Hope and Other Luxuries (46 page)

How many times had we fought over this? How many times had she raised her voice and told me to mind my own business? But now she said simply, “I'll move it.” Her voice was a ghost, a thing almost without breath.

“And while you're at it,” I snapped, “get it closer to the curb!”

This was completely unfair. The car wasn't that far from the curb. I said it just to hear her tell me that—to yell at me, to fight back.

Push up!
I begged her in my mind.
Push back on your stepping-stone—push up into life!

But she didn't.

“Yeah, I'll fix it,” she muttered as she slid out of the car and left me alone with my worries.

Winter break came a few frantic days later. Against all odds, Elena closed out the semester with excellent grades. Now the pressure was off. Yes! The pressure was off! Maybe she would start to eat again!

I dragged her to the grocery store and put anything into the cart that she so much as glanced at.

Christmas came. Joe and I went out of town to visit family. Last year, Elena had stayed in town because she was too busy to slow down. This year . . .

What about this year?

“I'm going to be busy,” she told me in the barest of whispers from underneath the covers. “You go have fun. You deserve it. And shut the door, please. You and Dad are so loud.”

So we left her there, with Pop-Tarts in the kitchen—anything I thought she might eat. Maybe it was good that I would be gone for a while, I thought. Maybe my nagging made things worse.

The little vacation eased my worries for a few days. The year was ending—the bad year.
Another
bad year! But this next year was going to be a good year. My granddaughter was about to be born, and three months later, she would be living with Joe and Elena and me.

“I can't wait to get this over with,” Valerie said on the phone as Joe and I drove home across Texas. “The baby's bouncing around in there like a basketball!”

“Pregnancy,” I said. “It's the only thing bad enough to make life with a newborn seem like a dream come true.”

“I believe it,” Valerie said. “I believe it.”

Her practical good sense steadied me.

Valerie hung up, and I daydreamed the miles away. Yes, this year would be different. This was going to be a better year. We reached the house, and I opened the door full of good resolutions: plans to make, talks to have, meals to try.

But Elena hadn't had a good vacation in our absence. She seemed to have had a falling-out with friends. I heard her yelling into the phone, with a frantic edge to her voice—a wounded sound. I stopped by her room to check on her, but she waved me out.

And on top of it all, Elena was down with the flu, she said. The flu—after everything else! How was this fragile girl ever going to finish college?

All that week, Elena lay in bed. And then another week. I prowled in and out of her bedroom. I brought her plates of snacks. Then I took them away again, untouched.

“Can I make you some soup?” I asked one evening.

Elena lay motionless in the darkened room. Her shade was down, and the light was off. “I'm having pizza with friends later,” she muttered.

But Elena stayed in her room all night, and no friends came by with pizza.

I didn't really think they would.

Next week will be better
, I thought.
Sometimes the flu lasts two weeks, but not three. Anyway, Elena's got school soon, and that'll get her out of bed. Maybe she's finally recharging. This could be good, right? After all, I'm the one who begged her to rest
.

The days continued to creep by.

Elena stayed in bed.

“When do your classes start?” I asked, standing at the door of her bedroom.

“Next week,” whispered the mound beneath the covers.

“No, they started last week,” I told her. “I looked it up.”

“The ethics professor sent out a note. She had an accident. We're starting late.”

“Okay . . . Well, what about your other classes?”

“The Tuesday-Thursday classes start this Thursday.”

I pondered these statements. Could they really be true?

No, they couldn't possibly be true.

But then again, if they weren't true, that meant Elena had missed the first day of school.

Could
that
possibly be true?

This was the girl who, from first grade on, couldn't wait to get home each day to start on her schoolwork. This was the girl who read ahead in her textbooks for
fun
. This was the girl who rewrote her notes in five different colors of ink. I still had a tin box with thousands of her handmade flash cards in it, Latin flash cards with German on the back.

Elena, missing the first day of
school
? How could that even happen?

Shocked, I pondered new strategies. A plan. I needed a plan. “Do you want to go to the mall?” I asked. “Maybe get a manicure? Some clothes for the new semester?”

This was the best gambit I had. Elena was a die-hard shopper. During high school, she had wheedled me out of more money for clothes than was good for either one of us.

“No, you go ahead,” the mound of blankets answered from within the darkened room. “Find something nice for yourself.”

“Really?” I asked, lingering. “You don't want anything? No new clothes?”

And the hollow voice drifted out from the lump under the covers:

“I've already got everything I need.”

That night, I lay awake in bed, almost frantic with worry. The semester break hadn't helped. Elena hadn't recharged. She was getting weaker and thinner by the day. When was the last time I had seen her eat? I couldn't even remember.

Like a cold weight settling on my chest, reality sank in. Elena hadn't gotten up for the first week of class. That meant she wasn't going to get up. She didn't intend to get up again. Ever.

I lay there in the dark, and I prayed, and I pondered, and I forced myself to face the facts:

Elena was dying.

Elena was killing herself.

And there was nothing I could do to make her stop.

O
nce I realized this—once I felt that knowledge all the way through to my bones—I couldn't just lie there anymore. I had to get out of bed. I wanted to go shake Elena and wake her up. I wanted to tell her about the cliff I saw, about how close she was to going over . . .

But I knew what would happen. Elena wouldn't wake up well.

She'd raise her voice. Then I'd raise my voice. We'd end up yelling about something completely different, like why she always answered her phone when I was talking to her but never answered when I was the one calling.

Or maybe not. Maybe she'd lie there and whisper agreements:
Sure, Mom. I know, Mom
. That would mean she wasn't even listening at all.

