The door banged open, and I turned away from the laptop screen with relief. Thank goodness! An interruption.
“Oh. My. God!” Elena said as she dropped her purse and books on the piano bench. “I’ve got to play you this song. It’s a-maz-ing! Here, let me see your laptop.”
“Wait! I have to save my file. How’d you do on your statistics test?”
“Kicked ass! Best grade in the class.”
I was in no hurry to get back to Martin and his skeleton. Sadness and worry seemed to be all around me these days. “Which song is it?” I asked as I pulled up YouTube.
Elena and I sat and chatted and swapped favorite songs and YouTube videos for a happy half hour or so. Then she gave a yawn. “I’m going to go lie down,” she said. “I’ve been up since four, studying.”
“How about letting me fix you a little lunch,” I offered. But I already knew what the answer would be.
“Nah, not right now. Later.”
Later . . .
That meant never.
“I could do with a break,” I said, following her across the living room. “How about a Sherlock Holmes?”
Elena and I both adored Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. As far as we were concerned, he had been genetically engineered to play that role.
“Okay,” she said. “But I get to pick which one.”
“Caramel corn?” I offered, turning back to the kitchen.
“Hells yeah!” she answered.
Yes! I thought. A win! And I sprinkled the caramel corn into two bowls with a generous hand—even though I knew I would be the only one to finish mine.
Sometime later, my daughter finally headed off to bed, and I returned with the stacked bowls to the kitchen. I snacked on the rest of her caramel corn while I opened up my laptop again. Martin’s story was going through final edits, under deadline. I had to do my writing!
I opened up the file again, stared at the black letters against white, and waited for my imagination to bring me the right film. I waited while it flitted through scenes of YouTube kittens and the Sherlock Holmes episode. He was brilliant! That nervous twitch, the sudden turn of the head away from the villain . . .
Now I was seeing the interior of the pantry. Was there anything in there that maybe Elena would eat later tonight?
I closed my eyes and took a long, calming breath.
Finally, the turbulent rush of images stilled, and I could focus on the text again. I was in a dusty room. Martin had a lump in his throat. He was hugging his dog . . .
“Mom!” Elena yelled from her bedroom. “The cat peed in here again, all over my pillows!”
And poof! Martin was gone.
“You’ve got to keep your door shut!” I called back.
“I do keep my door shut! They sneak in!” Which was certainly true. And they were my cats, after all.
I set aside my laptop to go retrieve the pillows and wash them. That’s a good use of time, too, I thought, perking up. I’ll separate the laundry. It’s starting to pile up. I’ll wait to work on this file until the house quiets down tonight.
Anything to put it off. Anything to keep from living through Martin’s sadness as well as my own.
“Close the door,” Elena murmured as I carried the offending pillows out of her room.
My phone buzzed as I was loading the washer. Valerie had sent me an ultrasound. And there she was, in black and white: my granddaughter.
I felt joy. And I felt pain. The two were mixed together so that they couldn’t possibly be separated. Joyful pain. Painful joy. The gift of every child to every mother.
That new life opens up a door—a door to feelings so wonderful and so agonizing that we can’t imagine them ahead of time. No matter what happens, that door can’t be closed again.
Valerie didn’t know this yet. She was still invincible. But I already knew what waited for her. As happy as I was over this precious new life, I felt worry and pain for my daughter.
“How are you feeling?” I asked her when she called a few minutes later.
“Not bad,” Valerie said. “Still kind of a nervous wreck, though. Everybody’s so thrilled, and I’m so stressed. And my back hurts! Yesterday I had to lie down in one of the fitting rooms for half an hour before I could go back to work.”
“Everything loosens up when you’re pregnant,” I said. “It’s got to be rough that you’re on your feet seven hours a day.”
“Yeah, that reminds me,” she said. “My feet hurt, too.”
Lately, Joe and I had been discussing a plan with our Georgia kids. Clint was scheduled to go into Air Force basic training in the spring. Valerie’s lease would be up in March. We’d offered to bring Valerie out here to live with us while Clint was going through his training. Then the Air Force would start moving the three of them around as a family.
But this thought awakened a new swarm of worries in my mind. So much needed to get done—
Specifically, Martin’s book needed to get done.
Joe knew this, too. At dinner, he asked, “So, how much writing did you get done?”
“Not too much,” I said, thinking with guilty misery about the neglected file. “I don’t know where the time went.”
Where had my time gone today? What had I accomplished? A few pages of edits, a bowl and a half of caramel corn, and three loads of laundry.
Joe didn’t comment, but I could see the disappointment on his face, and that disappointment hurt. I just wasn’t very good at balancing my priorities, I thought. I didn’t have the knack of pleasing everybody at once.
Joe and I washed the dinner dishes. Okay, no more interruptions now. I would get to that file—very soon. But first, I would practice piano, just for a few minutes, just to clear my head. That would take my mind off my worries.
Or would it?
