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Authors: Elena Dunkle

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BOOK: Elena Vanishing
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Mom leaves, and a tech takes me back to the main hallway where the nurses' station is. Patients are everywhere. I retreat into a corner, sit on the floor, and pull up my knees to make myself as small as possible.

Please don't look at me. Please stop looking at me!

Group sessions are over for the morning. There's nothing for the patients to do right now, and they don't have a lot of options for places to go, so they're drifting around the wide hallway like restless souls in hell. I study them out of the corner of my eye, the anorexics—what I thought I might be, but I'm not.

They look like children, no matter what their age. They look like refugees.

Several of the girls are standing in a clump right in the middle of the hall. They look attenuated, taller than they should be, with their coarse hair pulled back in clips and their faces gaunt and solemn. They turn their heads to and fro as they talk, like meerkats on a mound.

The only man is thin and lively. He looks like Pinocchio. He's laughing and gesturing with his stick-thin arms, entertaining several of the others. Any second, I expect to see him leap into the air and crow, “I'm a real boy!”

One woman catches my eye, but I look away quickly and rest my sore forehead on my knees. Mom needs to call to tell them I'm leaving. I need to get out of here!

The room is starting to go gray around the edges. I can feel my breath, cold, rushing in and out of my chest. My heart hurts—my damaged heart. My heart is thin, even if I'm not.

“Hey,” says a low voice in my ear.

It's Karen, the woman who threw her pancake. She's crouching beside me in the corner. “You're having a bad time, aren't you?” she says. “Yeah, you are. You're having a bad time.”

My face feels cold. I touch it and realize I've been crying. Karen sneaks a look at the nurses' station. “Come with me,” she says.

She leads me into the rec room, keeping a cautious eye on two patients who are sitting on the couch and watching TV. She stops behind them, by the far wall. A big metal shelving unit there holds
everything from books and games to yoga mats. With the tips of her fingers, Karen waves me closer.

“This is one of my best spots,” she whispers. “Not the bottom shelf, because they look there, but the second shelf, behind the stack of yoga mats. You can crawl in there and pull the mats back in front of you. No one's ever found me there.”

It doesn't look like there would be room for a person behind the mats, but Karen is like a toothpick. I'm not surprised no one has thought to hunt for her there.

She waves again, and I follow her down the hall. Two small palms and a luxurious fiddle-leaf fig share the corner by the window.

“I curl up behind the pots,” she murmurs. “It's crazy that it works. You're not hidden that much. You'd think they'd spot you, but their eyes slide right past.”

Next, she leads me through a door at the end of the hall. I didn't know this room was unlocked, but Karen tells me this is the cooldown room. Prepared for what's coming, I scan for hiding places, but I don't see any. It's sparsely furnished, and you can take in the whole room from the doorway.

“Back here,” breathes Karen, with a quick look toward the door. “There, behind the couch cushion. It's a futon, see? All one piece. You just push it forward and slide in between it and the frame, and no one will ever, ever find you.”

I stare at Karen in awe. This woman is a genius!

“Because sometimes, you have to be where they can't see you,” Karen says. Her face is urgent, like she's telling me how to defuse a bomb. “Sometimes, you have to get away.”

I nod. “You do. You absolutely do.”

“You can use my places,” Karen whispers, with another cautious look toward the door. “I know I can trust you. You won't tell.”

“I won't. I absolutely won't.”

And Karen slips away.

Right after supper, a nurse calls me to the phone. It's Mom, and I can tell from her hello that she's feeling a hundred percent better.

“You can start packing,” she says. “I talked to Dr. Harris, and he's offered to see you in his office day after tomorrow. He says he'll have an EEG and an MRI done to make sure there's nothing medical causing the blackouts, and he'll do a full psychiatric evaluation to see if you have an eating disorder. It's going to take two days to get there. We'll rent a car and drive. I'm getting ready to call rental places right now, so I won't make it to visiting hour.”

I don't tell her that the staff have already put me on the blacklist for visiting hour. It would just make her mad.

