Elena Vanishing (9 page)

Melinda waves from the door of the waiting room, and we all cry happily and wave back. This is who we are! They want to break us, but we choose the life we want. This is who we are!

The pretty psychologist walks out with Melinda. When she comes back, she looks distraught. She stops at the nurses' station, and I hear the staff talk to her in low voices.

“Is she going somewhere safe at least?” asks the fat one.

The psychologist shakes her head.

“Some man she met on the Internet. I couldn't get a straight answer. I'm not even sure she knows where he lives.”

The pretty psychologist rubs her forehead as if she has a headache, and her frown intensifies. Then she rests her elbow on the counter and shades her eyes with her hand.

The fat nurse pats her on the shoulder.

“I know,” she says. “I know. But you can't save them all. You know that. You can only save the ones who want to be saved.”

I am in another hospital gown—a beige gown with gray diamonds.
I am in another hospital bed—a bed with a powder-blue blanket.

A bristling cap of probes has been glued all over my scalp. They itch, but I'm not allowed to scratch them. Many gray wires wind down from the probes to a machine beside the bed. I'm Medusa again, with a scalpful of snakes.

But I don't mind. Medusa was so strong, she didn't need anybody. She could kill a man with just one look.

The eating disorder center kept me for seventy-two hours, and then they had to give me up to my parents. But my parents aren't finished with hospitals yet. Dad has left his stressful office and flown over to America to take on the equally stressful job of driving Mom and me across the country to see the Texan psychiatrist Mom trusts. That psychiatrist has put them in touch with a neurologist, so right now I'm undergoing a forty-eight-hour EEG.

The cold, round eye of a camera lens at the foot of my hospital bed watches my every move. Mostly, it watches me watch television. There's a certain static circularity about all this.

I've been listening to Mom describe my fainting fits for weeks now. She's been wild with worry. But me? They mean nothing to me. They've been a nice break from the nastiness of this last month.

The neurologist is a shrewd-looking, slightly grumpy man with grizzled hair and absolutely no bedside manner. I immediately like him for this.

“Do you think you can have one of your seizures now that you're back in a hospital?” he asks.

I had a number of blackouts at Drew Center, but I haven't had any while Mom and Dad and I have been traveling across the country.

“I guess so,” I say.

“What brings them on?” he asks, turning to Mom and Dad.

“She doesn't have them when we're with her,” Dad says. “I think she'd have one if she was alone.”

“Then we'll have your parents leave,” the neurologist tells me. “We'll see if the unfamiliar surroundings can produce one.”

So I sit in the hospital bed by myself and flip channels. Television in the hospital always seems especially boring, as if it has its own programs just to keep patients from getting too excited. And the picture on this TV is horrible: grainy and full of white flecks. Would it kill hospital administrators to buy better TVs?

The nurse brings in supper and checks on the camera. Then he takes my vitals and leaves me with the supper tray.

You're not going to eat that, right?
prods the voice in my head.
You'd be eating on camera. That's even worse than eating when someone's watching you.

I debate this for only the briefest flicker of time, more for the pleasure of having a choice than from a need to make up my mind. It's been so nice to be out of the eating disorder treatment center. Every bite of food that I choose not to eat feels like its own personal victory. And it's true that I hate to eat in public. That was one of the worst things about Drew Center.

I glance at the camera. It stares back like an alien spy. So I push away the tray with a feeling of relief.

My head aches. These probes have given me a headache. I flip through the channels, but nothing good is on.

I wonder what the Drew Center patients are doing right now. Do they miss me? Did they like me? What did they think of me?

They were just being polite
, says the voice in my head.
They didn't really like you. Remember how Susannah looked at you when you said good-bye?

I try to distract myself by changing the channel again, but it's all mindless noise. My head is killing me. The round, empty camera eye goggles at me over the end of the bed. I wish it would blink. It's making my eyes water.