Lately, even the piano made me feel guilty and unhappy. Week after week now, I didn’t seem to get any practicing done. Each time I saw the piano teacher, my old friend, I felt her patience with my lack of progress. But it hurt. I was failing even at my hobby.
Now, I ran through last week’s song over and over. My hands were so clumsy! They never seemed to be where my brain told them to be. But slowly, the plaintive melody formed under my fingers. It was a little piece in D minor. It sounded like a Russian folk tune.
As I played, my mind filled with scenes of snow. Then a city floated up among the snow drifts, all gray columns and gray stone, with a white, frozen river threading through it.
“Mom?”
There was a broad window with light shining out, golden light that sparkled like champagne. Tall men in black evening dress floated past the golden window, clasping pale women in flowing ball gowns.
“Mom.”
A peasant clumped by beneath the window, out on the icy street. His long brown beard was snowy, and his feet were wrapped in rags.
“Mom!”
Elena was at my elbow.
“Can’t you do that later?” she begged. “I was up all night studying for my exam.”
In my mind, I reached for the snow-filled city again. “But I can’t keep putting it off,” I said. “I never practice anymore!”
“You can practice while I’m at school.”
“But I don’t. That’s when I write.” Try to write, I corrected myself.
“You can write while I’m asleep.”
“But I don’t! It’s too late in the day by then!”
“Mom, please.”
The city was gone. Elena’s face was all I could see now. It was exhausted. No, not just exhausted—drawn and pale.
Remorse and worry shot through me. She’s sick again, I thought. She just got over being sick, and now she’s sick again!
“Please?” Elena said again.
So I stopped.
I need to drop these piano lessons anyway, I thought. We’ll have a baby in the house soon. And I’ve got deadlines. I need to save up my time for writing. And speaking of writing, I need to get back to Martin.
The
edits weren’t going to go well, I realized with gloomy certainty. They were going to be . . .
Gloomy.
But they had to get done. They had to get done!
Anyway, it was good that Martin was facing these kinds of scenes. He needed to learn that life wasn’t going to be all that I had hoped for him. I had wanted him to have reader friends, but that wasn’t going to happen now. He would have to get used to loneliness and neglect.
Even my characters wanted things I couldn’t give them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The next week, my oldest and dearest friend came to town to pay me a visit, the one who, once upon a time, had held deep philosophical conversations on the playground with a certain ugly little freak. “Why do we even need feelings?” she had asked me back then as our classmates had run and played and balls had bounced around us. “What do feelings add to our lives besides trouble and pain?”
It hadn’t occurred to us back then that we should have been letting ourselves be children.
Throughout our whole lives, this dear friend and I had never stayed out of touch for more than a couple of months at a time. But we had the chance to see each other only every half year or so, when one or the other of us made the trek up or down six hours of highway. This time, she had made that long drive. She had come to stay with me for three precious days—a chance for us both to catch up, cheer up, and reconnect with what mattered in ourselves.
The day after my friend arrived, the two of us were in the living room, chatting, when Elena threw open her bedroom door:
“You didn’t wake me up!”
I remembered as soon as Elena said it. When she had come dragging home from school that day, she had asked me to wake her up for a meeting she needed to attend. Elena had been going to set her alarm, too, but she almost never woke up for her alarm anymore. It was all I could do some days to get her to wake up for me.
She was starting to sleep like the dead.
“You promised you’d wake me up!” Elena cried. “I counted on you!” And, across the coffee table, I saw my old friend asking questions with her eyebrows.
Those were questions I didn’t want to answer.
The presence of a visitor made me take in the details more keenly. Elena’s voice, for instance: I registered with a shock that it was a shrill, exhausted monotone again.
It sounded as it had during her senior year.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” I said. “Really, I am. I just forgot.” And Elena, worn out by the unusual effort, turned around and crept back to bed.
“She’s sick right now,” I said by way of explanation, and my friend nodded and let the subject drop. But once again, worries seized and shook me. Elena was sick more than she was well these days.
Around ten thirty that night, as my friend and I were sharing some after-dinner chocolate, Elena passed through the room again. This time, she was wearing makeup and strappy heels. She picked up her purse and her car keys off the piano bench.
And my friend’s eyebrows started to ask questions again.
“Where are you going?” I asked Elena.
“Study session for statistics. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“But you’re not feeling well,” I pointed out.
She certainly wasn’t looking well. Again, I seemed to see my daughter with fresh eyes.
Elena’s extra-small double-zero skinny jeans were baggy at the rear. There was no rear to hold them up anymore. Her arms and legs were so long and spindly that she looked like a colt trying to stand for the first time. I half expected to see those legs fold up and drop her to the ground.
Panic gripped me. When had this happened? How had I missed seeing how thin she was getting? I had known that she was back to not eating, of course. I tried every single day to get her to eat. But I hadn’t realized how bad it was now. I had let myself not notice.
“You’ve missed dinner again,” I said, trying to control my panic. “Take a minute to grab a sandwich.”
