by Brianna Hale
“I don’t know. It wasn’t a heart attack, just a problem with a valve that’s not life-threatening. But if she doesn’t start eating again, she’ll get weaker and weaker. That’s what carries anorexics off. Heart failure, because the muscle wastes away as they starve.”
Just thinking about it makes my chest feels tight. What we did together is actually killing her. For the first time in my impatient, angry life, I think I may have caused someone real harm, and I’m so fucking scared.
“Have you spoken to her?”
“She wants me to leave her alone.”
“And are you going to?”
I stare at my untouched pint. “I don’t know how to stop, but I’m terrified that if I don’t, I’ll kill her.” I look up at Adam bleakly. “I let her down. I ruined everything, and I have no idea how to fix this, or even if I can.”
We talk for another twenty minutes. Adam doesn’t have any idea what I should do, of course, and neither do I.
I call Petrou twice a day over the next few days, and he’s kind enough to take my calls. Occasionally I can hear his wife in the background, asking if he’s talking to that man again.
He keeps me updated with Lacey’s progress. She recovers from surgery, and then voluntarily admits herself back onto the anorexia ward. I was expecting this, and I’m glad she went willingly, but my heart still hurts for her, remembering what she said about it.
It’s the worst place in the world. You have no idea what it feels like. Not because of what they do to you, though that’s bad enough. Because of the shame you feel in your heart.
“Does the ward allow visitors?”
There’s a pause.
“Stian, best leave her be,” he says gently. “I know you want to help, but—”
There’s a faint scuffling sound, and then a shrill female voice comes on the line. “I forbid you to go anywhere near her! Do you hear me? Lacey was doing just fine until you got your disgusting hands on her. You should know better at your age not to prey on troubled young women.”
“Lacey’s not—”
The line goes dead. I stare at my phone, wondering if that’s what I did. Prey on someone who was struggling, just because I’m obsessed with control. Because I need the drama of a challenge.
I call the ward, and they do allow visitors. When I’m asked who I’m calling about, I tell them I’ll ring them back.
I need to think.
Chapter Twenty
Lacey
I wake to the sight of worn institution-gray paint and feel the scratchy, over-washed pillowcase beneath my cheek. My stomach clenches painfully, as it has every morning since I arrived at the Dawnstead Anorexia Inpatient Ward. From shame. From the knowledge that it will soon be crammed full of food again, and then again and again.
She is furious. She screams in frustration that I allowed myself to be committed a second time. She tells me I’m stupid and disgusting. Why am I even bothering to live if I’ll be greedy and unlovable? I’m a waste of fat, ugly space.
She’s giving me all her greatest hits.
My alarm rings and I swing my legs out of bed and switch it off. My room’s tiny, but at least I have space to myself. All the furniture and floors bear marks of the patients who came before me. I try not to think about where they are now. If they got better. If they came back again. If they died.
Like all the other women on the ward—and it’s just women and teenage girls, though there was a nineteen-year-old boy last time—I dress in loose, drab clothing. None of us want to draw attention to our bodies.
Breakfast is muesli and milk, and we eat it together at one large table without speaking. I look around at my fellow patients. Janice will sit down only at mealtimes, but for the rest of the day she stands in order to burn more calories. Cora is hunched over her food, her corn silk blonde hair hanging around her face. She cries quietly in a corner most afternoons. Taylor hits her bowl with her spoon in a nerve-shattering rhythm. She won’t eat until the nurses threaten to take away her phone for a week. She’s angry all the time, ranting that the doctors are picking on her, that there’s nothing wrong with her, that the whole world is against her. I like her the least because she sounds so much like the other me. I wonder if Taylor is what happens when you allow your anorexic half to assume your whole identity.
Taylor is the only one here with any pride! the other me shrieks. She knows there’s nothing wrong with her. The rest of you have been brainwashed. Weak! Pathetic!
To distract myself, I glance around and see that Cora has got some half-chewed muesli stuck to her lip, and my stomach churns.
See how disgusting she is? Do you think you look any better?
I quickly lower my eyes to my bowl. It’s best to try and block out the fact that anyone else is here. I know the other girls are doing that, too, which makes our mealtimes eerie and robotic. I eat slowly, the voice ranting the entire time.
After breakfast, we have group therapy, and we all shuffle into the therapy room and sit on the sofas. We have private sessions with a psychiatrist, but these group sessions are our opportunity to workshop each other’s disordered thinking. We’re meant to challenge each other on our assumptions in a non-judgmental way, and complete mindfulness exercises and various worksheets.
Everything’s the same as the last time I was here, which makes it hard to believe that it’s going to make any difference.
After lunch, one of the nurses calls out to me. “Lacey. Doctor Loftin is here. You can have your session in the group therapy room. It’s free for the next hour.”
I’d forgotten that Doctor Loftin wanted to keep seeing me while I was here. I go through to the therapy room and see her waiting for me in an armchair, cool and collected as always behind her glasses.
I glance around for the scales. “Where do I weigh in?”
She motions me over to the sofa. “We don’t need to do that. I met with your counselor earlier, and she updated me on your progress.”