Another hospital
, says the voice in my head.
Your parents have wasted thousands of dollars on you. Your friends back home know you're a mental patient now. You'll walk into school, and they'll laugh behind your back.

The television speaker in my remote is getting louder and louder. My temples are throbbing. I try to turn down the volume, but it doesn't seem to be working. The blanket, I think. I'll wrap it with the blanket.

People will whisper about you in the cafeteria
, says the voice in my head.
They'll whisper about you in the faculty lounge.

My head hurts so much that tears form in my eyes as I swaddle the loud remote.

They'll say, “Did you hear what happened to Elena? Did you hear what happened? Did you hear?”

The remote slips from my fingers.

The next thing I know, the nurse is shaking me. He's bending over me from a long way away.

“Sweetie,” he says, “what on earth are you doing down there?”

I look around. I'm not in my bed anymore. All I can see are shadowy gurney wheels and the dark undersides of equipment.

“I got burned,” I say.

It's true. I've been scalded. The stretch of skin across my collarbones feels like it's on fire.

The nurse lifts me into bed and pulls back my gown. My upper chest directly below my collarbones is one giant, oozing scab. The skin is gone from it in a patch several inches wide.

“What happened?” the nurse asks in amazement. He steps back and examines the floor where I fell. “I don't see what could have scratched up your chest and face like that.”

My face? Oh, no! My face! What do I look like?

I feel my cheeks. They sting, and my fingers follow the puffy lines of scratches. Where's my makeup? I need my makeup bag. I must look like a mess!

You look like the kind of person they lock up
, says the voice in my head.
With a tube up your nose to feed you.

My head is pounding like it's going to split open. My chest is one solid blaze of pain, and my face prickles and tingles from the scratches. The nurse sprays the chest wound and bandages it, but nothing can make it stop hurting.

The next morning, the neurologist plays the video for my parents and me. I don't want to risk looking at the mirror girl at first, but the image is so small on the monitor that I realize I can't make out its features anyway. It's just a boring movie about an anonymous girl in a hospital gown who's imprisoned on a little flat screen. For hours, she barely moves. Even fast-forward doesn't make her do much.

Then, with great deliberation, she wraps the remote up in her blanket. A few seconds later, her head falls back on the pillow.

The girl's hands and feet twitch. They start twisting in lazy circles. A minute or two later, her head begins to swing from side to side. And, under the girl's half-closed lids, her eyes are rolling, white, in their sockets.

I feel bored. That girl isn't me. This is a movie I'm watching about someone I don't know. It's not even an interesting movie.

As the minutes pass, the girl's circles become more and more pronounced. Each time her hands pivot on their wrists, her fingernails scratch across her chest. Thin lines of blood start to appear where her fingernails have passed.

Little by little, the girl's movements become more violent. The feet kick, and the arms begin to bend from the elbows. The body thrashes from side to side.

Now the body is folding at the waist like an automaton, like a possessed puppet tossing back and forth. Then it flips over the bars of the hospital bed. The screen shows nothing but a rumpled sheet.

“Forty minutes,” the neurologist announces, reviewing the footage. “That's how long you were on the floor.”

Mom looks grave. Dad looks shocked. But I don't feel a thing.

“It isn't epilepsy,” the neurologist continues. “I think it's psychological in origin.”

“That's good news,” Mom says. “Isn't it?”

The neurologist shrugs.

A nurse comes to disconnect the snakes from my head and pry the probes loose from my scalp. I go back to our motel to wash the glue from my hair, and we drive over to talk to my new psychiatrist.

Dr. Harris looks like a long, tall Texan. He has gray hair, a gray mustache, and twinkling gray eyes. He would make a fantastic grandfather—he'd be the one who would give you the whole train set, plus he'd get down on the floor to help you set it up.

This is the psychiatrist who saw Valerie right before she flaked out and ran away from us to live with a bunch of strangers. That was after England. She was supposed to be turning things around, and Mom and Dad paid their good money to let her go to college in the States. But she dropped out and took off halfway through the semester.