“We’re ordering pizza,” Elena said. “I’ll eat there.”
For the sake of my friend, I didn’t cross-examine Elena. But I was pretty sure this wasn’t true.
Elena wasn’t back the next morning before my friend left. Both of us studiously avoided mentioning her. But I could see the look in my old friend’s eyes: the worry and concern.
Why do we have to have feelings? I wanted to ask her. Did either one of us ever figure that out? But instead, I hugged her tightly as we said goodbye. It wasn’t as if her life was a picnic, either.
Elena didn’t get home that day until almost noon. I tried calling, but she didn’t pick up her phone. Was she safe? Was she sick? Mornings like this left me feeling completely helpless. I felt old. I was starting to feel so old.
“So, how was the study session?” I asked as she dragged herself through the front door.
Elena looked horrible. She looked more ill than before. “Study session?” she muttered, baffled.
“The one you’re just coming home from.”
“Oh. We got a lot done.”
“And class?”
“Class got canceled.”
“Canceled? Really?”
“The professor’s sick,” she muttered as she dropped her purse and car keys on the piano bench. And before I could ask any more questions, her bedroom door banged shut.
Helicopter parent or not, I dug in, and I started fighting. I went back to nagging full-time. It had gotten Elena through her senior year, I told myself. Maybe it would get her through the last few weeks of the fall semester to the Christmas break.
“Come out here and eat some breakfast!” I called.
“I’m not hungry,” she called back.
“Come out here and eat some breakfast anyway!” I called.
“Stay out of my business!” she yelled.
“You don’t let me stay out of your business,” I answered. “You’ve made me your alarm clock and your taxi service!” Because, more and more often, Elena seemed to find ways to rely on me for rides.
Why did I do it? Why did I haul her around? Because at least I knew it would get her safely to class. I was holding my breath now over each final project and each exam. I wasn’t sure she’d manage to pull it all off.
Once again, I was lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, while I turned over options. Everything I came up with was sadly inadequate. Elena was an adult. I had no authority to order her to treatment. Besides, given how badly she responded to shows of force, I couldn’t imagine that forcing her into care would work.
But persuasion—that never worked either.
Please, dear Lord, I prayed. Please help Elena get through this! She needs your help. She needs all our help! She’s like a racehorse running on a broken leg.
Anorexia came and went in cycles, I reminded myself with more optimism than evidence. When Elena was under stress, it got worse. When she did well at her goals, it got better. The firing from her RA job at the start of the semester had made this episode very bad. But maybe a successful finals week would change that.
So I rousted Elena out of bed to study. I drove her to class. And each day, as I watched her struggle off through the crowd, with her skinny spine bent beneath the almost unsupportable weight of her backpack, I begged: Please, Lord, please just get my poor sick daughter to the winter break so she can recharge.
But I recognized the sad irony of that prayer: Lord, didn’t I ask you for the same thing last summer?
On the drive home one afternoon during finals week, Elena’s cell phone rang. “Can’t they just leave me alone?” she said out loud, and her voice held more genuine emotion than I had heard from her in weeks. Then she answered the phone, and I expected to hear that honey-sweet voice kick in, the one she saved for friends but not for me.
“Oh, yeah?” she said, smiling at the phone. “Yeah, I wish I could, too.”
But it wasn’t that honey-sweet voice. It was a gruff parody of it, as if Elena were making that voice in her mind, but
her vocal cords couldn’t pull it off. What came out was a gravelly, colorless voice. An old voice.
Elena’s face looked old now, too, I realized with a jolt. She’d always had a striking face, but now, in the bright Texas sunlight pouring through the windshield, that face was a little bit shocking.
Her skin was sallow and rough. Her forehead was bony. And was her hairline actually receding? It seemed higher on her forehead now, so thin, so brittle and dull. She fussed over it all the time and applied countless treatments to it, but none of them made any difference.
It was as if my daughter was gone, and in her place was a skinny little refugee from some famine country, looking very old and very young at the same time, impossible to match to an age. I could see wrinkles under her sunken eyes. I could see the cords at the corners of her mouth that pulled her dry lips into a parody of a flirtatious smile.
“Yeah, I can’t. I’m in Austin right now,” she was saying. “No, it’s a concert. I’m here overnight. Maybe tomorrow.” And she hung up the phone.
“Is that Ryan?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you tell him you had a party to go to when he called a couple of hours ago?”
“Dunno.”
“You tell these wild stories to your friends,” I pointed out. And to me, I added in my mind. “There’s no way they can believe you. You don’t keep the stories straight.”
Elena was gazing blankly at the cars going by. After a minute she said, “So?”
I felt panic. I couldn’t reach her. She was slipping away again—slipping away from health and curiosity and life.
When had she last told me a story?
We pulled up to the house. “You parked your car against traffic again,” I said, and the panic inside me made me raise my voice. “You did it again! You know it drives Dad crazy. You’re going to get a ticket!”
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.
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