take the number from her. But in my heart, I know:

I won't be coming back.

The next day, I have another free afternoon. Mom drives me to see an apartment she's found.

“It's between two of the best nursing schools in the city,” she says. “I think you could walk to either one of them. It caters to female students and single women. The parking garage is locked, and the front desk is manned at all times.”

The day is sunny and hot, and Mom exclaims over how beautiful the neighborhood is. It's full of stately buildings from the 1920s. Tall trees grow in rows beside the streets. Students are everywhere, pedaling bikes or walking dogs.

“Look at that girl,” Mom says as we get out of the car. “Doesn't she look like a nursing student?”

The girl is fit and trim, with a serious expression on her face and a thick backpack full of textbooks. She could very well be what I've wanted to be for so long—on her way to becoming a real nurse.

But for the first time in years, my heart doesn't leap and yearn at the thought of the hospital. I stare at the girl as if she's a mirage. I look at the wide streets and multistory buildings around me, and it's as if I'm watching a movie.

I feel nothing. This isn't me. This is not my life.

The apartment house is charming. It's an avant-garde skyscraper that tops out at ten floors. Mom and the caretaker talk together like old friends, and he cheerfully greets each of the strangers we pass. He seems to know the name of every single one of his tenants.

“This building has been a family-owned business from the start,” he tells us. “It's still co-owned by the grandsons of the builder. I've got two apartments to show you, an efficiency on seven and a one-bedroom on level ten.”

While we squeeze into the tiny elevator, Mom asks him about parking. As luck would have it, he has a free space for rent at the moment in the covered garage.

We walk down a narrow hall, and he unlocks a door. The efficiency on seven has clean white-painted cabinets in the tiny kitchen and an Internet cable trailing around the baseboard in the main room. I stare out the window and look west into golden haze over city suburbs. Birds fly below me, darting from tree to tree.

“Your furniture would definitely fill this place up,” Mom says. “Let's take a look at the one-bedroom on ten.”

We squeeze into the tiny elevator again and chug up to the top floor. This apartment has a locking screen door as well as a solid door,
a reminder of the days before air conditioning. The caretaker unlocks both doors, and we walk inside.

As soon as I enter, a shadow like a black smear flits past me. It hangs at the very edge of my vision.

Mom and the caretaker walk into the kitchen, but I stay in the living room, blinking and shaking my head. An emotion trembles in my straw-stuffed core for the first time in days—maybe weeks.

It's fear.

There is death in this room.

Like an animal, I freeze and sniff the stale air. Whose death? Whose? The shadow dances just out of sight, and I am coldly, suddenly aware:

This death is my own.

As clearly as a movie, I see my future life. I will move in here. I will enroll in college. I will make the drive three times a week to treatment. But family and friends will be a thousand miles away, and I won't stay in touch.

For a while, everything will hang in the balance. I will stock the kitchen shelves with food. But the winter months will set in with their unfamiliar ice and snow. I won't want to go outside anymore.

And a day will come—a gray day in December or January—when I won't get out of bed at all.

The one-eyed cat won't be able to save me. He won't have enough life in him for us both. He'll cry at the door, and the caretaker will unlock it and find my body, and my soul will stay behind to flit from place to place in the shadows.

I can't do this. I'm not ready. I'm standing at the edge of a cliff.

This room contains my death.

We chug back down the elevator and step out into the sunlight. Mom climbs into the car, bubbly and excited.

“So, for the letters of reference,” she says, “I think you could get your old boss at the gym, and maybe your German professor.”

“I'm not moving here,” I say.

“But why not? It's perfect! It's what you said you wanted.”

It
is
what you said you wanted—you loser!

I can't explain to Mom about the shadow or the future or my soul of straw. I'm too sleepy to talk.

“It's not going to work,” I say.

Mom smacks the steering wheel in frustration. Then she takes a deep breath. “I'm trying to be supportive here,” she says. “Why don't you please tell me what it is we're trying to do.”

“I want to go home.”

“You said you want to stay in treatment!”

You
did
say that—you loser!

“It's not going to work.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Elena! Why isn't it going to work?”

Tell her it won't work because you're not going to recover
, says the voice in my head.
Say it! Say you're not going to recover.

“I want to go home, that's all,” I say. And I doze off on the drive back to the orphanage.

