Hope and Other Luxuries (52 page)

Was it fair for me to suggest this? I'm not that sentimental about cars. But what did the BMW mean to Joe? Did he see it as a symbol of success? Was it a reward for his years of hard, steady work as an engineer? Did the sight of it in the garage give him a mental lift to tackle the daily grind?

I don't know. My husband is practical and straightforward. He doesn't tell me these sorts of things.

What I do know is that he didn't hesitate.

“You're right,” he said. “See what you can get for it.”

Three days later, I had exactly the deal I wanted, and it was a deal on—of course!—another Elantra. But it was the newest model, and it had leather seats. I owed my poor husband that much, at least.

Joe picked me up at the end of his workday, and we headed to the dealership to sign the final papers. Halfway there, my cell phone rang. I answered it through the Bluetooth connection in the dashboard, and Elena's angry voice reverberated through the car.

“I'm leaving today! There's nothing you can do to stop me!”

My heart sank.

“Hello?” I said. “Elena, what's going on?”

“Mrs. Dunkle,” a smooth feminine voice answered, “this is Dr. Greene, Elena's psychiatrist.”

“Yes, hello, Dr. Greene,” I said. “I remember you.”

“I've got Emily, your daughter's therapist, here with me,” Dr. Greene continued, “and we're having a conference with Elena. She's very upset. She wants to talk to her parents.”

“Yes, go ahead,” Joe said. “We're both here.”

“Your daughter wants a PEG tube,” Dr. Greene said. “That's a tube that goes straight through the abdominal wall. We aren't sure it's a good idea, and your insurance won't pay for it. If we schedule it, will you pay for it yourselves?”

Joe and I exchanged startled glances. He was driving down a three-lane access road through rush-hour traffic. It wasn't the best place for absorbing fine details.

“Wait,” Joe said. “You don't think an operation's a good idea. But you want us to pay for it?”

“We just need to know if you're willing.”

A tube through the side of the abdominal wall. My imagination dredged up a photo I had seen in a science book of a man who was fed through a flap in his stomach. Doctors had experimented on him for years, putting things into his stomach and taking them out to look at them. My own stomach felt fluttery at the thought.

“I need that operation,” Elena said. “They want me to eat five thousand calories a day. Five thousand
healthy
calories—that's plates and plates of food! My stomach can't process it all!”

“It is true,” Dr. Greene agreed, “that the amount of food is hard on your daughter's system. But her metabolism is so high that unfortunately, it's necessary.”

Joe took a right turn. Now he was on a five-lane feeder street: two lanes each way and a turn lane in the middle. Cars and people and big flashy signs were everywhere, crowding in and demanding attention. My stomach lurched and rolled from the motion and the mental images. I shaded my eyes with my hand and tried to be sensible.

“I'm still not getting this,” I said. “Isn't the amount of calories going into the stomach the same?”

“It's different with a tube,” Elena said. “With a tube, I won't notice. It can get spread out over twenty-four hours.”

“When you were in the hospital before,” Joe said, “you had a tube that ran down your nose for that.”

My imagination found that image and showed it to me: my daughter lying absolutely still and silent in the ICU, the beeping of the machines, the chilly air . . .

“We've tried the nose tube,” Elena's therapist said. She sounded harassed and unhappy. “A nose tube doesn't work for your daughter.”

“How is that possible?” Joe asked. “Why wouldn't it work?”

For a few seconds, none of the three invisible parties spoke. Then Dr. Greene's smooth voice answered. “Elena's gag reflex is very sensitive. She's conditioned it with years of purging.”

I blinked. A silver minivan came blasting out of a gas station and almost took my door off. Joe swerved.

“Years of—I'm sorry, we're on the road here,” he said. “Years of doing what?”

Purging. Purging is vomiting
, I thought.
But Elena doesn't do that
.