I sit down, my hands tucked between my knees, remembering my deception with the weights. When I first started seeing her, she would make me strip down to my underwear before I stepped onto the scales, but over time, she started treating me with a little more humanity. A little more trust. And I betrayed that trust.
“How’s your recovery been since the surgery?”
“I don’t know. Fine, I guess.” I feel tired and wrung out, but that could be because of a lot of things. There are four small sets of stitches on my chest. They hurt a little, but I should heal quickly because it was keyhole surgery. The surgeon told me they didn’t have to replace my valve, only repair it. I’m supposed to rest, eat healthily, and not perform any strenuous exercise. Which is of course precisely what the people here expect from me too, so yay for me, I guess.
“Your counselor here says you’ve done well your first week.”
Eaten my meals, she means. Not hurled food at a nurse or thrown up in a corner or attacked another patient. I’ve seen all these things happen.
“A regular little duck to water,” I mutter. I see nothing to be proud of in the fact that the routine of this ghastly place is so familiar to me. I fold my arms and stare up at the tiny window overhead. Barely any of the sky is visible from this angle.
Doctor Loftin waits for me to expand on my week. I know from experience that if I barricade myself in a sulk, she’ll come up with some exercise for us to do together. I search around for something to say. “Everything’s the same, but also it’s not. As last time, I mean. This place is familiar, but what’s going on inside me isn’t.”
“How does it feel different?”
I shrug, picking at a loose thread on my sleeve. “I guess I’m angrier.”
“What are you angry about?”
I shoot her a poisonous look. “You lied to me. You said I could have a normal life, but the truth is there’s nothing normal about me and there never will be.”
“Is that what your anorexic voice has been telling you?”
I sha
ke my head. “She’s screaming at me again, and I can feel her all around me, but this is something I figured out for myself before she came back with a vengeance. I think it’s why she came back.”
“What do you mean, Lacey?”
“I mean,” I say, over-enunciating every word as if she’s stupid, “that I’m a moron for thinking that I could ever be happy. When I realized that everything I wanted was out of my reach, she got her nasty little claws into me again and I wasn’t strong enough to resist.” Worse, I didn’t want to.
“What else do you feel, apart from angry?”
“Isn’t that enough?” I snap. Doctor Loftin looks coolly back at me. I don’t know why I’m performing for her. She’s seen me in a bitchy mood before and she’s not going to be shocked or argue with me. “Sad, I guess.”
“What are you sad about?”
Just get through it and get out of here. The sooner I jump through their hoops, the sooner I can get a little privacy.
“I lie awake at night or stand in the shower trying to find a name for the piece of me that’s suddenly gone. It doesn’t feel like I’ve relapsed. It feels worse.”
Doctor Loftin nods. “You’re capable of great self-reflection, but there will be times when your self-reflection shows you painful things. You haven’t been through one of those times yet, but I think you are now.”
“Are you saying that if I was stupider, I’d still be living in blissful ignorance?”
Doctor Loftin gives me a thin smile. “The feeling you described sounds like grief.”
“But no one’s died.”
“You can experience grief for any number of reasons, not only after a death. Loss of a career. Status. A role you once played.”
What about a life you’ll never live?
I think of that other Lacey, holding Stian’s hand and speaking of things which are theirs. I wonder if she’s out there in some other universe, tracing the patterns of his tattoos with her fingers. Sleeping in his bed. Being held by him.
I look back up at the window as tears slip down my face. “He wanted me to be his girlfriend.”
We sit in silence together for a few minutes, and then Doctor Loftin describes the five stages of grief to me and what I can expect in the weeks ahead. She suggests I keep a diary of my feelings, and I give a non-committal answer. I know what my feelings are going to be. I’ll feel like crap.
Two days later, one of the nurses finds me again after lunch. “Lacey, you have a visitor. You can go through to the meeting room.”
I frown. My parents came yesterday and Doctor Loftin isn’t due until tomorrow. I want to ask who it is, but the nurse has hurried off to deal with a tantrum that has suddenly erupted on the far side of the ward.
I suppose it’s dad, because he didn’t say much yesterday. Mum was doing all the talking, and he just seemed unhappy.
When I open the door, I don’t see dad.
It’s Stian.
I stop dead at the sight of him, my injured heart thumping painfully in my chest. He’s wearing jeans and a dark blue T-shirt with a brown sports jacket. His blond hair is rumpled as if he’s been running his fingers through it. When I look into his eyes, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shade of blue so clear and pure.
He stands up and comes around the table toward me, but I flinch away when he reaches out to hug me. My body is a ruin. I don’t want him to touch me.
His arm drops to his side, and he says softly, “Hey.”
I fold my arms tightly across my chest. “Hey.”
He goes back to his chair and stands by it, waiting for me to sit down with him. Hesitantly, I do. We face each other across the Formica, his hands on the tabletop, mine crammed into my lap. I gaze at the symbols tattooed above his knuckles.
I am the runemaster.
“I’ve missed you,” he says.
I don’t know what to say to that. What has he missed? My neuroses? My weakness? My inability to have a normal human interaction with him?