Nighttime. I wake out of nightmares to find that the room is almost black, except for a few rays of moonlight that have crept through the closed blinds. They lie in thin white stripes across the floor. With all the medicine I take, I should be able to count on sleeping through the night, but wouldn't you know, it doesn't work that way.

I stumble to the bathroom and pull down my pajama bottoms.

Blood. Bright red blood!

Images flood my mind: red splashes against beige linoleum.

Your fault! Dead baby. Dead baby!

Nightmares come swimming out of the corners of my mind: chopped-up corpses. Bloody limbs.

Dead baby! Dead baby! DEAD BABY!

“Shut up!” I whisper, pounding my fists on my thighs.

The room whirls. Blood surrounds me. It laps up against me like a sea. Its coppery stink overpowers me and upends my sensitive stomach. I turn and grip the sides of the toilet bowl and purge until all that comes out is long stringy ropes of white spit.

Images flicker high-speed through my brain: dead things. Deformed things. Half-formed things.

Blood! Stink! Death! DEAD BABY!
The voice in my head is a scream now.
DEAD BABY! DEAD BABY!

I dig the palms of my hands into my eyes, but I can't block out the images. All I see is the color of blood.

YOUR fault! YOUR fault! YOUR fault!
screams the voice.
Dead BABY! Dead BABY! Dead BABY!

In a frenzy, I snatch up my razor from the bathtub and peel a deep slice through the flesh of my arm.

Instant calm. The panic stills. The voice dies back to a whisper. The only thing left is the harsh sound of air whistling into my aching lungs. I crouch on the floor and watch blood spill out of the stinging cut as my heartbeat gradually slows down.

My period started, that's all. It's normal. It's perfectly normal.

These damn pills are turning me into a crazy zombie!

Hands shaking, I wrap a hand towel tightly around the cut. Then I wipe up the mess and creep back to bed.

But the next morning, I call to Mom as I'm preparing to take my shower.

“The blood won't stop,” I tell her.

I don't remember the cut being that deep, but I've sliced through a large vein. When I came into the bathroom just now and pulled off the hand towel, the dried blood gave the cut a tug and popped it back open. Now a compact rivulet of dark burgundy is slipping down my arm into the sink. It's flowing so fast that the stream of blood is still tube shaped, and a ketchup-colored pool has formed by the drain.

It's lucky for me that Mom is hard to panic. She holds my arm over my head and applies pressure. I don't want to go, but I end up sitting in the waiting room of another ER.

For some reason, my mind is clearer today than it has been in weeks. I think about my panic attack last night and my sister's decorations of cuts and burns.

What drove Valerie to self-harm?

Was she trying to shut out bad memories, too?

The doctor is gray-haired and tired. He's also seen too many patients like me—patients who seem to damage themselves for no good reason.

“It's too late for stitches,” he tells us. “All I can do is steri-strip it together.” He turns to Mom, his eyes weary and contemptuous. “Is that okay with you?”

I see Mom flinch like she's been slapped. But she covers it up immediately and gives him a rueful smile. Mom is getting better at hiding her feelings these days.

“It's as okay as it's ever going to be,” she says lightly, and I'm proud that she didn't let him see how much he hurt her.

We find our car again in the massive parking garage and start the drive back to the orphanage.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Mom demands as we wait at a light. “Why didn't you wake me up?”

“Trust me,” I say, “you couldn't have helped.”

“Trust you? You don't trust
me
. You haven't trusted me in years. You keep me at arm's length all the time—you hardly say two words to me! I came here to help you. I left my grandbaby behind, and Clint and Valerie. . . . How long do you think they'll be living so close that I can hold my grandbaby every day?”

“Don't blame me,” I say, looking out at the passing traffic. “I told you I wanted to go home.”

“This is supposed to help you,” Mom says. “You're here to get better. All day, I'm stuck in a room by myself, and when I pick you up, you tell me you slept right through it.”

That's right
, says the voice in my head.
You ungrateful little shit!

“That's it,” I murmur. “Tell me what an evil person I am. That's going to help me get better.”

“Oh, for God's sake, stop it!” Mom says. “You're not fifteen! Stop talking like some little emo drama queen.”

“Emo drama queen—that's a good one, Mom,” I say.

Because she's not going to see that she's hurting me, either.

“You know what?” Mom says. “I cannot WAIT until you finally grow up and I'm just another woman to you. I cannot WAIT until you drop this whole me-against-Mom act and I don't have to be the evil witch anymore.”