I hang up the phone. So I'll be leaving. That's good, right? No need to worry anymore about what the patients think of me. No need to wonder whether we're alike or different.

“I need my suitcase,” I tell the nicest nurse. She turns and stares at me in surprise. “I'm leaving. My mom's going to pick me up after visiting hour.”

“Has she cleared that with Dr. Moore?”

“I guess so.”

“I'll check with him. In the meantime, you just have a seat and watch the world go by. Nothing's going to happen until Dr. Moore says it can, and it won't take you more than a couple of minutes to pack.”

Visiting hour begins. A staff member unlocks the waiting room door, and parents and siblings file in and empty their pockets in front of the nurses' station. The visitors are all wearing identical resolutely cheerful expressions.

Behind the main part of the group is a young man with a baby. I love babies. Back home in Germany, I do as much babysitting as I can.

You'll never see Germany again.

The young man finishes his pocket-and-bag check and walks toward us with a dazed half smile on his face—an expression that wants to turn into a real smile if he can only see the right thing to make that happen. But after a few seconds, the smile falters, and I realize that the right thing isn't going to happen today.

He notices me watching him and comes over.

“I'm Karen's husband,” he says. “Have you seen her?”

Uh-oh!

I turn and scan the room. No Karen anywhere. I remember the urgent look on her face: “Sometimes, you have to get away.”

The young man gives a shuddering sigh. He looks bewildered but not surprised. He asks, “Do you have any idea where she might be
this
time?”

I do. But I made a promise, so I shake my head.

He turns to scan the crowd again, hopelessly this time, and shifts the baby in his arms. It opens its eyes and starts to fuss.

“I have to talk to the nurses,” he says. “Where can she
go
?” he adds under his breath.

Probably behind the yoga mats. But I don't say that. Instead, I say, “Can I hold your baby?”

He surrenders the child gratefully and heads to the nurses' station, where a bustle of activity immediately ensues. But I ignore it. I ignore everything in the world except the wonderful little creature in my arms.

Holding Karen's baby: this is the best thing that has happened in weeks. The baby is soft and beautiful and smells so pure that it aches my chest to hold it. I don't even wonder if it is a boy or a girl. It doesn't matter. It is already perfect.

I sit down in the yellow chair by the nurses' station and balance the baby on my knees. I sing to it, and it waves its little starfish hands in the air and opens its round dark-blue eyes very wide.

I marvel at its fresh start in the world. It has no regrets, no memories, no fear of the future. It is new. New, new, new. Amazing.

Visiting hour ends, and the crowd ebbs away. Looking crushed and miserable, the man comes back to retrieve Karen's baby. I wander into the rec room and sit down on the couch to watch a soap opera somebody else has turned on.

A few minutes later, Karen sinks onto the couch next to me, her face set in a look of grim determination.

I don't have the heart to ask what she's determined to do.

“Elena,” calls the nice nurse. She doesn't say anything else, but I can already see it in her face. She holds out the phone, and then Mom's telling me something in a voice that's just a shade less than a shriek.

I drop the phone and burst into tears.

Patients surround me. “What is it?” they ask. “What's wrong?”

“They won't let me leave,” I sob. “They're forcing me to stay here!”

“Bastards!” That's Karen's voice.

“This place is a damn prison!” That's Susannah's.

Hands reach out to me, propel me to a chair, pat my shoulders, and give me tissues. Patients are bending over me or kneeling down next to me. Their eyes are alight with encouragement.

“Don't let them get to you,” they tell me. “Stay strong! We can't let them win!”

We.
It's the only word I hear. Over and over, I hear it:
we
.

This place is a prison. But maybe—just maybe—I belong.

6

I am sitting in group therapy. The pretty young woman leading the
group today is wearing a light blue peasant blouse and has a string of chunky wooden beads around her neck. She is talking with great animation, and her short black hair flips in shiny layers as she turns from us to the dry-erase board and back. I take in her bright, serious expression and her dynamic gestures, but I'm not listening anymore. What she just said has shocked me to the bone.