Mom is starting to exchange emails with my sister again. I've forbidden her to tell Valerie anything about me.

Mom and Dad leave Dr. Harris and me alone, and he begins to talk about Valerie. He's slightly apologetic, and I realize that in a way, Valerie betrayed us both. She abandoned me, but she abandoned him, too. I can tell he feels bad about it.

“I'm not like her,” I tell him. “Not a thing like her.”

Dr. Harris actually looks like he's listening to me. He isn't trying to control his expression so I can't guess what he's thinking. He's interested to hear what I have to say. So we talk about Valerie. Maybe it helps that he already knows so much about what we went through with her.

“She told me that your father can have a pretty explosive temper,” Dr. Harris says. I eye him suspiciously, but he doesn't seem to be holding onto a poker face or giving hints about What Went Wrong. He looks like he's just wondering what I think.

“Dad can get mad, sure,” I say. “He's half Italian. But he doesn't stay mad. It's over in an hour or two. When we were little, Dad was a lot more . . .” I pause to find the right word. “Dad was a lot more volatile. He got over it, though. He isn't like that anymore.”

“So you don't think it was that big a factor?” he asks. “In Valerie's depression?”

I flash to a memory of a much younger, taller, scarier Dad erupting in our midst. He is shouting at Valerie and me in a kind of frenzy. Valerie is so scared that she pees her pants, and me, I'm afraid of everything.

But that was a long time ago, and Dad got a lot better. He wouldn't do that now. Can't people leave the past alone? Can't they give a person credit for improving?

I think about how tired Dad is now in the evenings. It's nothing for him to put in twelve-hour days. He's a hard worker, just like I am. I got that from my dad.

I say, “I think Valerie just used it as an excuse.”

Then Dr. Harris starts asking me lists of questions, but this time they don't seem too intrusive because he has such a mild, thoughtful voice. It isn't like he's trying to get at What Went Wrong. More like he's just getting to know me.

Dr. Harris asks about rituals, and I tell him about even numbers. I tell him that in the German boarding school, I once fell downstairs because I was so busy counting my steps that I didn't notice where I was going.

“In the German boarding school,” he echoes. Inwardly, I bristle: here is where he gloms on to What Went Wrong. Instead, he gets a wistful smile on his face. “It sounds like a movie,” he says.

“It was so much fun,” I tell him. “With that many kids, you never knew what crazy thing would happen next. Like the time Maria Engel dropped a whole stack of plates. Or the time Anna Cecile was carrying a sheet of clear glass, and it was so clear, she didn't even notice she'd dropped it.”

“Did you count your steps in German or English?”

“In German. That's because Ramona and I counted our steps together a lot of the time.”

“Ramona?”

“My best friend. We were in the same class, and we roomed together for a year and a half. We got in trouble a lot, too. We were like the black sheep of the school. Some of the stuff we did really would make a great movie.”

Dr. Harris consults his notes.

“Not the anorexic,” he says. “Different name.”

“No, Ramona wasn't anorexic. She was a binger.”

“Bulimic.”

“That's right. Ramona would hoard food. Then, when everyone was asleep, she would binge.”

“So she made a ritual out of it,” he says. “Like the counting.”

“That's right,” I say. And then I think about that. It's interesting.

“You could never make Ramona cry,” I tell him. “Never, no matter what. We'd get in trouble, and I'd cry—mainly because I was mad—but all that would happen with Ramona was that she'd get these red lines across her cheeks. To her, that was crying. But she didn't ever shed a tear.”

I tell Dr. Harris that Mona's parents hated each other—
really
hated each other. They used their children as weapons. Like toddlers, her mother and father snatched at the children: “Mine, mine! This one is my favorite! That one can be yours.”

At the school, we joked that Mona got the sweetest deal of any kid because her parents tried to buy her love with gifts and crazy permissions. Her mother even took us out to bars.