I talk
, I thought,
but the two of us don't talk. It's just me, talking at her. Whenever I say something good, it breaks against my daughter like a wave. I can see my words flow away and get lost. But the bad things I say—they crawl inside my child, and they stay inside her forever
.

As I thought about these things, I wandered from place to place in my dim house, trying to find the comfort that would help me resurrect my sense of hope. I find hope easily—too easily. It's almost a failing of mine. A cat settles down into a soft circle on the sofa, and I decide that I'm worrying too much. A cup of tea makes all things right again.

But now, I found no comfort, and I found no hope. My fear and helplessness were so intense that they seemed to be toxic drugs flooding through my body. Poison seemed to be spreading inside me, weakening me, attacking healthy cells. Meanwhile, the night crept on outside my windows, and the darkness smothered me.

Maybe daylight was only an illusion. Maybe the night would never end.

I didn't know what I would say as I began the letter. I just needed so desperately to reach my daughter, sick and sleeping her life away in the next room. The things I needed to tell her were bursting through my skin.

Dear Elena
,

I'm so sorry for how you're feeling these days
 . . .

I wrote, and I wasn't even sure what I wrote. The act of writing seemed more important than the words.

Of all the people I know, you are the most outward-seeking, the most inquisitive. That makes you naturally active. You find your happiness in observing others—and, after observing, in helping—in celebrating—others
.

But you've found a way to change that. It's called starvation
.

My sentences were stumbling over one another, shadowed by worry and lack of sleep. Probably they weren't saying anything very helpful.

Food doesn't help us be. It helps us do. It enables us to volunteer, to see the world, to accomplish our goals. It gives us the power to change lives. Your future patients need you. Little children who haven't been born yet need you. Your real friends—the ones like you, who have compassion and who want to help the world—need you. Your busy days need you to be able to meet them, complete them, get out there and get things done
.

My sentences filled one page, and then another. As they stretched out across the whiteness, I felt the frantic worry inside me start to calm down.

Please make yourself eat. I know it's not fun. But life is a marathon, and right now, you're sitting on the sidelines. Eat to do. You'll burn those calories the minute they come in. Don't look at yourself in the mirror. How you look will change over the years, but what you do makes
you who you really are. And nobody can take that away from you
.

Love, Mom

Shortly before dawn, I printed the letter out, one crisp sheet after another. I lined the sheets of paper up and folded them in half, a good sharp bend. Then I turned them lengthwise and folded them in half again, another good sharp bend.

I wrote my daughter's name on the outside of the folded square:
Elena
, a name I had loved before I even got to meet her, a name of ancient queens, perfumed with frankincense and spices. Then I tiptoed into Elena's room and laid the letter next to her cheek.

Anyway, those sentences are there
, I thought as I went back to my room and laid my heavy head down on my pillow.
They're solid. They'll stay put. They aren't like spoken words that are only a little air and drama, that can twist this way or that or be made to disappear. I've done all I can
.

And I drifted away into sleep.

In the full light of morning, I woke up. Instantly, I remembered my fears from the night before. But now I was feeling hopeful again.

Maybe I had been exaggerating. Maybe things weren't so bad.

Always, daylight could do this to me. It made me doubt the doubts of the night. There was the Elena by daylight, a bright, gifted student with a brilliant future ahead of her, who maybe stumbled and struggled sometimes and who was rendered a little fragile by stress. And there was the Elena by night, a deeply damaged, devious invalid whom I could not trust and who was bent on self-destruction.

No matter how long I spent on this problem, I couldn't tell which Elena was the right one. I could add up facts to make each one turn out right.

So I went to her room to see which one I would find.

Even though I'd slept for hours, Elena hadn't stirred since the last time I was there. The folded letter still lay next to her cheek, opening a little like an awkwardly made fan and spreading its sharp corners of pages in the air. Elena heard me push her door open, and she blinked for a few
seconds at the ceiling. Then she reached for her glasses, and the letter crackled under her hand.

“What's this?” she muttered.

I didn't answer. My words were all there, folded next to her cheek. I had nothing more to say.

Elena propped herself up on an elbow and read the letter through, first one page and then another. And then she began to cry.

Suddenly, for the first time in weeks, words were pouring out of her, a torrent of words: regrets, fears, lost opportunities, missed deadlines. Revelations came floating out in this gush of words that astounded me—but somehow confirmed what I'd somehow already known. The ROTC scholarship she'd talked about so longingly that had suddenly disappeared from conversation? The ROTC major had asked her to gain weight. Those odd meetings up at school before or after class? They were counseling sessions she'd arranged.

But they hadn't helped. Nothing had helped, and nothing was helping. She was running down a path that kept getting steeper all the time—so steep that she couldn't stop anymore.

At the bottom of that path was a cliff.

“I wish I'd stayed at Drew Center,” she sobbed, and the honesty of those words cut me through and through like razor blades. I was the one who had taken her out of the treatment center, over Dr. Moore's advice. The day she'd left was one of the happiest days of my life.

“I wish I had taken the advice of Sandalwood's director last year,” she sobbed. “I wish I'd gone into treatment.”

“How about now?” I said.

The question surprised Elena so much that she stopped crying. She stared at me as if she'd just been dropped down onto the moon. But before she could think up an argument against it, I was ready with arguments of my own.

“You need to get out of your classes now anyway,” I said. “You've missed too much work to make it up, but it's early enough that you don't have to withdraw with a pass or fail and damage your transcript. You don't have your jobs anymore. It's perfect, really. This is the perfect time.”

“Well—where would I go?” she wondered. “I don't think there's anywhere nearby. Sandalwood is just for day patients, not for twenty-four-hour care. That's what she said I needed.”

“Where did Sandalwood's director tell you to go?”