It was the one thing Dr. Costello had felt confident telling me during the Summer from Hell. Elena wasn't bulimic. She didn't purge. Over and over, I had heard her confident denial as one doctor after another had asked her about it. “Look at my teeth,” she would say. And they would look at her white, undamaged teeth, and they would nod in agreement. No purging. My daughter didn't purge.

But Dr. Greene's voice was steady.

“Your daughter has been purging her meals for years, on a daily basis. Her gag reflex is so sensitive that it responds to the slightest pressure. We've tried it repeatedly, but she can't keep a nose tube down.”

Can't keep a tube down. My imagination played with that—played with nerves in the back of my throat. My own gag reflex gave a heave in answer.

Joe pulled into a parking lot and stopped the car. It was that big chain toy store, a place with some of the most unnatural, grotesque childhood companions on the planet. In years past, I used to walk in there and
feel as if I were trapped inside a can of soda. I used to joke that if I died in one of its aisles, no one would even bother to move my body.

A PEG tube. A hole in the side of the stomach. An unnatural, grotesque misuse of the body. Major surgery, against doctors' advice and on our nickel—just to keep from having to eat.

“No,” I heard myself say. “We won't pay for a PEG tube.”

Elena's voice filled the car again, bitter and furious. I could hear the loss of control in her voice that the medications had brought on, the loud tone and sloppy speech. Was this helping my daughter? Was she becoming more truly herself?

The further Elena went into treatment, the less I understood who she was. The tragic details of the rape and the miscarriage had made me feel closer to her. But in this moment, sick at heart and sick to my stomach, I had never felt so far away.

Who was this resentful stranger who hurled insults and vomited up food? How did my bright, nervous, imaginative child turn into this bony, bullying wraith?

Joe began speaking quiet sentences into the hectic torrent of words, stepping-stones to help us find our way. “I know this is hard,” he said. “It's causing you great stress. But you can do this, Elena. I believe in you.”

Little by little, Elena began to calm down. That allowed Emily to intervene. Over the course of the next few minutes, she and Dr. Greene talked Elena into trying again.

Shouldn't this make me happy? Shouldn't I be grateful to Joe for jumping in and being an effective, positive parent? Why should it leave me with such anger?

Oh, sure, she'll calm down for him! She always listens to her father. But who's been there for her? Who's lost sleep over her? And she treats me like I'm the enemy!

Joe and I said our good-byes to them, and he pulled out into traffic again. In silence, we drove to the dealership.

“I was beginning to worry!” the manager joked when we walked in.

I could feel the wrongness of my smile. It stretched my lips like rubber, but it didn't reach my eyes. Joe was the one who answered and reached out to shake the manager's hand.

As I watched my husband sign away his beautiful white BMW, my anger melted into guilt.

What's wrong with me? Don't I want my husband to be a good parent? Isn't it good that the two of them have a rapport?

We drove home in the new car. Its attractive interior appealed to me, and Joe seemed to enjoy it, too. Leather seats and a top-of-the-line trim package, for just the price I had wanted—I had practically stolen this car! And Gemma was awake when we got home. I hugged her warm, soft little body in my arms and walked up and down with her, singing the alphabet song.

I always sang Gemma the alphabet song. I wanted to condition her for life. My hope was that whenever she heard it, she would feel a little happier and a little more loved, even if she didn't know the reason why.

Meanwhile, Valerie was setting out plates and pouring drinks. Pizza again—I wasn't much of a cook these days.

“Let's have a salad, too,” I said, feeling guilty. “We've got salad fixings, right?”

Valerie opened the fridge. “I think we've got a bag around here somewhere.”

She scooped preshredded lettuce into bowls while I told her about the phone call. “Vomiting food!” I said. “It's like I don't even know her anymore.”

“She's pretty crazy,” Valerie agreed. “I think she's going to be okay, though. I don't have a reason for that, except that I'm okay now. I got through it—and yeah, I know it wasn't as bad as what she had to deal with. But still, I got through it, and I think she will, too.”