“Remember,” she told us, “it's up to you to do the work to recover from your eating disorder. You are all you have to rely on. You can't look to your family for help. Your parents are the ones who made you sick.”

I stare at her ballet shoulders, her embroidered blouse, and her eloquent hands.

Is that true? Did my parents make me sick?

In my mind, I see a fried egg on a plate. Its edges are crunchy and brown, and its white is pockmarked with oil-filled dimples. The yolk has burst and leaked a puddle of golden goo that is in the process of crusting onto the plate. Dad is sitting across from me, jaw tight and eyes blazing. I am to sit there until I eat that egg.

Avoiding Dad's glare, slightly bored and very angry, the younger me pops her knuckles and works through her repertoire of table-time activities. She tap-dances against the chair legs, daydreams a story
about a mouse that knows karate, and hums through snatches of songs. She makes her fork and butter knife fall in love with each other and plan to run away to Dallas. She fans her fingers and peers around the kitchen through them, pretending she's hiding in a jungle.

Eating the egg doesn't even occur to her.

The older me watching this childhood drama can tell that my father is beside himself. Dad intends personally to make sure I eat the egg, so he can't leave the table, either. His precious free time is draining away. Soon it will be bedtime, and then the grind of another workday. Also, his repertoire is more limited than mine: he doesn't know tap-dancing or understand the fun of soap operas with cutlery.

He drums his fingers against the table.

We are at a standoff.

Inevitably, Dad's patience cracks, and he opens negotiations. “Eat five more bites.” Then, as the younger me's eyes light up: “
Big
bites.”

“Not the runny stuff.”

“Okay, you can skip the yolk. But eat all the white. That wasn't five bites! Eat one more.”

The younger me risks a childish wail. “It's too much! The last one was
h-u-g-e
!”

“Oh, fine!” Dad snaps as his chair scrapes back. “Take your plate to the sink.”

I remember exactly how the younger me feels when this happens: she has wrestled with the giant and won. He stalks off to his lair—the office. She runs off to her waiting dogs and her stuffed cloth cow and her older sister, who gives a very grown-up sigh.

“Why, Elena?” the sister asks with exaggerated patience. “Why does every minute with you have to mean drama?”

Well, look at you now, Valerie. Look at your cigarette burns and your fingerless gloves and your loser junkie friends.

Who's the drama whore now?

“Thank you, Steph,” the pretty woman is saying, while a girl I don't know stares unhappily at her toes. “And now Karen has something she would like to share.”

This brings me out of my reverie. She does?

“I do?” asks Karen with a frown.

“You remember,” prompts the pretty woman. “What we talked about this morning.”

The frown on Karen's face deepens.

“Okay. So my father, if you can call him that, wasn't around when I was a kid. More of a sperm donor, I guess. Anyway, my mother . . .”

She trails off into silence.

After a few seconds, the pretty woman coaxes, “You can do it. Go on. We're listening.”

“I know I can do it!” Karen snaps.

There is another quiet pause.

“Anyway, not much to say about my mother,” she goes on. “I don't remember much about her. I came home from school, and the front door was locked. Nobody was home. My mother was gone. Moved out. Moved while I was at school. That sounds like a joke, doesn't it?”

She looks around at us with a grim smile, but we aren't smiling. So she shrugs and continues, “The neighbors called the police, the police put me in foster care, and here I am.”

The pretty woman waits for a minute, but Karen is done. So the woman turns to the rest of us.

“You see here how Karen's parents set up her disorder,” she says. “But she's the one doing the work to make herself well. That's the challenge to each and every one of you. They made you sick, but you can make yourself well.”

I look at Karen's gaunt face as she stares down at the ground. It's wearing the same look of determination I saw the night before. If parents make us sick and screwed-up parents make us more sick, then what does that mean for Karen's baby?

And in a flash, I have it all. I know why Karen has to get away. Fury bubbles up inside me. They made this woman afraid to hold her own child!

BOOK: Elena Vanishing
2.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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