“I can see from the expression on your face that you don’t believe me. I wouldn’t lie to you, käraste. I’ve fucking missed you.”
“Have you found a new assistant yet?” I ask hoarsely.
Stian sits back, and his jaw flexes. I’ve seen this happen when he’s been annoyed by other people, and it always amused me, like a secret only I knew about. Now he’s annoyed because of me and it’s not funny in the slightest.
“I’ve got a temp from an agency, someone to manage admin. I’ve had other things on my mind.”
Silence stretches between us. He’s not going to leave until he gets something meaningful out of this encounter, and I need to find a way to show him that coming again will be useless. I can’t be the Lacey he wants me to be.
“Welcome to my humble abode. I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything.”
He’s not impressed by my lame sense of humor. I pick at my sleeve for a moment, trying to think of something to say. As with Doctor Loftin, I just have to get through the worst of this so everyone will leave me alone. The more I see Stian the harder this will be for me. I don’t want to be reminded of the thing I want most.
“Do you remember getting out of bed and taking that call the other week?” I ask him.
He frowns, and nods.
“While you were gone I flicked through a book on your bedside table. About Viking artifacts. I saw a diagram of the tattoo you have on your shoulder.”
“A vegvísir.”
“Yes. A stave that guides you through bad times. I imagined that you might be that for me. I even wondered if I could be that for you, too.” Oh, the arrogance, that I could be that for anyone.
He leans forward, his eyes lighting. “We can be, Lacey. I believe it with all my heart.”
I shake my head sadly. “It wouldn’t work. The more I am around you, the harder the storm rages. I have to give you up if I’m ever going to get out of here.”
Stian gives me a long, hard look. He’s searching for ways to take back the reins of a situation that’s out of his hands. My control freak doesn’t give up so easily.
He shakes his head. “No. I won’t accept that.”
“I’ve had some time to think in here. It’s only been a week, but they make you think all the goddamn time.” Sometimes I wonder if you can sprain your brain with too much self-reflection. Everything hurts in there.
“Do you know the story of Pandora’s box?” I ask, and he nods. That’s the upside of getting involved with a museum director, I suppose. He already understands all my favorite stories.
The Ancient Greeks had a myth for every painful and joyous aspect of the human psyche. Pandora was a mortal, and she was given a box by Zeus and told she must never, ever look inside. She didn’t know it, but it contained all the world’s ills. Sickness, pain, death, hunger, and many other things besides.
“I have my own Pandora’s box. It’s where my anorexia has lived since I was discharged from the ward last year. I put her in there and sealed the box up tight, and I was able to keep myself alive, and functioning. I could have a job and exist out there in the world with everyone else. For a while, I was able to have you, too.”
I reach out and brush my fingers across the back of Stian’s hand. A whole hour with him every evening. It was like a beautiful dream.
He catches my hand and grips it hard. “You still have me. I’m not going anywhere.”
I take a deep breath and continue. “When Pandora opened the box, which she did because she’s human and humans are weak, all the evils of the world came flying out. She slammed the lid shut, trapping in what was left inside, but it was too late. All the bad things had got out. The only thing left in the box, fluttering sadly around, was one little creature. Hope.”
Stian waits, not understanding.
“I have to trap my anorexia in that box so I can survive, but other things get locked in there, too. My hope. The things I really want. I know they’re in there, but if I reach for them, she gets out, too.”
The
possibility of falling in love. Traveling. Having children. Just being. Hope is always out of reach. Trapped in that box forever.
“But it’s not—”
I cover our joined hands with my other hand. “Please, Stian,” I say, my voice shaking. “I only have so much strength right now, and she’s taking everything I have. I can’t argue about this with you, too.”
He lapses into unhappy silence, glaring at our twined fingers and gripping my hand so hard that my flesh is white.
“How was the exhibition opening?” I ask, trying for a neutral change of subject.
“It was fine,” he says tightly.
I slowly pull my hand from his, because it’s time to say goodbye. “I’m proud of what we were able to do together. We had a good two months.”
His face is stony, as if he hates me talking in the past tense. It was a sliver of happiness between two great chasms of darkness. I suppose it’s not his style to think in terms of morsels that quickly disappear. He told me that the night he first kissed me. I always want everything.
“I can never give you what you need, Stian. You know that. I appreciate you trying, but it’s not going to work.”
I think back to the conversation we had in the vaults. We were curious about each other then, and we were learning what made the other tick. That conversation gave me the courage to confess my complicated feelings for him. He told me he enjoyed risky ventures. What was I, if not a challenge he was dying to get his hands on?
“I was a risk, but I blew up in your face.”
He slams his palms down flat on the table and stands up. He hovers there for a moment, pain and fury burning in his eyes. Then he storms out.
Chapter Twenty-One
Stian
I’m too angry to get on the Tube, so I walk the two and a half miles to the next station, my feet pounding the concrete. I won’t be told to give up on anyone, by anyone. Lacey doesn’t get to sit there in that horrible institution and calmly shed me from her life as if it’s what she wants. That was her disease talking, the jealous, spiteful bitch who—