As Valerie talked, I idly watched her hands, busy with the green salad leaves. The light played off those hands unevenly, in small flashes of pink and silver.

Valerie coming downstairs, humming. And her hands . . . the dark purple circles on her hands . . .

She was right. If those could heal up, anything was possible.

M
y phone rang. That meant something was wrong. Whenever something went wrong, my phone rang. I used to perk up when I heard the phone ring. Now, I simply hated it.

“Mrs. Dunkle, we have to talk to you.” It was Emily again.

I waited with a sinking heart. This couldn't mean anything good.

It was the beginning of April, over two months since Elena had left to go to Clove House. She had recently stepped down from residential treatment to day treatment, which ran seven days a week for ten hours a day. During the off hours, Elena was staying in a halfway house that the Clove House management ran. A staff member stayed there with the patients and gave them their medicine, but they had breakfast on their own and less structure in the evenings. It was an extra charge, not covered by insurance, but it was the ideal solution for us.

So far, Elena's day treatment had been going well. And when I'd heard from Elena, she had sounded better—more like her old self. She'd even started to tell me entertaining little stories again about her days and about the other patients in treatment. But now, Emily was on the phone, and that meant only one thing:

Something had gone wrong.

“Elena cut herself,” Emily said. “When she did that, she violated the contract we made with her. We can't keep her in our overnight house any longer.”

Cut herself!
I felt a shiver of disgust.
Isn't the not eating bad enough? Thrown out of the overnight program
—now
what are we supposed to do?

But I fought down my feelings of frustration. My daughter was sick. She wasn't hurting herself just to complicate my days.

This wasn't about me.

“Well . . . Are there hotels nearby?” I asked. “Can we book her a hotel room and a rental car?”

“We can't allow that,” Emily said. “We've discussed it, and it isn't safe. Elena can't stay overnight by herself. She needs someone there to monitor her. If no one can do that, we'll have to remove her from our program.”

My frustration returned, tinged with pure out-and-out panic.

Where would Elena go if she couldn't stay there? What was this going to mean for her recovery? Because if there was one thing I
did
know about Elena at this point, it was that she was a very long way from recovery.

When Elena had first gone into full-time treatment, I'm not sure what I was expecting. The only thing I could really compare it to was classes I'd taken. I had expected a steady progress of some kind, a climb up the learning curve. By two weeks she would learn this; by a month she would know that.

What I hadn't expected was the kind of erratic, explosive non-progress we had observed from a distance. Elena zigzagged every few days from being fully compliant and gaining weight to calling me up in the middle of a medication-fueled fury, yelling over some real or imagined conflict at the treatment center. “Buy me a ticket!” she would angrily demand. “I'm done! We're done here!”

Just because I didn't understand what was going on didn't mean that the Clove House team was doing no good. On the contrary, Elena had made significant strides in their care. They had persuaded her to bring her trauma out into the open. This meant she could finally start to work through it.

But, for Elena, letting the rape come to the surface after all those years was like being raped all over again. Once more, she was living through enormous emotional storms of rage, hatred, and shame. This time, Elena didn't have the comfort of her eating disorder behaviors to calm those storms back down. She couldn't starve the feelings away. And the medications she was on didn't help her suppress those feelings, either. They were there to help keep her from slamming on the brakes and covering those feelings back up again.

I didn't understand much about the process, though, and it left me feeling anxious and mystified. When exactly was Elena going to get
better
?

Now, Emily suggested a course of action I hadn't expected at all. “Can you come out to stay with her, Mrs. Dunkle? You could bring her into treatment in the mornings.”

This wasn't a welcome suggestion. I loved my daughter very much, but I absolutely hated minding her business. The times we had been happiest were the times when Elena had been well; she could share with me the parts of her life she wanted to share, and I could cheer her on. But the times when I had had to “manage” Elena—to wake her up in the morning and nag her through her days—those had not been happy times.

I had no desire to step back into that role. I didn't want to run my daughter's life.